Sonia Hakobyan had moved to her new apartment three days before the massacres started in Sumgait. Armenians were scattered all over Sumgait and only during the day of the massacres did Sonia realize how many Armenians lived in the city. She and her family, together with another 5,000 Armenians, found shelter from the slaughterer in the huge cultural center building under the control of the naval infantry close to Lenin Square.
Sumgait was to serve as a “cruel lesson” for other peoples in the Soviet Union, who also had demands regarding national issues. “Rallies in Yerevan and NK demanded unification with Armenia. This was the reason behind the massacres. We did not think they would come and drive us out of our homes. We had been waiting for an apartment for 12 years. My husband and I worked in factories and finally we received the three-room apartment where we lived for just three days. Currently an Azerbaijani family from Amasia (northwestern Armenia) is living in our apartment,” says Sonia. Her family, as well as many others from Sumgait, has settled in the village of Mughni, not far from Yerevan.
An official from the Kremlin, Grigory Kharchenko was in Sumgait three days after the massacres. Apart from the horrifying scenes, something else had shaken him – the Armenians wanted to depart for Russia and not Armenia. “No one that we spoke to expressed a desire to fly to Armenia. They all asked for Krasnodar, Stavropol, and Rostov regions. Why? They said, ‘No one in Armenia needs us. They don’t think of us as real Armenians, we are not real Armenians’”.
Only a fraction of Armenians, with roots in Karabakh, who were living in Sumgait, moved to Karabakh or Armenia.
Lida Alexanian is one of those who did. She says that during the massacres Azerbaijani friends of her son, who was then in military service, defended them. “My son was serving in Germany. After the massacres my husband and I went to the military commissariat and told them that we were moving to Yerevan. I asked them to inform my son not to return to Sumgait. They refused, saying that Armenians had to return to their birthplace. And so we waited for 10 months after the massacres. On November 29, 1988 my son returned from military service and the next day we came to Armenia. Later, both of my sons moved to Russia, as our standard of living here was very low,” she says.
Samvel Shahmuratyan recorded dozens stories by the survivors of Sumgait in the spring of 1988. Certain Azerbaijanis claim that the killings of the Armenians in Sumgait were carried out by Azerbaijanis allegedly deported from Kapan, a city in southern Armenia. Among those responsible for the killings, there also could have been Azerbaijanis who were banished from Armenia earlier. It is clear that among the more than 80 Azerbaijanis who were convicted in court, not one was from Kapan.
Constantin Pkhakadze, a Georgian, who along with his Armenian wife lived in Sumgait, said that on February 21 he heard from his Azerbaijani friend that one week later there would be anti-Armenian protests. At the time, Pkhakadze took this as a joke. On the evening of February 26 in Lenin Square, Pkhakadze had seen a few dozen people had gathered. One of them, not giving his first or last name, had said that he had escaped from Kapan with his Azerbaijani compatriots and that Armenians there had killed his and his wife’s relatives.
“We have escaped from Kapan,” an Azerbaijani with a long face and thin mustache had said to those gathered in the square. He was the leader of the protest rally. The next day more stories were added to this – Armenians had supposedly raped Azerbaijani girls in Kapan, cutting off their breasts. The man claiming to be an Azerbaijani from Kapan concluded his remarks by proclaiming: “Armenians, out of Azerbaijani lands! Death to the Armenians!”
On the afternoon of February 27, Sumgait Deputy Mayor Malek Bayramova appealed to the participants of the rally – “It is not necessary to kill the Armenians. Gorbachev has said that no one will be taking Karabakh away. The territory is and will remain Azerbaijani. Allow the Armenians to leave Azerbaijan freely, give them the chance to leave.”
After discussions with the Armenians of Sumgait it became clear that the mob had resorted to violence because the Armenians were demanding Karabakh. A short while later the issue of Karabakh was relegated to the back burner. With evident impunity, several groups comprised of dozens of thugs, were killing Armenians and looting their homes.
Vladimir Grigoryan recounted, “I looked out my window. There was a rally in Lenin Square. Nothing could be heard, I opened the window. They were saying, ‘Calm down, we will not give Karabakh to the Armenians, Karabakh is ours.’ Another said that two Azerbaijanis were killed in Karabakh, one 16 another 22 years of age.” His wife Marina added that after Katusev’s speech, the Azerbaijanis became more indignant.
USSR Deputy Prosecutor Alexander Katusev, who was in Baku, stated over Azerbaijani T.V. on February 27 that five days earlier two young people had been killed in Askeran, stressing their Azerbaijani last names. This news further inspired killings of Armenians and the stealing of their belongings by the eager mob.
During the last three days of February, as a result of the organized Armenian massacres, 29 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis were killed. About 400 – the majority of whom were Armenian – were injured. The 18,000 Armenians of the city became refugees. The six Azerbaijanis were most probably killed by soldiers of the Caspian Infantry Fleet and Land Regiment when these forces moved in the direction of young thugs gathered at the Sumgait bus station. But this was on the evening of February 29 when the slaughter of the Armenians had already ended. Perhaps this attack on the Azerbaijanis took place in order to give the massacre in Sumgait an international nuance.
The fact that the murderers were all armed with the same metal rods, that they had the addresses of the Armenians and were organized into groups speaks to the fact that the slaughter was premeditated. On the other hand, it is obvious that if ordinary Azerbaijanis had not sheltered Armenians in their homes the number of those murdered and injured would have been much higher. It was only on the afternoon of February 29 that Soviet troops received orders to forcibly intervene to save the thousands of terrified Armenians from being massacred.
On February 28, the Moscow central television program Vremya described the Armenian massacres as “acts of hooliganism.”
