"ARMENIANS ALSO REMEMBER "BLACK JANUARY" WHEN SOVIET ARMY CAME TO SAVE ARMENIANS OF BAKU WHO BECAME VICTIMS
OF MASSACRE FOR ALREADY SEVERAL DAYS," SPOKESPERSON FOR ARMENIAN FM SAID
Armenpress
YEREVAN, JANUARY 25, ARMENPRESS: "Armenians also remember the "Black
January" in Baku when the Soviet Army came not to press the movement
for freedom but to save the Armenians of Baku who become victims of
massacre for already several days," spokesperson for the Armenian
foreign minister Vladimir Karapetian told Armenpress, referring to the
circumstance that January 20 in Azerbaijan is considered the Day of
Tragedy in January when in 1990 the Russian army entered Azerbaijan
and killed innocent people.
"Really, the Soviet army was late and when they blockaded the 8
tyrants the crime had already been committed. As a result over two
hundred thousand Armenians escaped from Baku," Karapetian reminded.
Speaking to a news conference in Yerevan the chief of the Communist
party Ruben Torosian said he had raised the issue last week in Moscow
when meeting with his Russian counterpart Gennady Zyuganov.
The murder of darker-skinned immigrants from the Caucasus and Central
Asia is widely blamed on neo-Nazi skinhead groups openly operating
in Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and other Russian cities.
Torosian lamented in Yerevan saying it was very difficult to see
how a nation that was on the forefront of fighting against fascism
is giving birth to neo-Nazi groups. Tigran Karapetian, head of the
People’s Party, said Russians have always been ‘pronounced chauvinists’
and their attacks are not against Armenians alone, but against people
from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
"Friendship is over when blood spills. We can accept Russians as
friends but when they kill Armenians we deem it unacceptable," he said.
The most recent of those killings was reported last week when a
16 year-old Armenian boy was stabbed to death near Moscow, but
reports from Moscow were overshadowed by the murder of Hrant Dink,
an Armenian-Turkish journalist, slain in Istanbul.