ARMENIAN POGROMS IN BAKU WERE PLANNED PREVIOUSLY

PanARMENIAN.Net
13.01.2010 14:45 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ After the February 1988 Sumgait massacres and brutal
crimes against Armenians we never thought the same might happen in
Baku, a town with a population of 1.5 million, with 200.000 being
Armenians, said Eleonora Avanesova, one of survivors of Armenian
pogroms in Baku.

"Even before the pogroms, Armenians in Azerbaijan always suffered
from infringements upon their rights," she told Wednesday a news
conference in Yerevan.

"I worked in a scientific institute where my articles were always
undersigned by other authors My name was at best indicated as a
co-author," Avanesova stressed.

According to her, Armenian pogroms in Baku were very well organized,
as Azeri gangster groups possessed lists with the names and addresses
of all Armenians.

As noted by Robert Khachatryan, another eye-witness, "The pogroms
reached their peak on January 13, 1990 after Azerbaijan’s Supreme
Council passed a decision on withdrawing from USSR."

"Azerbaijani official sources reported 56 people dead, but Armenian
experts say 270 Armenians were killed during the pogroms. According to
other sources, the number of victims reached 1000," he said, adding
that the atrocities against Armenians in Baku can be characterized
as Genocide.

Sumgait pogroms: an Azeri-led pogrom that targeted the Armenian
population of the seaside town of Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan during
February 1988. On February 27, 1988, large mobs made up of ethnic
Azeris and other ethnicities formed into groups that went on to attack
and kill Armenians both in the streets and 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 official death toll was 32 people
(26 Armenians and 6 Azeris). Many insist that at least 200, not 30,
people were killed.

Armenian pogroms in Baku: twenty years ago today the Azerbaijani
authorities instigated the pogroms of Armenians in Baku. Some 400
Armenians were killed and 200 thousand were exiled in the period of
January 13-19. The exact number of those killed was never determined,
as no investigation was carried out into the crimes.

On January 13, 1990 a crowd numbering 50 thousand people divided into
groups and started "cleaning" the city of Armenians. On January 17,
the European Parliament called on EU Council of Foreign Ministers
and European Council to protect Armenians and render assistance to
Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. On January 18, a group of U.S. Senators
sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev to express concerns over the
violence against the Armenian population in Azerbaijan and called
for unification of Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia.