A GENOCIDE GONE UNPUNISHED
Pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait (February 1988)
As it happened
“No half-measures or arguments about friendship of nations can calm
down the people. Even if some doubted it before Simgait, no one
sees a moral opportunity to insist on territorial unity of NKAO and
Azerbaijan after the tragedy happened”.
Andrei Sakharov, renown Soviet physicist and human rights activist
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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