Sumgait Massacres

[Aratta-Kingdom]

YOUNG MEMBERS OF HUNCHAKIAN PARTY CALL ON INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS TO GIVE POLITICAL ESTIMATION TO SUMGAYIT MASSACRES

 

Noyan Tapan

Feb 27 2007

 

YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 27, NOYAN TAPAN. Representatives of the Social

Democrat Hunchakian Party "Sargis Tkhruni" student's-youth

union held a march on February 27 with "Azeris' armament is Axe,"

"Sumgayit is continuation of 1915" and other similar slogans. They

moved from the Yerevan State University towards to the European

Union Armenian Office, then towards the Embassy of Great Britain

to Armenia. It is particularly said in the statement addressed to

employees of the EU Armenian Office and the Embassy of Great Britain:

the Azerbaijani furious mob, allowed by the country heads, massacred

and killed Armenians living in the city, robbed their property, raped

Armenian girls and women on February 27-29, 1988, in Sumgayit. 19

years passed after those cases, but the event has not been given

political estimation by today. We demand that this phenomenon is

given a political estimation as not giving a political estimation is

a greater genocide."

 

Narek Galstian, the head of the "Sargis Tkhruni" student's union

mentioned that, particularly, England has always coldly responded

the Armenian Genocide problems and neglectly related to "our

national problems." But, in his words, every Armenian's duty is to be

consistent in the affair of international recognition of both Armenian

Genocide, and Sumgayit and Baku massacres. "We call on international

organizations to recognize the Sumgayit massacres to get rid of new

Sumgayits," N.Galstian said.

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

PROCESSION DEVOTED TO THE MEMORY OF VICTIMS OF ARMENIAN POGROMS IN SOUMGAIT TO BE HELD IN YEREVAN FEBRUARY 28

 

DeFacto Agency, Armenia

Feb 27 2007

 

February 28 a procession devoted to the 19th anniversary of the

Armenian pogroms in Soumgait will be held in Yerevan. The action has

been initiated by ARF Dashnaktsutyun.

 

According to the information DE FACTO got at the ARF Dashnaktsutyun

Supreme Body's Press Service, the procession's participants would

gather at the Sport and Concert Complex after K. Demirchyan. The

participants will walk to the Memorial of the Armenian Genocide's

victims - Tsitsernakaberd, where they will lay flowers and wreaths,

thus paying tribute to the memory of the victims of the Azeri

cutthroats.

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

DAY OF GRIEF

 

 

The Armenian nation is celebrating a mournful day – the Day of the memory of the victims of the Armenian pogroms in Soumgait.

February 26-29, 1988 the Azeri nationalists’ disorderly crowds were committing outrages in the Soumgait streets. Their goal was to destroy the town’s Armenian population. The facts that the lists of the flats, where Armenians lived, were made beforehand, the telephones were turned off in the Armenians’ houses and the weapons were prepared testify that the action on the Armenians’ destruction was carefully elaborated. Armed with knifes and traditional axes, the Azeri pogrom-makers burst into the Armenians’ flats. They spared neither children, nor old people and women. The Armenians could not give an effective rebuff. How could they resist numerous groups of bandits? During three days of pogroms the Azeri authorities did nothing to save the Armenian population, which also testifies to the fact that they were implicated in the crime. Tens of people were killed and hundreds were injured as a result of the pogroms. Thousands of people, who were saved by a miracle, became refugees, leaving their homes forever. The pogroms in Soumgait initiated the process of the Armenians’ physical liquidation from Azerbaijan.

The pogrom’s culprits have not been punished and the international community has not given a proper appreciation of the events. ‘’The memory of the Victims of violence in Soumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, Nakhijevan obliges us to strive for the punishment of both the atrocities’ immediate participants and the Republic of Azerbaijan – a state, which propagates, cultivates violence and misanthropy’’, the Network of the Civil Society ‘’Refugees and international Law’’ statement made in connection with the 19th Anniversary of the pogroms in Soumgait runs. In its turn, the NGO of the NKR Refugees in its address notes, ‘’the condemnation of the fact of the Armenian Genocide by the civilized world will prevent the continuation of such atrocities in future and will make Azerbaijan repent, reconsider its policy towards Armenians’’. The Russia’s Armenians also urged the international community to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Today a procession devoted to the memory of the victims of the Armenian pogroms in Soumgait will be held in Yerevan. The participants will walk from the Sport and Concert Complex after Karen Demirchyan to the Memorial of the Armenian Genocide’s victims – Tsitsernakaberd, where they will lay flowers and wreaths. The measures, including round tables and press conferences, arranged for the tragic date will be held in the capital city of Armenia.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

