SUMGAIT IS AN UNPUNISHED GENOCIDE, SAYS STEPANAKERT
asbarez
Friday, February 24th, 2012
A memorial for Sumgait victims
STEPANAKERT-“On February 26-29, 1988, with the actual support of the
Azerbaijani authorities and the collusion 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 Foreign Ministry of
the Nagorno Karabakh Republic said in a statement issued Friday ahead
of the 24th anniversary of the crime.
“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.
The massacre of Armenians in Sumgait was thoroughly organized,
including from the ideological and psychological points of view. At
the anti-Armenian 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 leave 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.
An open atmosphere of mass psychosis and hysteria was formed at the
‘rallies.’ Those on the tribunes called upon the 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.
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 covered with petrol and burned alive.
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 went on. Only in the evening
the military units started taking decisive action.
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.
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.
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 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.
Unfortunately, the February 27-29 pogroms in Sumgait, organized at
the highest state level, are not given 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 pogroms 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 prevent a new ‘brown plague,'” concluded the
announcement.