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A Genocide Gone Unpunished
Pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait (February 1988)
As it happened
Pogroms, beatings and murder of Armenians in Sumgait,
which is a town 30-minutes drive from Baku, took place in broad daylight
as passersby kept looking. The crimes committed by Azeri thugs reached
their high point on February 27-28. These events were proceeded by a
wave of anti-Armenian rallies that shook entire Azerbaijan in February
1988. Almost the entire territory of the city with a population of 250,000
became an arena for unobstructed mass pogroms of its Armenian population.
Azeri thugs broke into apartment buildings with prepared in advance
lists of Armenian tenants residing there. Azeries were armed with iron
rods (armature pieces), hatchets, knives, broken bottles, rocks and
gas tanks. The number of these thugs can be determined by a simple fact
that according to many witnesses, 50-80 people attacked each apartment.
Similar crowds (numbering up to one hundred people each) went on a rampage
in the streets.
Dozens of Armenian were killed (according to verified
but incomprehensive data, number of murdered Armenians reached at least
53), majority of whom were set afire alive after being beaten and tortured.
Hundreds of innocent people recieved injuries of different severity
and became physically impaired. Women, among them minors, were raped.
More than two hundred apartments were robbed, dozens of cars were destroyed
and burned, dozens of art and crafts studious, shops and kiosks were
demolished. Thousands of people became refugees. At best Azeries kept
silence, some, calling themselves the intelligencia or the "salt"
of Azeri nation, tried to justify what happened. These were Sumgait's
true colors, which put the first mark on the long list of crimes against
humanity committed by Azerbaijani authorities during the past decade.
Pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait amounted to genocide
organized on the governmental level. In his address to the Supreme Council
of the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Region, a leader of the Communist
Party of Azerbaijan Mr. Hidayat Orujev, stated days before the massacre
of Armenians in Sumgait: "If you do not stop campaigning for the
unification of Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia, if you don't sober up,
100,000 Azeris from neighboring districts will break into your houses,
torch your apartments, rape your women, and kill your children."
The same Orujev is currently the State Advisor for Ethnic Policy in
Heidar Aliyev's presidential staff.
This crime was not given its adequate political and
legal evaluation. Not only its organizers and primary executors were
set free, but also until today their names remained unknown to the world.
Despite the fact that everything possible was done to conceal the circumstances
of the crime committed in Sumgait and to distort its nature, there are
enough documents, witness accounts and other facts that lead to one
and only conclusion: the pogroms were organized and executed on high
governmental level. Moreover, prime organizers and executors of the
crime were the authorities of then Soviet Azerbaijan and certain nationalistic
pro-Turkish Mafia circles linked in different ways to Azerbaijani authorities.
During 18 October-18 November 1988, the Supreme Court
of the USSR reviewed one of the eighteen criminal cases filed after
the Sumgait atrocities, in which, as the prosecution stated in its conclusion,
"hundreds of people of Azeri nationality" participated. During
the investigation many witnesses were questioned, the testimony of which
stated the unusual cruelty and their organized nature of the crimes.
Enraged mobs threw furniture, refrigerators, television sets and beds
out of balconies and set them afire. Tenants were dragged from their
apartments. If they tried to run and escape, the mob attacked them.
The mob used metal rods, knives and hatchets, after which bodies were
thrown into the fire. "He was still moving, trying to escape from
fire, but five young men were pushing him back into the fire with metal
rods" (witness A. Arkhipov). The Internal Ministry troops did nothing.
Witness S. Guliyev revealed during the trial how they reacted to pogroms
and killings: "A man was being beaten near the windows of a police
station. The police gave up the town to dishevel. It was not [present]
in town. I did not see it [there]." "The Police knew everything",
-- stated witness D. Zarbaliyev, a son of an Internal Ministry major
himself.
Division of one organized crime into separate and
independent cases testified to the fact that the trial was biased and
had an aim to conceal true organizers and perpetrators of the crime.
The court qualified mass murders of Armenians as murders committed by
hooligans. Moreover, during the trial, the criminal idleness of local
party and soviet structures as well as the military regiments present
in the city was not taken into consideration. By February 29 the army
troops were in Sumgait. However, they were not defending Armenians,
but rather defending themselves from the enraged mob, which was throwing
rocks at the army troops.
Mass rallies, which gathered thousands and where direct
calls to kill Armenians and begin with pogroms were made, also allow
concluding that tragic events in Sumgait were organized. So does the
obvious assistance of Sumgait law enforcement bodies to the mobsters
and murderers, and later the involvement of officers of the Azerbaijani
Interior Ministry and the KGB in the sabotage of criminal investigations
and covering of criminals. The weapons of murder (sharpened armature
pieces, spears and knives) were manufactured at Sumgait factories, rocks
were delivered to the areas of pogroms in advance, roadblocks were installed
on the escape routes from the town, lists of Armenian residents were
given to the mobsters, telephones were disconnected by the workers of
the local telephone company, electricity was shut off in entire blocks
and neighborhoods of the town during the days that the pogroms took
place, the mobs were well disciplined and subordinated hierarchically
to one another. All of these contradict to the allegations that the
crime had a spontaneous nature. It should be noted that immediately
after the pogroms, following the orders of the Chairman of the Cabinet
of Ministers (Prime Minister) of Azerbaijani SSR G. N. Seidov and an
Azerbaijani Communist Party's Central Committee official Ganafayev,
the belongings of Armenians, which were thrown out of their apartments
to the streets, were hastily removed, yards and building entrenches
were wash, and mobbed apartments and public buildings were frantically
repaired. Seidov headed the government delegation that arrived to Sumgait
on March 1, 1988. Thus, the physical evidence of the crimes was destroyed,
which noticeably hampered the investigation. The bodies of many victims
were later found in the morgues of Baku and other towns near Sumgait.
