Sumgait massacre
It was exactly 30 years ago today that Azerbaijan committed pogroms against its Armenian population. We urge you to ask your Representative to issue a statement condemning these crimes, as well as Azerbaijan’s ongoing cease-fire violations.
In the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait, longtime peaceful Christian Armenian residents were brutally targeted on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected to unspeakable crimes. In March 1988, The Economist magazine reported the atrocities, and documented the murder and mutilation of pregnant Armenian women and newborn babies in a maternity hospital. Other reports speak of gangs of young Azerbaijanis hunting down Armenian families and committing murder, rape, and robbery. The Azeri government was never held accountable for these atrocities.
The Sumgait pogrom committed on February 28, 1988 was the beginning of the escalation of violence against the Armenian minority across Azerbaijan and against the residents of Artsakh (also known as Nagorno Karabakh), culminating in the violent expulsion of 390,000 Armenians.
The Sumgait pogrom was widely reported and roundly condemned, but the violence was never contained. Increasingly, anti-Armenian forces acted with impunity and the pogroms spread across Azerbaijan, leading to the military campaigns of the late 1980s to 1994 to deport the Armenians of Artsakh, until a cease-fire agreement was signed by Azerbaijan, Artsakh, and Armenia. Since then, the cease-fire agreement has been violated on a daily basis, and in April 2016 Azerbaijan resumed full-scale warfare for four days before it was prevailed upon to halt its aggression.