Artsakh’s Human Rights Defender Gegham Stepanyan on Tuesday issued a statement commemorating the 35th anniversary of the Sumgait pogrom. His full statement is provided below.
"On February 27-29, 1988, in the city of Sumgait, Soviet Azerbaijan, under the coordination of the authorities and the negligence of the law-enforcement bodies a mass massacre of the Armenian population was carried out.
What happened in Sumgait should make any impartial observer believe that it was a systematic, directed, and organized crime aimed at the partial or total destruction of a specific ethnic group – the Armenians, which has a clear definition under international law: Genocide.
The Sumgait crime originated the ethnic cleansing and mass pogroms of the Armenians in other communities of Soviet Azerbaijan – Baku, Kirovabad-Gandzak, Shamakhi, Shamkhor, Mingechaur, and elsewhere, in which hundreds of Armenians became victims and hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly displaced from their homes.
The genocidal actions initiated by Azerbaijan were aimed at suppressing the realization of the inalienable right of Artsakh people to live in their Homeland and determine their identity and the civilized struggle that began for it.
The Azerbaijani leadership responded to this simple and understandable aspiration of the Armenian people for the realization of these universal rights with the policy of collective punishment, carrying out multiple crimes against humanity.
After Sumgait, manifestations of ethnic hatred and discrimination were not only unpunished but also became a state-encouraged policy with which the Azerbaijani authorities continue to poison their own society. The apparent justification of the violence and the lack of responsibility became a basis for the chain of crimes of the Azerbaijani authorities against ethnic Armenians, such as the massacres of the civilian population of Maragha and other communities during the Artsakh Liberation War, the brutal murder of an Armenian officer Gurgen Margaryan, as well as the April 2016 and the 44-day wars of and the many war crimes.
The criminal activities carried out regularly after the establishment of the ceasefire and the illegal blockade of Artsakh for 79 days now are the clearest proof that the impunity of gross violations of human rights gives a green light to the aggressor, pushing him to commit new crimes. In order to ensure accountability and justice, it is urgent for the international community to address a legal and political assessment of the criminal behavior of the Azerbaijani autocratic authorities and to take practical steps to curb it.
It is in such conditions that the community of states guided by the rule of law must prove its commitment to human rights to ensure that new crimes against humanity and genocides do not occur due to indifference and silence tantamount to complicity."