An Azerbaijani historian and human rights advocate, who emigrated to the Netherlands to escape persecutions in his country, has revealed new facts about the 1990 Armenian pogroms in Baku, blaming late President Heydar Aliyev for orchestrating the tragic events.Speaking to the internet TV channel Objective TV, Arif Yunusof also criticized Azerbaijan’s current leadership for misrepresenting facts in an effort to cover up the Soviet Azerbaijani government’s genocidal policies.
“The Communist Party of Azerbaijan was to convene a plenary session of its Central Committee in late January to dismiss Heydar Aliyev and his entire [political] team from the party and to later oust them all from the political arena. Aliyev was certainly aware of the fact, so he initiated counteractions through his allies across the republic. A central figure in the Azerbaijani National Front was Neymat Panahov, whom Aliyev had told at one of the meetings that they needed ‘a lot of blood’. So on December 31 1989, Panahov organized the border transgression plot in Nakicevan even though Moscow had already signed the agreement to allow the opening of the border. They promised there would be no fire attacks by border guards of the National Security Committee. So Panahov himself was the perpetrator of the Armenian pogroms in January 1990,” Rusarminfo.ru quotes him as saying.
Yunosov also expressed his concerns that the Azerbaijani government glorifies those dark pages in history “as a day of a heroic struggle for the state’s independence and part of their national liberation movement.”