LARISA ALAVERDYAN: ARMENIAN POGROMS IN BAKU ARE CONTINUATION OF 1915’S GENOCIDE

PanARMENIAN.Net
19.01.2010 18:26 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ I already put forward a number of suggestions,
previously discussed with Azerbaijan’s Armenian refugees, on
increasing children’ awareness of Sumgait and Baku events, Heritage
party secretary, parliamentarian Larisa Alaverdyan said.

In a conversation with PanARMENIAN.Net reported, she gave high
assessment to RA Education and Science Ministry’s initiative to
conduct history lessons on 1990’s Armenian pogroms in Baku.

"Tragic events in Baku and other Azeri cities are not solely Armenia’s
issues; they are, in fact, crimes against humanity," Alaverdyan noted,
adding that representatives of other nationalities also fell victims
to Baku pogroms. As she stressed, age-long historical experience
proves that the impunity of genocide perpetrators leads to other
genocides. "Baku pogroms are continuation of 1915’s Armenian Genocide."

The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic
destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during
and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and
deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to
lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths
reaching 1.5 million.

The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be
April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.

Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes
and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of
food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were
indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse
commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case
of genocide after the Holocaust.

The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire,
denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In
recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as
genocide.

To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized
the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars
and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also
recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC,
The Washington Post and The Associated Press.

The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the
Genocide survivors.

Armenian pogroms in Baku. In January 1990, Azerbaijani authorities
instigated the Armenian pogroms 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, 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.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress