NKR MFA: official Baku learnt no lesson from Sumgait events
28.02.2010 15:18 GMT+04:00
/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 pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait (a town located a half an hour
drive away from Baku) took place on February 27-29, 1988. The events
were preceded by a wave of anti-Armenian statements and rallies that
swept over Azerbaijan. Almost the entire area of the town with
population of 250 thousand became a site of unhindered mass pogroms.
Armed with iron rods, stones, axes, knives, bottles and canisters full
of petrol, the perpetrators broke in Armenian houses. There were
dozens of casualties, mostly burnt alive after assaults and torture.
Hundreds of innocent people were wounded and disabled. The story of
Sumgait marked the first entry in a long list of crimes against
humanity and ethnic cleansings of the end of the 20th century.