SUMGAYIT BECAME A BLOODY PRECEDENT FOR FUTURE WARS, POLITICAL SCIENTIST SAYS

armradio.am
21.01.2010 16:51

"In response to the decision of the Regional Council of Nagorno
Karabakh to join Armenia Azerbaijanis organized a medieval bloody
slaughter of the Armenian population of Sumgayit," Member of the South
Ossetian Parliament, political scientist Gennady Kokoev wrote in his
book titled "South Ossetia – the way to freedom."

"Sumgayit became an ominous precedent of interethnic conflicts over
the territory of the USSR. The fact that the authorities of the
country failed to give a political-legal assessment to the Sumgayit
slaughter and the guilty were no punished, negatively affected the
overall social-political situation and the social psychology: the
externalism felt they could go unpunished, since the law-enforcement
bodies in Sumgayit were not preventing the actions of the armed thugs
and were bolstering them instead. As for the political leadership
of the Soviet Union, it turned absolutely unprepared to interethnic
clashes," the author of the book writes.