“The reality of Sumgait and the Sumgait phenomenon in general is not fully understood by the Armenian state, I would say. Until today, the Sumgait phenomenon has not received state, political, legal, moral, and humanitarian assessments. And, in a strange way, the genocidal machine placed in the west of the Caspian is still working and still in progress,” the coordinator of the Congress of Armenian Refugees from the Azerbaijani SSR, Mariam Avagyan, said during a press conference at the Tesaket press club.

She said that the Sumgait reality did not take place between February 26 and February 29, 1988, but it started at the end of 1987 when a falsified model was created by the massive resources of political technology and the entire process of how to carry out a massacre in Sumgait was established.

“This process is still being created by the same political technologies. The history of Sumgait is included in history textbooks in Azerbaijan with myths, of course, that the Armenians did it. And there is an interesting basis for this; they claim that Armenians say that the number of victims is too low so that they can avoid being blamed for it. When we speak to those who survived the Armenocide in Sumgait, they all confirm that the murderers were mostly children, particularly between 12-14 years old. Those children are now between 45-50 years old and their children are learning about the history of Sumgait in school. It seems that the plan to commit Armenocide is so deeply in place that, aside from the native, stateless people living in Sumgait, there is also a group living there that acts like a screw to hold the genocide machine in place. This group is prepared to commit Armenocide at any point as long as the opportunity arises,” Mariam Avagyan said.

Mariam Avagyan and the author of Sumgait… Genocide… Glasnost?, Hrayr Ulubabyan, spoke about how the authorities are not giving proper attention to the Sumgait issue. The state system is not speaking about the scale of those compensated for Sumgait because then they will be forced to make a political assessment. “It has been several years that the authorities are simply making statements that we cannot allow this to happen again. But no one says how that is possible,” Hrayr Ulubabyan said.

To find out more about the Sumgait massacre, you may read about it here.

Elina Ghazaryan