NKR MFA: official Baku learnt no lesson from Sumgait events

February 28, 2010 - 15:18 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net -
The events of late February 1988 in the town of Sumgait shocked the international community with their savagery and brutality. They became an embodiment of the Azerbaijani authorities’ policy of hatred towards Armenians conducted within the whole soviet period.

“Unfortunately, the pogroms organized and implemented in Sumgait on February 27-29 on a top state level haven’t got corresponding political or legal assessment, and their organizers and basic executors haven’t only avoided any punishment, but they still occupy top positions in Azerbaijan. The official structures of the USSR hurried to put veto on the Sumgait issue, artificially dividing the mass massacre of Armenians into separate crimes. In other words, the committed genocide was veiled, and its organizers and executors were shielded on an official level.

The policy of concealment towards the genocide in Sumgait made possible conducting ethnic cleansing in the whole territory of the Republic by the Azerbaijani SSR authorities and led to further unleashing a wide-scale military aggression against the people of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic. Having suffered a crushing defeat in its unleashed war, official Baku is not going to learn a lesson from the recent past and keeps on intensifying its military rhetoric.

Official Baku's unwillingness to face the truth only distances the prospect of confidence building between Artsakh and Azerbaijan, without which the Karabakh conflict settlement and solution of other regional issues are impossible,” NKR MFA statement says.

The Sumgait Pogrom

The Sumgait Pogrom was the Azeri-led pogrom that targeted the Armenian population living in the Azerbaijani seaside town of Sumgait in February 1988. On February 27, 1988, large mobs made up of Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians in both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen. The violent acts in Sumgait were unprecedented in scope in the Soviet Union and attracted a great deal of attention from the media in the West. The massacre came in light of the Nagorno-Karabakh movement that was gaining traction in the neighbouring Armenia SSR.