CONDEMNATION OF THE FACT OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN SOUMGAIT BY THE CIVILIZED WORLD WILL PREVENT REPETITION OF SUCH ATROCITIES IN FUTURE

 

 

In connection with a current anniversary of the tragic events in the Azeri town of Soumgait the Department on Migration, Migrants and Refugees under the Nagorno-Karabagh Republic government and the NGO of the NKR refugees made a joint statement. The statement runs, in part: ‘’As a result of the Turkish-Azeri policy targeted at the Armenians’ total destruction, thousands of Armenians were expelled from their native town, tens of peaceful citizens were barbarously murdered in the spirit of the Genocide of early XX century committed by the ‘’Young Turks’’ movement. Soumgait became the beginning of the ethnical cleansings of the Azerbaijan’s regions inhabited by the Armenians. The action was also targeted at the deterrence of the Nagorno-Karabagh Armenians, who had raised a flag of the national and liberation movement.

Unfortunately, neither the former USSR leadership, nor the international community has given a modern and worthy political and legal assessment to the atrocity, which is unprecedented in modern history’’.

‘’We are sure the condemnation of the fact of Armenian genocide in Soumgait by the civilized world will prevent repetition of such atrocities in future and will make Azerbaijan repent, reconsider its policy towards Armenians and try to find points of contact to establish future peaceful interrelations with its neighbors’’, the statement reads, IA REGNUM reports.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

ArmInfo

2007-02-28

 

 

Events Devoted to 19th Anniversary of Sumgait Pogroms To Be Held in Armenia Today

 

 

A press-conference of the leader of an Initiative group for protection of Sumgait Armenians' rights will be held in the "Urbat" club with participation of the witness of tragic events Roman Hambaryan. By the initiative of the ARF Dashnaktsutiun, a procession will be conducted to the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial of the Armenian Genocide victims in Ottoman Turkey, in the neighborhood of which a monument to the victims of Sumgait events is raised. The ARFD has also organized a Round Table on the subject "Armenian Response to Propaganda of Turkey and Azerbaijan".

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

1988 Pogroms in Sumgait Were Genocide, Say Karabakh Legislators

 

STEPANAKERT (Karabakh Foreign Ministry)--Legislators from all factions represented in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic parliament issued a statement Monday urging the international community to recognize the planned pogroms of Armenians in the Azeri city of Sumgait in 1988 as Genocide and punish the perpetrators of these acts.

 

Below is the English translation of the parliamentary announcement:

 

On February 27, 2007, Armenians throughout the world will honor the memory of innocent victims of Armenian pogroms in Sumgait. Sumgait symbolizes the repressive policy of the Azeri authorities toward Armenians. By condemnation of this policy the Armenian nation declares to the world that it will consistently struggle for restoration of its violated rights.

 

The pogrom, organized and executed in Sumgait on February 27-29 on a high state level, did not receive adequate political evaluation, and its organizers not only escaped punishment, but also their names remain unknown to the world wide community. Meanwhile, Ilyas Ismailov, then -Prosecutor-General of Azerbaijan, admitted that "perpetrators of the pogroms in Sumgait now carry mandates and sit in the Azeri Parliament".

 

The policy of suppression toward the genocide in Sumgait allowed the Soviet Azeri leadership to carry out ethnic cleansing campaigns throughout the republic (November-December 1988 - Khanlar, Kutkashen, Vartashen and Shamhor regions, Mingechaur and other cities; November 1989 Kirovabad; January 1990 - Baku) and in Nagorno Karabakh proper (May 1988 -- Shushi; April-June 1991 -- operation "Koltso" ("The Ring"), as well as to unleash a full-scale aggression against population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

 

Since the very emergence of the Azerbaijan, a policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at formation of a state without Armenians has been and remains to be organically included in the toolbox of Azerbaijani politicians. Extensive extermination of monuments, which belonged to ancient Christian culture also served to that goal.

 

Meanwhile, we consider it unacceptable to allow Azerbaijani leadership to undertake attempts to put the massacre of peaceful population in Sumgait on the same footing with the events in Azeri-populated village of Khojalu, Askeran region of NKR, which has been turned into a firing point for shelling peaceful population, civilian and humanitarian objects in Stepanakert and surrounding Armenian villages. Moreover, distorting the facts concerning the true causes of the events in Khojalu, which have become a ring of domestic political struggle for power in Azerbaijan, the official Baku is, first of all, misleading its own people and passes over in silence the fact that Karabakh forces opened a humanitarian corridor for unimpeded exit of civilian population from the war zone.

