SUMGAIT – UNPUNISHED GENOCIDE
Panorama.am
24/02/2012
On February 26-29, 1988, with the actual support of the Azerbaijani
authorities and the connivance of the Soviet leadership, a massacre
of Armenians was carried out in the city of Sumgait, the Azerbaijani
Soviet Socialist Republic, which shocked the international community
with its savagery and brutality.
The Sumgait massacre of Armenians was committed in response to the
Karabakh people’s legitimate expression of will for reunification
with Armenia and became the embodiment of the Azerbaijani authorities’
policy of hatred towards Armenians conducted during the entire Soviet
period. The mass pogroms of Armenians in ‘international’ Sumgait were
intended to block a possible solution to the issue, to frighten the
Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh with the prospects of new bloody actions
and to make them abandon their national-liberation movement. Dozens
of people were killed with sadistic cruelty; a considerable part of
them was burned alive after having been beaten, tortured, and violated.
Hundreds of people were disabled for life and thousands became
refugees…
“After Stalin’s atrocities nothing took place in our country to
throw us so far back – from civilization to savagery”, wrote those
days scientists from Moscow in their “Open letter to the friends
in Armenia”.
The massacre of Armenians in Sumgait was thoroughly organized,
including from the ideological and psychological points of view. At
the anti-Armenian gathering-like rallies, which started on February
26 in the central square, the municipal leaders openly called upon
the participants for violence against the Armenians.
On February 27, the ‘rallies’ escalated into acts of violence. The
first ‘rally’ in front of the building of the Sumgait City Party
Committee was attended by about 50 people; the next day, the number
of participants grew to several thousands. In her speech, Second
Secretary of the City Party Committee Melek Bairamova demanded that
Armenians left Azerbaijan; Azerbaijani poet Khydyr Alovlu concluded
his speech by saying: “Death to Armenians!”
In addition to the city leadership, representatives of the law
enforcement agencies were on the tribune, and it wasn’t accidental
that unprecedented facts of inaction and heartlessness of the Interior
employees were fixed during the pogroms.
Following is a fragment from the indictment on criminal case 18/60233
on accusation of Akhmed Imani ogly Akhmedov, Ilham Azat ogly Ismailov,
and Yavar Giyas ogly Jafarov: “Answering the question of lawyer
Shaposhnikova “Why did you not call your father, who was in service
then, to tell him about what was happening in your block?”, witness D.
Zarbaliev (the witness’ father worked in the militia in Sumgait) said:
“And why did I need to call? The militia knew about it; everybody
knew about it. It was not the first day of the pogroms”.
An open atmosphere of mass psychosis and hysteria was formed at the
‘rallies’. Those on the tribunes called upon the rally participants to
be true to the credit of the Muslims and to unite in a war against the
‘infidels’. The thugs were inflamed by, actually, fascist appeals,
heated by alcohol, which was distributed freely out of trucks, and
drugged; convinced of their own impunity, they continued with renewed
impetus the pogroms of Armenians’ apartments, their mass beating
and killing, which lasted until late at night. The crowd was headed
by none other than First Secretary of the Sumgait City Committee of
the Communist Party Jahangir Muslimzade, with the national flag of
Azerbaijan in his hands. The gangs were headed also by some prominent
people in Sumgait – the director of secondary school #25, an actress
of the Arablinsky Theater, and others.
“In peacetime, the Soviet Union had never experienced what happened
then. Gangs of about ten to fifty or more people strolled through the
city, broke windows, burned cars, but the main thing was that they
were looking for Armenians”, wrote Rodina (Motherland) magazine (#
4, 1994, pp. 82-90).
On February 28, the number of thugs armed with iron bars, axes,
hammers, and other improvised means considerably increased. The crowd
clearly knew its tasks. The pogrom-makers, who were divided into
groups, broke into Armenians’ apartments and killed the people in
their own homes; but more often they took them out in the street or in
the yard for making a public mock of them. After painful humiliation,
the victims were poured with petrol and burned alive.
Following is a fragment from Hasan Mamedov’s testimony (record of
a judicial hearing, Moscow, USSR, the Supreme Court, October 18 –
November 18, 1988):
“I saw that a middle-aged man was brought out of the entrance and
beaten, mostly from behind… He was lying about three meters from
me. A fire was burning nearby. Nizami Mageramov took the guy’s legs
and Fizuli Fataliyev took his hands; they lifted the guy off the ground
and threw him into the fire. His body turned out to be in the fire and
his legs were out of it. I saw it clearly, as it was light. The guy
thrown into the fire still showed signs of life. I determined this,
seeing how he was trying to roll out of the fire. But, a guy in a black
jacket and jeans was holding the guy down in the fire with a piece
of reinforcement rod, preventing him from rolling out of the fire…”
Only on February 29 military forces were brought into the city of
Sumgait, but they did not immediately establish control over the city.
The killings and pogroms of Armenians were going on. Only in the
evening the military units started taking decisive actions.
The central authorities were not interested in establishing the exact
number of victims in the Sumgait bacchanalia. Officially, 36 Armenian
and 6 Azerbaijani deceased persons were stated. Meanwhile, British
researcher Tom de Waal wrote in his book Black Garden. Between Peace
and War: “…If you pay attention to the serial numbers of medical
death certificates, you’ll find out that at least 115 bodies were
recorded those days in the morgues… Such a number of natural deaths
is excluded, at least because no more than 72 deaths were registered
in the previous two months” (“February 1988: Azerbaijan”, chapter 2).
