ArmInfo.A regular meeting of the Armenian government started on February 28 with a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Sumgait pogroms.
As Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan noted in his speech, exactly 31 years ago, violence began in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait against local Armenians, after which the pogroms spread to Baku, Kirovabad and other settlements of Azerbaijan. "Events in Sumgait became a clear example of when on ethnic and racial grounds our compatriots became the target of those atrocities.
Such events are not uncommon for us, and we have learned the lessons of history. I propose to honor the memory of those killed in those events with a minute of silence, " the Deputy Prime Minister said.
To recall, riots on ethnic grounds in the city of Sumgait, Azerbaijan SSR occurred on February 27-29, 1988. They were accompanied by mass violence against the Armenian population, robbery, murder, arson and destruction of property. According to the words of the British journalist Tom de Waal, these events became "the first outbreak of mass violence in modern Soviet history." According to official data of the Prosecutor General's Office of the USSR, 26 citizens of Armenian nationality died in the course of the riots, more than a hundred people were injured. According to unofficial estimates, hundreds of Armenians were killed. During an operation to restore order, injuries of varying degrees of severity were received by 276 military personnel. However, according to the data of the Memorial Human Rights Center, the lack of timely investigation of the circumstances of the pogroms, the identification and punishment of the perpetrators led to a further escalation of the Karabakh conflict.