 

Such an attitude towards modern history postpones the perspective of establishing a confidence between the parties as a minimal condition for a dialogue, and hampers the constructive efforts by international mediators for peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

 

We urge all the parties, interested in the eradication of all forms of violence, especially towards the peaceful population, as well as in promoting democracy, respect for human rights and the soonest settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, to make an adequate evaluation of the tragic events in Sumgait, which do not have a time limitation due to gravity of the perpetrated crimes, condemning and qualifying them in line with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

 

Democracy Faction

 

Motherland Faction

 

Armenian Revolutionary Federation--Movement-88

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

AZG

 

SUMGAIT – CONTINUATION OF TURKEY’S ANTI-ARMENIAN PLANS

 

19 years age in the Sumgait town of Azerbaijan took place another wave of repressions and massacre of Armenians by Azeris. In connection with the anniversary of those tragic events Hrayr Ulubabian, head of the Sumgait Armenians’ Rights Protection Group, gave a press conference at the "Urbat" ("Friday") club.

 

"Sumgait was the continuation of Turkey’s anti-Armenian program under the slogan ‘Armenia without Armenians’. That program was realized not only in the East but also in the West, " said Ulubabian at the conference, being sure that the 1988 events are but a part of the chainsaw of genocidal actions against Armenians. Mr. Ulubabian stated that the massacres of February 26-29, 1988 were preceded by mass demonstrations led by high-ranking Azerbaijani officials, calling upon the Muslim population to attack the Armenians and show no mercy. Hrayr Ulubabian represented evidence of barbarous murders of Armenian children, although official Azerbaijani sources allege that no children suffered in February 26-29. "February 28, about 6:00 PM a group infuriated Azeris attacked our apartments. ‘You have to get out and go to Karabakh – that is what you wanted and you shall not stay here,’ they said and started hammering our doors with axes. Gorbachov lies. The peacemaking corpses were late 3 days, not 3 hours," said eyewitness Roman Ghambarian, participant of eh conference.

 

According to Soviet official data, 26 people were injured those days, but H. Ulubabian stated that is not true. Basing upon data derived from certificates of death he came to conclusion that more than 100 people were killed. Roman Ghambarian stated that much more were murdered. "About 20 thousand Armenians lived in Sumgait," he said, "4 thousand of them found refuge in Armenia, 4 thousands in Stavropol and Krasnodar, Russia; where are the rest?"

 

Hrayr Ulubabian expressed confidence that the Armenian authorities are to do everything possible to achieve the international recognition of the Sumgait tragedy and define them as genocide. He also reminded that the Azerbaijani government is doing everything to spread worldwide falsehood about Khojalu and accusing the Armenians.

 

The massacres of Sumgait were specially organized so as to prevent the Karabakh movement. Mr. Ulubabian said he believes that the evidence of another genocide against Armenians can be used to the benefit of Armenia in its claim against Azerbaijan. "Armenia must not recognize the lawfulness of Azerbaijani statehood, as Azerbaijan refuses to recognize the independence of Karabakh. Armenia must communicate with Azerbaijan only through the International Court and treat Azerbaijan as a criminal," concluded Ulubabian.

 

By Gohar Gevorgian

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

A Life Divided: Survivor of pogrom reflects on the hatred that drove him out of Azerbaijan

 

 

By Suren Musayelyan

ArmeniaNow reporter

 

Ararat Martirosyan has lived in the village of Mikhailovka in Armenia’s Lori marz for 17 years. He buried his wife Zabela here two years ago. Now he lives alone because, as he says, God did not give children to him and Zabela.

 

 

 

After a hard day (he has a land-plot, some cattle and chicken) the 80-year-old Martirosyan sits down to watch satellite TV. He is particularly drawn to shows on Azeri TV stations.

 

“They sing well and have some good music programs on TV, but their anti-Armenian propaganda is terrible,” says Ararat, a refugee from Azerbaijan who speaks perfect Azeri.

 

Ararat fled Baku with his wife in December 1989, weeks before the bloody events of January 1990, when the last and fiercest of pogroms began and continued for a whole week until Soviet troops were introduced into the city. Dozens of Armenians were murdered between January 13 and 20, others were robbed of their property and deported, many were brutally beaten or crippled.

 

There had been some 30,000 Armenians in the Azeri capital when the pogroms began. By the time the ethnic cleansing ended, the city that once was home to an almost 200,000-strong Armenian community was left without an Armenian population, except a few hundred people in mixed marriages.

 

But before that Ararat had witnessed the dreadful events in Sumgait, an industrial town about 40 kilometers north of Azerbaijan’s capital Baku.

 

“I worked as a forest warden. At that time I lived in a house near Baku and it was more convenient for me to drive to Sumgait to do the shopping,” Ararat remembers.

 

“It was on February 28, 1988, at about 5pm. My wife and I were in my Gaz 69 jeep. We saw an approaching crowd. I thought to myself, what funeral is it that has no coffin?”

 

As the crowd approached, Ararat saw that they were nationalist demonstrators, or hooligans as the veteran communist party member then thought to himself.

 

“One teenager asked me in Azeri to show documents and after I explained in Azeri that I hadn’t any with me, he exclaimed, “He speaks with an Armenian accent, he is Armenian, take him!”

 

Ararat remembers that in a fraction of a moment he managed to shut the doors of his car. But the crowd began to beat the car with sticks and rocks, someone started jumping on the bonnet, and others attacked the windows. They managed to open a door and began to drag his wife out, but she resisted and somehow struggled to close it again.

 

“Then I saw an ambulance on fire in front of us and understood that perhaps it was our end,” recalls Ararat.

 

Eventually, the car was turned over but luckily did not catch fire. Ararat says that it was a miracle they were saved.

 

“I knew many militiamen as I helped arrange hunting tours for them. One of them was nearby and recognized my car,” he says. “He managed to convince the raging crowd that we were not Armenians and that he knew us well.”

 

 

 

 

The Azeri policeman took Ararat and Zabela to hospital (they were both bleeding from injuries to the hands and face). Ararat remembers that the policeman helped them only as acquaintances, rather than as somebody doing his job, and that, he says, was humiliating.

 

“At the hospital I was very afraid, because I did not trust Azeri doctors any more, they could inject us with some poison or cause infection in our wounds,” he said.

 

Ararat heard militiamen talking in Azeri about 16 farmers from Armenia selling potatoes in the town’s main market. He never found out what became of them, but he feared the worst.

 

The incident happened to Ararat in Sumgait’s Prospekt Mira (or Peace Avenue), near the monument to the Bird of Peace. Ararat says that a group of prosecutors came from Volgograd, Russia, to Azerbaijan to investigate cases of violence in Sumgait.

 

“I have photographs and documents. I myself am a living memory. Now I am old, I want nothing, I just want my story to be recorded and heard. Someone promised me to do that, but he never came back,” Ararat says.

 

The Martirosyans managed to sell their property for a small price in Baku and buy a house near Kalinino (now Tashir) in Armenia.

 

He says life now is not bad. He gets a small pension of 16,000 drams (about $44) per month, and his small farm provides enough not only for him, but also to support relatives in Yerevan.

 

He says only his poor eyesight is a problem and he plans to undergo eye surgery in the capital in spring.

 

Seventeen years after the tragic events in Azerbaijan, Ararat, a man of Karabakh extraction who lived for decades among Azeris, still cannot understand what happened.

 

“I used to have a radio-set and listened to Azadliq [RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service], but my radio is broken. I want to understand what’s going on between Azeris and Armenians now, how to solve the Karabakh problem,” Ararat says.

 

 

[Aratta-Kingdom]

 

 

Marching in Memory: Rally commemorates the victims of Sumgait

 

ArmeniaNow

February 28, 2007

 

Young people marched under the Armenian tricolor along central streets in Yerevan to mark the 19th anniversary today of the Sumgait massacres.

Shouting different slogans and holding banners proclaiming “The Azerbaijanis’ weapon is the axe,” and “The massacres of Sumgait continue”, they marked the day when pogroms of Armenians began in the town of Sumgait in Azerbaijan.

 

According to official soviet data, mob violence took the lives of 40 Armenians, left hundreds more injured and deprived thousands of their homes in an event that became one of the triggers of the Karabakh conflict. See also: http://www.armenianow.com/?action=viewArti...935&lng=eng.

 

Hrayr Ulubabyan, the head of the initiative group for the protection of rights of Sumgait Armenians, insisted today at the “Friday” Club that more than 100 Armenians had been killed in the events of February, 1988.

