ArmInfo. Nagorno-Karabakh commemorates the victims of Sumgait massacre.
The press office of the Artsakh Republic President reports that on 28 February, on the 29th anniversary of the Sumgait pogroms, Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan accompanied by Primate of the Artsakh Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church Archbishop Pargev Martirossyan and top officials of the republic visited the Stepanakert Memorial Complex and laid flowers at the monument of the innocent victims.
The Sumgait massacre of Armenians was committed in response to the Karabakh people's legitimate expression of will for reunification with the Armenian SSR. The mass pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait were accompanied by mass violence against the Armenian population, robberies, murders, rapes, arsons and destruction of property. Actually, the Sumgait massacre led to aggravation of the first conflict between the nations of the Transcaucasus and caused the first flows of Armenian refugees from Sumgait to Stepanakert and Armenia. According to official data, 26 Armenians were killed and more than 100 were wounded, though experts estimated that the death toll was about 200. All this medieval vandalism took place amid full paralyzation of the local authorities in Sumgait and Baku and the central authorities in Moscow.
The Communist Party of Azerbaijan represented by Kyamran Bagirov and the Communist Party of the USSR in the person of Mikhail Gorbachyov only called for calmness and did not even consider the reasons of what was going on. The law-enforcers did not take any actions, and only the delayed deployment of internal troops was able to stop the extermination of people and to save the few alive Armenians. At the session of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR in Moscow on 29 Feb 1988, the supreme legislative body of the country officially stated that the killings in Sumgait were on ethnic grounds. Afterwards, dozens of organizers of this tragedy appeared before Soviet courts, but only one of them was sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, however, he was released. In the meantime, the real organizers and murderers of hundreds of peaceful Armenians, particularly, the leadership of the People's Front of Azerbaijan and personally Abulfaz Elchibey not only evaded punishment, but further came to power with chauvinism and continued to heat up anti-Armenian moods in the Azerbaijani society. Later, it was this impunity that led to reoccurrence of genocidal actions in Baku, Maragha, and in dozens of peaceful villages and towns populated with Armenians.