By Tatul Hakobyan
In these days of January 13-15, Baku was deprived of a significant part of its history. The city of oil has been attracting Armenians, mainly from Artsakh and Syunik, since the 1950s. For about 150 years, Armenians played a key role in the construction, development and development of Baku. Many Armenians accumulated fairy-tale wealth thanks to Baku oil: Mantashov, Aramyants, Mirzo! World chess champion Gary Kasparov believed in the international illusion of Baku until the end, he was one of the last Armenians who had to leave his beloved city to save his life. In the same 1990, he, who was no longer from Baku, defeated his rival Anatoly Karpov in the fight for the world championship.
The jewelry company “Karloff” presented Kasparov with a diamond crown with 1118 s and a white diamond. He decided to sell the crown, transfer the money to the Armenian refugees, the people with whom Baku had built, and give an international color to the city on the Caspian coast. There was even a buyer, an Arab sheikh. However, the sheikh disappeared, and Kasparov had already promised the money to the refugees. At that time, the leader of Kalmykia նախկին former FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov came to the rescue, who bought the diamond crown. Years ago, Nelli Ghukasyan, a teacher of Russian language and literature, told me with horror what she had seen in her favorite city, in these days of January 1990. “I was secretly looking out of the window of my house, I was seeing what was happening on the street. They set fires and looted cars loaded with Armenian property. Alla Khachanyan lived on the second floor of our building. When the door to her house was smashed with an ax, the girl threw herself out of the window into the street.
People were thrown out of high-rise buildings. It was a horrible sight. When we asked the soldiers for help, they said they had no command. We were hid in their house by Azerbaijani refugees from Yerevan when the People’s Front militants were breaking down the doors of Armenian apartments. My husband and I got to the port of Baku with the help of our Russian bride, and from there to Krasnovodsk (now Turkmenbashi). As in Sumgait, the actions of the attackers were particularly brutal. People were thrown from the balconies of their apartments upstairs, the mob attacked with iron rods, killed Armenians with knives, and simply seized their apartments and property. It is impossible to say exactly how many Armenians were killed during the Baku massacres. There are 150 Armenians, including those who died in Turkmenistan a few days after receiving their wounds elsewhere. Azerbaijani researcher Arif Yunusov mentions the number 86. Etibar Mammadov, one of the leaders of the opposition People’s Front Party of Azerbaijan in 1990. said in January.
“I personally witnessed two Armenians being killed not far from the train station. The crowd had gathered, they were filled with gasoline and burned, and two hundred meters away there was a police station in Nasim district, there were 400-500 soldiers of the internal troops, who drove 20 meters past the charred corpses, no one tried to disperse the crowd. »: After describing this terrifying picture, Mammadov justified the People’s Front. “It was our activists who cordoned off the area and demanded that the police disperse the crowd.” The Armenian massacres in Baku took place in the days when the People’s Front was seeking power in Azerbaijan. On the one hand, the communist leadership of Azerbaijan expected help from Moscow to maintain power in the fight against the fronts, on the other hand, cooperated with them.
Gorbachev said on television that the events in Baku had become tragic: “massacres, murders, the eviction of innocent people from their homes.” The first and last president of the Soviet state, as in the case of Sumgait, avoids calling things by their names. In both Sumgait and Baku, troops are deployed only when the Armenian pogroms are over. It seems that troops could not have been deployed if the Soviet power in Azerbaijan had not been endangered. On January 15, as the Armenian pogroms continued in Baku, the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a decision to “declare a state of emergency in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and several other regions.” A state of emergency is declared in Nagorno-Karabakh, bordering Aghdam, Lachin, Mirbashir, Kelbajar, Jebrail, Fizuli-Ghubatlu, and later Shahumyan. Meanwhile, a state of emergency was declared in Baku only on January 19, when the Armenian massacres were, in fact, over, and there were no Armenians left in the capital. Moscow, using the Armenian massacres as an excuse, sent troops to Baku to crush the People’s Front, which is seeking power. Soviet troops arrive in the Azerbaijani capital on January 19, led by Alexander Lebed, commander of the USSR Airborne Division. The operation was coordinated by Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov.
A few days later, he admitted that troops had entered Baku “to prevent the People’s Front from trying to seize power from the communists.”akov. ” More than a hundred demonstrators and militants were killed, some of whom took part in the Armenian massacres in Baku. Dozens of civilians were crushed under the larvae of Soviet tanks, hundreds were injured. More than two dozen Soviet soldiers were killed in the clashes, which means fighting broke out in the city. After a long silence, Heydar Ali enters the arena again. After being removed from the Politburo, he continued to live in Moscow. After sending troops to Baku, Ali condemned the move at the Azerbaijani embassy in Moscow, and returned to his hometown of Nakhichevan some time later. Becoming the leader of Nakhichevan (he was to move to Baku in 1993), Ali told American journalist Thomas Goltz who the culprits of “January” were. “It was the KGB of Moscow, it was the KGB of Azerbaijan, it was the whole leadership of Azerbaijan. They were all involved in the attacks on the Armenians of Baku on January 12, 13 and 14, and again on January 20, when Soviet troops invaded Azerbaijan. “All this was Moscow’s program, in which the Azerbaijani leadership, Vezirov and Mutalibov, participated.”