 

“For three to four days they were unmercifully slaughtering helpless people: how could the victims be 40? The Prosecutor-General’s office here refused to provide me even with the names of the 26 bodies sent to the Sumgait mortuary, because they knew that people who had relatives among the victims would protest against the missing names of their close ones,” insists Ulubabyan.

 

Ulubabyan said also that statements by the Azerbaijani authorities that no children suffered during the massacres did not correspond to reality.

 

“A man who was looking for a relative saw the burnt corpse of a child; other witnesses saw a child being thrown into the fire, and others have seen how newborn children were thrown out of the windows of maternity hospital,” he says.

 

Since 2005, February 28th has been marked officially as the day of commemoration of the victims of the massacres organized in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, and the day of protection of the rights of the displaced Armenian population.

 

Azerbaijan continues to deny the Sumgait massacres, describing the events as hooliganism, and argues that Armenians exaggerate what took place. Ulubabyan says the Soviet authorities in Moscow were accomplices in denial of the massacre.

 

“That is how the Soviet authorities tried to prevent the Karabakh movement. Each time there was an attempt to raise the question of the Sumgait events, (general secretary Mikhail) Gorbachev would try to circumvent it and not give a political assessment to the massacres,” he says.

 

 

[MosJan]

Remembering Sumgait: Chronicle of a pogrom

By Aris Ghazinyan

ArmeniaNow reporter

On February 26, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the future first and last president of the Soviet Union, addressed a statement to the peoples of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

 

Sahakyan says it’s absurd to suggest that “our refugees return to places where they would be threatened with an axe every night.”

In the statement, Gorbachev promised to study carefully the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and to devote a special Central Committee plenum to the issue of the development of interethnic relations. His address ended with an appeal: “The time has come for reason and sensible decisions.”

 

Banners held up at rallies in Yerevan’s Opera Square in those days carried slogans such as “Lenin, the Party, Gorbachev!”. They believed in the triumph of reason and in the logic of sensible decisions, and, therefore, having heard Gorbachev’s appeal, the demonstrators went home.

 

A new word entered the dictionary of Armenia’s history the following day – Sumgait. It marked the beginning of the chronicle of the bloody Azeri-Armenian confrontation.

 

People also began to gather in that town, built after World War II and considered one of the industrial centers of Azerbaijan. The gatherings began on February 26 in front of the Party’s committee building in Lenin Square.

 

On February 27, after Gorbachev’s address, the crowd gathered again. This time banners at the “rally” called for the killing and expulsion of Armenians from Sumgait.

 

There were speeches at the rally too. Rocks, axes, homemade spears made of reinforced steel appeared. Groups of Azerbaijanis high on hashish were already setting cars on fire and breaking into Armenians’ apartments to claim the first victims.

 

This was the start of three days of pogroms against Armenians.

 

The first reports of disturbances in Sumgait reached the CPSU’s Central Committee later the same day. Gorbachev was told that people had been killed and law enforcement bodies were claiming to be helpless to prevent the violence.

 

On February 28, hundreds of residents of Sumgait who had participated in the pogroms gathered again in the central square as if nothing had happened. The rally was led personally by the first secretary of Sumgait’s party committee, a former leader of Azerbaijan’s Komsomol organization.

 

More reports reached the Kremlin. At least 20 people killed. The pogroms were gaining a mob characteristic. Gorbachev issued orders to central bodies to intervene and troops were sent onto the streets of Sumgait.

 

Moscow began an investigation into the pogroms. It established that steel bars had been produced in a planned manner at Sumgait’s tube-rolling mill in January and that hashish had been distributed in the town for free on the day the violence started.

 

It was also established that lists of Armenians had been drawn up at the housing and communal services centers of Sumgait a week before the pogroms. Many Azerbaijanis had been warned in advance not to switch on their lights on the night of February 27-28 to make it easier to identify the apartments where Armenians lived.

 

It was established that on February 28 and 29, many telephones in the town were disconnected. The Moscow News wrote that one Armenian apartment defended itself for seven hours while being unable to summon help from any quarter.

 

It was becoming apparent that much in the Sumgait tragedy had been planned. Later, the secretary of the CPSU’s Central Committee Alexander Yakovlev would accuse the KGB of involvement in the events.

 

February 28 Armenia was commemorating another tragic day in the nation’s history: 19 years since the three-day pogroms in Sumgait.

The Soviet leadership, disregarding all the evidence, categorically refused to describe the mass killings in Sumgait as driven by ethnic and religious hatred.