The fact that the Genocide of the Armenian population of Sumgait
was planned in advance and was not a spontaneous action of a group
of hooligans, as the Soviet authorities and judicial agencies tried
to present it, is testified by some irrefutable facts: production
of cold arms for the pogroms at the industrial enterprises of the
city; making lists of the Armenians living in the city with the aim
of their killing; the authorities’ inaction; speeches of specially
trained provokers at the rallies for manipulating the crowd; the
local militia’s assistance to the thugs; disconnecting the phones
in the Armenians’ apartments; cutting off the electricity supply in
the blocks where the pogroms were going on; accurate coordination
of the gangs’ actions; providing the thugs with reinforcement rods,
pipe scraps, rocks and bottles with gasoline and alcohol; blocking the
entrances to the city by armed groups; lack of any assistance to the
victims by medical workers of the city; removal of the crimes’ traces
(hasty repair of the smashed shops, apartments, and other facilities),
and hiding the organizers and many executors of the Genocide from
the justice.
Following is a fragment from the indictment on criminal case 18/60233
on accusation of Akhmed Imani ogly Akhmedov, Ilham Azat ogly Ismailov,
Yavar Giyas ogly Jafarov: Witness M. Ilyasov, Russian: “From the window
of my apartment I saw a GAS-24 black car to drive up to our block. This
car was approached by two men out of the crowd… Without leaving the
car, the men sitting in it said something to those who had come up
to them, and they immediately went back into the crowd. After that,
the pogroms started with renewed fury… I think they fixed in advance
the addresses of the Armenians. I came to this conclusion, because the
killers entered accurately the entrances where the Armenians lived…
All this was not an act of hooliganism; it was an action against
a particular nation, against the Armenians. It was not against the
Russians or some other nations, it was against the Armenians; they
were looking for only Armenians”.
“Witness S. Guliyev said at the hearing: “Those people were gathered
together more than one day, as it is impossible to gather thousands
of people in one day.”
“Witness M. Mamedov: “The megaphone-holder (Ahmed Ahmedov) announced
that the crowd did not need to smash the apartments, as they would
remain to them, they only needed to kill the Armenians”.
“Witness T. Tahmazov, apartment block manager: “Representative of the
Azerbaijani Communist Party Central Committee Ganifaeva instructed
the rally participants to burn all the smashed things and cover them
with ground. They did so, and very quickly. The next morning, the City
Executive Committee sent repair and construction teams to block 412
‘a’ for removing the bodies and the smashed things”.
Sumgait Communist newspaper (#57, May 13, 1988) wrote: “In the days
of the heavy situation, axes, knives, and other items that could
be used by hooligan elements were made in the shop of the factory
(tube-rolling)”.
It is quite obvious that some persons, who were not identified as
a result of the investigation, had created favorable conditions for
carrying out the mass massacre of Armenians.
On February 29, 1988, a session of the Politburo of the USSR Communist
Party Central Committee took place in the Kremlin, at which it was
stated for the first time officially, though classified as ‘top
secret’, that the mass pogroms and massacre had been carried out in
Sumgait on an ethnic basis, that is exclusively against Armenians.
However, the USSR official structures were quick to taboo the topic of
‘Sumgait’, artificially dividing the mass slaughter of Armenians into
separate crimes. The crimes, which, according to the International
Convention on Genocide, must be assessed as crimes against the
humanity, were classified as crimes committed out of ‘hooliganism
motives’. In other words, the committed Genocide was veiled, and its
organizers were defended at the official level.
In particular, employees of the municipal and law enforcement agencies
remained unpunished, though many witnesses stated some well-known
persons in the city, who were directly involved in the ‘rallies’.
Moreover, Sumgait Prosecutor Ismet Gaibov, less than a year after the
massacre of Armenians in the city, where he ‘carried out’ the control
over law and order, was… appointed Prosecutor General of Azerbaijan.
Only the Communist leader of Sumgait Muslimzade was dismissed from his
position, though he wasn’t either brought to justice. It is rather
because at the next plenary session of the Azerbaijani Communist
Party Central Committee well-informed Muslimzade directly accused the
Republic’s leadership of organizing the massacre: “On May 21, 1988,
at the plenary session of the Azerbaijani SSR Communist Party Central
Committee, the former First Secretary of the Sumgait City Committee of
the Communist Party blamed also the Republic’s leaders for the tragic
events in Sumgait. The day before, he stated considerable details
of this at the Bureau of the Azerbaijani Communist Party Central
Committee, when his personal responsibility was discussed, what can be
found in the verbatim records” (the Epoch , # 4, September 13, 1990).
Unfortunately, the February 27-29 pogroms in Sumgait, organized at
the highest state level, are not given yet an adequate political and
legal assessment, and the Moscow trial did not become the Nuremberg
trial, because the roots of the mass crimes were not identified.
The policy of silence related to the Genocide in Sumgait, concealment
of the reasons, which gave rise to it, and leaving its real organizers
unpunished made possible the ethnic cleansing carried out by the
Azerbaijani SSR authorities throughout the Republic, which culminated
in the January 1990 bloody bacchanalia in the Republic’s capital city
of Baku and led to further large-scale military aggression against
the people of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.
Meanwhile, the truth about Sumgait, like the materials of the Nuremberg
trial, is needed to the people for preventing a new ‘brown plague’.