Prime Minister Visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial to pay homage to the innocent victims of the Sumgait massacre.

It is important to recall that the Sumgait pogroms were a state-organized campaign of violence against the Armenian population of the city by the Azerbaijani authorities in the Soviet Union, occurring between February 27 and 29, 1988. This atrocity aimed to thwart the Artsakh movement and terrorize Armenians with the prospect of a new wave of violence to prevent the spread of the Artsakh liberation struggle.

On the eve of the massacre, a party official in Soviet Azerbaijan, E. Asadov, threatened to organize a massive rally of thousands of Azerbaijanis against the Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. On February 26, a day before the events, Mikhail Gorbachev expressed “concern” regarding the safety of over 200,000 Armenians living in Baku during a meeting with Armenian intellectuals, directly linking it to the demands of the Artsakh Armenians for reunification with the Armenian SSR.

To inflame tensions in Sumgait, false reports were spread, claiming that Armenians were indiscriminately killing Azerbaijanis in Armenia and looting their property. Notably, a televised statement by the USSR's Attorney General, Katusev, regarding the killing of two Azerbaijanis during the Askeran incidents had a provocative impact.

The planned nature of the crime is evidenced by the presence of lists of Armenian residences among the attackers, pre-prepared scenarios, and the assignment of roles (killers and looters, those destroying properties, and eliminating traces of the crime), along with preparations made in workshops for manufacturing metal rods and other tools, and the distribution of drugs and alcoholic beverages. Furthermore, telephone connections of Armenians were cut off, and law enforcement and emergency services failed to respond, while conditional signals and systems were used to pinpoint the locations of Armenians.

The results of the three-day massacre were horrific; the actions of the perpetrators were unprecedentedly brutal. According to official Soviet data, several dozen were killed, while unofficial figures suggest over a thousand, many of whom were burned alive after torture, alongside thousands of injuries, hundreds of rapes, including a significant number of minors, 18,000 refugees, hundreds of damaged and looted apartments, dozens of robbed stalls, shops, workshops, and public facilities, as well as several dozen burned and damaged vehicles.

On February 29, Soviet troops were deployed in Sumgait, yet violence and killings continued on that day. The army did not receive orders to use weapons and failed to help the Armenians. Only in the evening did they take decisive action to prevent further massacres.

Only 94 individuals were held accountable for the violence, and only one received a death sentence. The others faced charges of murder, rape, riots, and other offenses, with all cases being justified under the guise of “hooligan motives.”