 

Criminal proceedings began at Sumgait’s people’s court on October 12, 1988, against three men charged with the organization of “mass disturbances”. One of the men stated in his testimony: “The pogrom organizers had dragged an Armenian towards the pump station. We also headed there and I found an axe while we were going there. We approached a crowd who were beating an Armenian near the pump box, and I hit him with the axe on the forehead. At that time Ali Agayarov found a steel bar somewhere and delivered three blows to his head. Then I dropped the axe and left.”

 

The chairman of Armenia’s Chamber of Lawyers, Ruben Sahakyan, participated in the Sumgait (1988) and Baku (1990) court trials.

 

“The absurdity of the situation is that after the breakup of the USSR and the establishment of independent Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Sumgait case was dismissed,” he says.

 

“It is not only the Soviet Union, but also the OSCE, the Hague Tribunal, the European Court and the EU who have failed to condemn Sumgait. I have 13 volumes from the Sumgait case. I recommend representatives of these organizations to read through each of the hundreds of episodes in these volumes.

 

“After that, I think these organizations will think better than to suggest that our refugees return to places where they would be threatened with an axe every night.”

 

The lawyer thinks that the murder of the Armenian army officer Gurgen Margaryan in Budapest, Hungary, in 2004, is undoubtedly part of the Sumgait file, but not limited to it. The axe was commonly used as a criminal weapon in 1896, in 1905, and 1915-1922. At the close of the 20th Century, Azerbaijanis used it in Sumgait, Baku, Kirovabad, Shamkhor, Mingechaur and other Armenian-populated territories.

 

“The axe of Budapest fits well into this historical context,” Sahakyan contends.

 

It is enough to give just one example to imagine the full horror of Sumgait. On February 29, a group of thugs beat and humiliated the Melkumyan family before pouring petrol over them and burning alive the father, 57-year-old Soghomon, mother, 54-year-old Raisa, their sons Igor, 31, and Eduard, 28, and daughter Irina, aged 26.

 

The charred body of Irina Melkumyan was beheaded.

[Aratta-Kingdom]

ARMENIANS’ POGROMS IN SOUMGAIT BECAME THE FIRST GREAT BLOODSHED THAT FOLLOWED NAGORNO-

 

DeFacto

2007-03-02

 

 

KARABAGH PEOPLE’S PEACEFUL REQUIREMENTS

 

 

Armenians’ pogroms in Soumgait became the first great bloodshed that followed Nagorno-Karabagh people’s peaceful requirements on the NKAR cession from one Soviet Republic to another, the Nagorno-Karabagh Republic Deputy FM Masis Mailian told Novosti-Armenia Agency in connection with the 19th Anniversary of the Armenian pogroms in Soumgait.

In his words, Azerbaijan’s response was quite inadequate; people were killed only for being Armenians, which means by ethnical indication.

The Deputy FM noted international law regarded such actions as Genocide, and it does not matter how many people were killed.

‘’The actions took place 400 kilometers from the Nagorno-Karabagh in peaceful time, on the territory that did not refer to the national and liberation movement we started, so in this context the measures Azerbaijan undertaken 19 years ago may be considered inadequate’’, Masis Mailian noted.

The Armenian pogroms began in the Azeri town of Soumgait February 27, 1988. For three day tens of Armenians were killed in the town, exact number has not been determined yet. According to official sources, 32 people were killed then.

The Soumgait events became a reply to a decision the Nagorno-Karabagh Autonomous Region rendered February 20, 1988 ‘’About Petition before the Supreme Soviets of Azerbaijani SSR and Armenian SSR for the NKAR Cession from Azerbaijani SSR to Armenian SSR’’.

[Error 404]

Does any of you have Photos or Video of Sumgait, Kirovabad or Baku Pogroms? Or do you know a website where I can get them?

 

Thanks!

[MosJan]

i have some pics at http://www.armenians.com/Genocide/Sumgait/index.html

 

 

did captured them from a video / but i can't remember which one was it from

if i find it i will let you know

[MosJan]

getashen http://www.armenians.com/Genocide/Getashen/index.html

[MosJan]

did made a page for Artsvashen - but i can't find it

 

[MosJan]

Margara http://www.armenians.com/Genocide/Maraga/index.html

[Zartonk]

The last photo in the Margara link shattered my heart man.

[MosJan]

Margara http://www.armenians...raga/index.html

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCTb_F1-TjA