During the May 21, 1988 plenum of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani
Communist Party, the former Secretary of Sumgait Committee of Communist
Party D. M. Muslim-Zadeh blamed the authorities of Azerbaijan for the
Sumgait tragedy.
The policy of silence around the genocide committed
in Sumgait as well as the permissive attitude of the international community
towards the Azeri perpetrators of the Sumgait genocide allowed the organizers
and active participants of pogroms to avoid criminal punishment. Thus,
the bloody campaign continued and soon embraced the entire territory
of Azerbaijani SSR, reaching its high point in January of 1990 in Baku,
when hundreds of Armenians fell victim to the pathological hatred of
Azeri nationalists. In May, 1988 the Shushi regional Communist Party
Committee initiated deportations of Armenians from Shushi. In September
1988, tragic events took place near Kojalu village (Nagorno Karabakh),
where several Armenians were wounded and killed and the last Armenian
residents were expelled from Shushi. In November-December of the same
year, Azerbaijan was swept with a wave of Armenian pogroms. The most
brutal of them tool place in Baku, Kirovabad (Gyanja), Shemakha, Shamkhor,
Mingechaur and Nakhichevan Soviet Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan.
In Kirovabad, for example, Azeri mobsters burst into a retirement living
community, took its residents away to the outskirts of the city and
brutally murdered twelve old men and women, of which some were disabled.
The Sumgait tragedy and its bloody repetitions in
Azerbaijan in 1988-1991, led to the disappearance of a 450,000-strong
Armenian community of Azerbaijan and the military aggression against
the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh in 1992-1994. Although this has been
commonly perceived as the main and only reason for pogroms, the roots
of this tragedy are to be found not only in the unique mentality of
the Azeris as a people, which, allegedly, could not do otherwise but
to answer with pogroms and murders to Karabakh Armenian's peaceful demands
for self-determination. Certainly, psychological and historic motives,
which determined the social climate in Azerbaijan, are very important
in order to understand why all of a sudden thousands of people grabbed
hatchets and started killing their harmless neighbors.
Certain social climate, which would trigger a psychosis
of murder, had to exist in order for an explosion of aggression and
violence of this magnitude to occur. Recollections of a famous French
writer of Azeri descent Um-al-Banin, who spent her childhood in Baku
is a good illustration of this. Her writings demonstrate how an atmosphere
of massacres (pogroms of Armenians in 1905-1906) can affect a child's
mind. This is how she describes the games of Baku children in her book
entitled "Caucasian Days": "On holidays we used to played
a game called "Armenian Massacres", which we preferred of
all others. Drunk with our racist passion, we would sacrifice Tamar
(whose mother was Armenian) on the altar of our atavistic hatred.
First we would arbitrarily accuse her of killings
of Muslims and then immediately shoot her several times over and over
in order to renew our pleasure. Then we would tear off her limbs, tongue,
head and innards and threw it to the dogs to show our disdain for Armenian
flesh." In this environment several generation grew up - fathers
and grandfathers of people who live today. It was then that the foundation
for mutual hatred, which would burst into flames during the times of
change in 1918-1920 and in 1988-1991, was cemented. But the serious
reason, which led to the massacres, continued to exist. They were implicit
but real.
Beginning from creation of Azerbaijani state in 1918, genocide was and still remains a tool in the arsenal of Azerbaijani politicians. The organizers of the Armenian genocide in Azerbaijan (1920-1991) were certainly inspired by the results of Turkey's anti-Armenian policy - a country, in which more than one and a half Armenians were killed by local nationalists as a result of an unpunished genocide of 1915-1923. Today, just as ten years ago, it is obvious that the architects of the Azerbaijani state were concerned the least with the issue of ensuring prosperity for its national minorities. Instead they continued their policy of Turkization in all aspects of the state. This can be seen in the numerous public statements of top Azerbaijani state officials, including those of President Heydar Aliyev. Denial of the guilt of Azeries and Turks in the organization and execution of the Armenian genocide, shifting the blame to Armenians themselves, the policy of steeling the cultural heritage created by Armenians during many centuries in their homeland and territorial claims on a large part of Armenian historic lands put in doubt the possibility, which is expressed in the West, of co-existence of Azeri Turks and Armenians in the same state in the foreseeable future. 
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Monday, March 4, 2013
Artsakh Newsletter summarizes key developments in the Nagorno Karabakh Republic
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