pogroms Archives

Heydar Aliyev was behind Armenian pogroms in Baku, says Azerbaijani historian

January 27, 2018 by administrator

Armenian pogroms in Baku

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.”

US House Rep Adam Schiff commemorates Sumgait pogroms

February 27, 2016 by administrator

Re-published from Asbarez
Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Friday entered the following statement into the Congressional Record:
“Mr Speaker, I rise to commemorate the 28th anniversary of the pogrom against the Armenian residents of the town of Sumgait, Azerbaijan. On this day in 1988, and for three days following, Azerbaijani mobs assaulted and killed Armenians. When the violence finally subsided, hundreds of Armenian civilians had been brutally murdered and injured, women and young girls were raped, and victims were tortured and burned alive. Those that survived the carnage fled their homes and businesses, leaving behind everything they had in their desperation.

“The pogroms were not an accident. They were the culmination of years of vicious anti-Armenian propaganda, spread by the Azerbaijani authorities. The Azerbaijani authorities made little effort to punish those responsible, instead attempting to cover up the atrocities in Sumgait to this day, as well as denying the role of senior government officials in instigating the violence. Unsurprisingly, it was not the end of the violence, and was followed by additional attacks, including the 1990 pogrom in Baku.
“The Sumgait massacre and the subsequent attacks on ethnic Armenians, resulted in the virtual disappearance of a once thriving population of 450,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan, and culminating in the war launched against the people of Nagorno Karabakh. That war resulted in thousands dead on both sides and created over one million refugees in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Time has not healed the wounds of those murdered in the pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku. To the contrary, hatred of Armenians is celebrated in in Azerbaijan, a situation most vividly exemplified by the case of Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army captain who savagely murdered an Armenian army lieutenant, Gurgen Margaryan with an axe while he slept. The two were participating in a NATO Partnership for Peace exercise at the time in Hungary. In 2012, Safarov was sent home to Azerbaijan, purportedly to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Instead, he was pardoned, promoted, and paraded through the streets of Baku as a returning hero.
“The assault on ethnic Armenian civilians in Sumgait helped touch off what would become a direct conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karbakh. And today, Azerbaijan’s dangerous behavior on the Line of Contact threatens peace and stability in the region. Artillery and sniper fire across the Line of Contact has become a fact of daily life for civilians in the Nagorno Karbakh Republic, causing numerous casualties. I have urged the OSCE Minsk Group to deescalate the situation by ending a policy that equates unprovoked attacks by the Azerbaijan with the defensive responses of Karbakh and Armenian troops, and by pressuring Azerbaijan to

accept the installation of technological monitoring devices along the border. The anniversary of Sumgait is a reminder of the consequences when aggression and hatred is allowed to grow unchecked.
“Mr Speaker, this April we will mark the 101st Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, an event the Turkish government, Azerbaijan’s closest ally, goes to great lengths to deny. We must not let such crimes against humanity go unrecognized, whether they occurred yesterday or 28 years ago or 100 years ago. Today, let us pause to remember the victims of the atrocities of the Sumgait pogroms. Mr. Speaker, it is our moral obligation to condemn crimes of hatred and to remember the victims, in hope that history will not be repeated.”

Azerbaijan: 28 years pass since Armenian pogroms in Sumgait

February 27, 2016 by administrator

In late February 1988, large-scale massacres because of ethnicity were committed in Sumgait, Azerbaijan.

On February 27 of that year, the situation went out of control in this town, which is just 25 kilometers from the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku.

Several thousand Azerbaijani nationalists started burning the homes of the local Armenian population and killing the homeowners.

According to official data alone, 32 Armenian residents of Sumgait were killed, and hundreds of others suffered severe injuries and became disabled.

The February 27-29, 1988 Sumgait pogroms, about which Azerbaijan is silent to this day, were the first harbingers of the Azerbaijani neo-fascism These massacres were followed by the Azerbaijanis’ pogroms of the Armenians in Kirovabad—today’s Ganja—and in Baku, deportation of the entire Armenian population in Shahumyan Region, and incitement to war, all in response to the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) people’s demand to exercise their right to self-determination.