Category: 2023

U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Tuesday released a statement commemorating the Sumgait pogrom. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the massacres of Armenians that took place on 27-29 February 1988.

Rep. Schiff’s full statement is provided below.

"I rise today to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the pogrom against the Armenian residents of the town of Sumgait, Azerbaijan. Beginning on February 27, 1988 and over the course of three days, Azerbaijani mobs assaulted and killed Armenians. The violence left dozens of Armenian civilians dead and hundreds injured, women and girls were raped, and some victims were burned alive after being tortured and beaten. Thousands were forced to flee their homes, leaving behind their belongings. Armenian homes and businesses were left to be looted and destroyed.

The pogroms came about as the result of years of hateful, racist anti-Armenian propaganda woven into the very fabric of Azerbaijani society by Azerbaijani leaders, who made little effort to punish those responsible, instead attempting to cover up the atrocities in Sumgait and denying the government’s role in instigating the killings. This unprovoked violence against Armenians was a precursor to subsequent attacks on ethnic Armenians, including the pogroms in Kirovabad, Baku, and the Maragha Massacre.

Time has not healed the wounds of those victimized in the pogroms or their families because three decades later, Azerbaijan’s aggression against the people of Armenia and Artsakh continues.

Beginning on September 27, 2020, and over 44 days, Azerbaijani forces once again targeted and murdered innocent Armenians in Artsakh and displaced tens of thousands more. Azerbaijan’s violence again escalated in September of 2022, when Azeri forces shelled homes in the villages of Karmir Shuka and Taghavard in Artsakh and launched an unprovoked assault on sovereign Armenian territory.

Today, Azerbaijan continues to terrorize the people of Artsakh by blocking the Lachin Corridor — the only road connecting Artsakh to Armenia. Since the blockade on December 12, 2022, the humanitarian crisis in Artsakh has grown more dire by the day, with widespread shortages of food, medicine and other necessities and rolling blackouts amid freezing temperatures. The effect has been devastating to the 120,000 individuals living in Artsakh, including children and the elderly.

These are the horrific consequences when aggression and hatred grow unchecked and when Aliyev’s hostility is met with deafening silence, emboldening him to continue, and expand, his unprovoked attacks on the Armenian people, knowing there will be no repercussions. This is why Azerbaijan considers it acceptable to annihilate Armenians in their historical homeland. We cannot allow violence and crimes against humanity to go unanswered.

The United States must immediately and permanently stop all U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan and impose sanctions. It must also direct U.S. humanitarian assistance to Artsakh, call for the safe and unconditional release of the remaining Armenian prisoners of war and captured civilians, hold Azerbaijan accountable for the destruction of religious and cultural sites, and support democracy in Armenia and a free, independent Artsakh.

On this tragic anniversary, as we pause to remember the innocent victims of the pogroms, we are also reminded that despite the trials the Armenian people have faced, it has not broken their faith, determination, and their will to survive in the face of constant threats from Azerbaijan. Today, let us recommit ourselves to doing everything we can to bring liberation to our Armenian brothers and sisters abroad, once and for all."

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."

Armenia has become a “tool” against the regional countries due to the polices of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s administration, political analyst Alen Ghevondyan claims.

“The outlook for the future gives reason for worst predictions, because Armenia will be divided between the neighboring countries both politically (zones of influence) and, perhaps, territorially conditioned by their national security interests,” he wrote on Facebook on Monday.

"The West will incite provocations, and naturally, having failed, it will step aside, after which, according to the Armenian political tradition, they will start cursing their fate, forgetting about rational thinking.

“I assume that some parts of Armenia will be under joint administration. Moreover, at least one more foreign military contingent will be deployed to Armenia.

“When Armenia’s current prime minister invites the Western powers to Armenian territory to continue the confrontation with Russia on its soil, as a result of which nothing will remain of Armenia, he does not say that, in addition to confrontation with Russia, he provides the country’s territory for a possible operation against Iran,” the expert stated.

The Lachin corridor should operate in conformity with the trilateral statement of the Russian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani leaders dated November 9, 2020, which has no provisions on any checkpoints, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday after talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart Jeyhun Bayramov, TASS reported.

"The regime of its [the Lachin corridor] operation should be fully in in line with the first trilateral statement dated November 9-10, 2020, which means that free movement for solely civilians and humanitarian cargoes must be ensured. This is what we want to achieve, first of all with the help of the Russian peacekeeping contingent. It doesn’t envisage the establishment of any checkpoints," he said.

According to the Russian top diplomat, it is possible to "remove suspicions" about the use of the corridor "by technical means." "We touched that upon today. Technical details are of secondary importance," he added.