The next day, during a session of the Politburo, Gorbachev informed the Soviet leadership that – “Not less than a half a million people have taken to the streets in Yerevan. There have been clashes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians in Karabakh and two people were killed. Pamphlets were distributed throughout Yerevan calling for people to stop protesting and take up arms and pressure the Turks. But I must say that even when there were a half a million people on the streets of Yerevan, there were no anti-Soviet activities. The masses were moving forward wearing the masks of the members of the Politburo. Only the extremists were raising the notion of self-determination. All the speeches were about uniting Karabakh with Armenia. There is evidence of Azerbaijani families escaping from Armenia. Vladimir Ivanovich has reported that 55 people have left, Razumovsky has said, 200.”
Defense Minister Dimitry Yazov proposed to enforce a curfew given horrible scenes taking place in the city. “They cut off the breasts of two women, the head of another, and they skinned a girl. Alas, this is the kind of savagery there.”
Kharchenko and Filip Bobkov, Deputy Chief of the USSR KGB, were among the first officials to arrive from Moscow. They reached Sumgait via Baku on February 28 and witnessed the savagery with their own eyes. Kharchenko did not accept Gorbachev’s claim that the forces were only three hours late in arriving in Sumgait. They were late for a whole day, awaiting their orders.
“I don’t want to show you the photographs. I simply destroyed them. With my own eyes I saw dismembered corpses, a body mutilated with an axe, legs, arms, practically no body left,” Karachenko said. “They took the remains of dry leaves off the ground, scattered them over corpses, took petrol from the nearest car and set fire to them. Horrific corpses.”
Soviet history is full of bloody episodes, but what took place in Sumgait was unprecedented. First of all, the massacres took place in a time of peace. Second, the massacres weren’t political in nature but rather ethnic, and finally, the massacres were not carried out by the Soviet central or republican authorities as they were one year later in Tbilisi. This possibility, however, was handed over to the working class due to the inaction of the central authorities. Gorbachev had hoped that the working class would be able to establish public order.
According to Pkhakadze, the leader of Sumgait Communist Party, Jahangir Muslimzade, replaced Bayramova on February 27.The Azerbaijani who claimed to be from Kapan once again alleged that Armenians had killed his relatives and those of his wife and had raped two Azerbaijani girls in the dormitory. Muslimzade then took the microphone and reiterated what Bayramova had said: “Brothers, we must let the Armenians leave freely.”
Azerbaijani scientist Zardusht Alizadeh wrote that on February 27 Baghirov and PM Seidov came to Sumgait. “They met with citizens and refugees. But what could they say to these people? Shrieks and cries of the people who were offended, insulted and expelled from their country silenced the speeches of the leaders. They ran away through the back door of the club and literally fled.”
“On February 28, Muslimzade headed for the ill-fated rally, where tempers were furiously boiling. Karabakh would never be relinquished to Armenia, he said, there was no cause for concern. There is Article78 of the USSR Constitution and if they violate it and adopt the decision to seize Karabakh, then he would join the ranks of the protestors. They placed Azerbaijan’s flag in his hand and demanded that he prove that he was with the people and ready to demonstrate. Standing alone, with the Azeri flag in his hand and surrounded by agitated crowd, Muslimzade gave in to the will of the mob and went with them. When the procession headed by Muslimzade made its way, pre-arranged groups of thugs carrying metal pipes ran to the different parts of the city and began looting the apartments of Armenians,” writes Alizade.
Soviet Armenian authorities condemned the brutal massacre in Sumgait two and a half months after the fact. On June 15, the Supreme Soviet passed a similar decision, under pressure from those who had not come out into the streets. In the meantime, the leadership of Azerbaijan issued a communiqué, “expressing its deep sympathy and sincere compassion to the families and friends of the victims including all those who were injured as a result of the disorder that took place in Sumgait.”
On March 12, representatives of Sheikh-ul-Islam Khadji Allahshukyur Pashazade, the spiritual leader of Azerbaijani Muslims, visited the Mother See in Etchmiadzin. They conveyed their leader’s message, expressing pain and dismay in connection with the tragedy in Sumgait, to the Catholicos of All Armenians,
In mid-March, the plenary session of the Politburo of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party, in which Baghirov participated, relieved Muslimzade from his responsibilities “for his display of political carelessness, for allowing great flaws in organizational and political activities and for his non-party conduct, all of which brought tragedy to the city.”
Around 90 criminals stood before courts in different cities of the Soviet Union charged with implementing inter-racial massacre, violence, rape and other charges in Sumgait. Only one of them received the maximum death sentence. The Soviet justice system did its utmost to avoid referring to the nationality of the criminals during the court cases. The insistence that some of the killers were not Azerbaijanis also served that purpose.
Note- This chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book- Karabakh Diary; Green and Black
An exceptional and informative work based on a rich and varied source base. Its impartiality is striking. A much needed monograph destined to persevere as the ‘textbook’ for Armenian diplomacy. As a pioneering initiative that presents an accurate reinterpretation of the Karabakh struggle for self-determination, this book captures the essence of the issue with an illuminating portrayal of many of the key figures and events that have come to define the Karabakh issue. The conflict cruelly shaped the destinies of thousands of average people and the ordeals they bore underline the responsibility of those at the top, in whose hands a resolution of the Karabakh conflict rests. The author’s secret, revealed in the pages of Green and Black, is that he does not shy away from presenting those facts and realties no longer considered expedient to remember. Anyone wishing to be informed and regarding the Karabakh conflict must read this book.
Paperback: 416 pages,
Language: English,
2010, Antelias,
ISBN 978-995301816-4.
