Wednesday, January 21 2015 13:44

 Baku's aggression will continue until international community recognizes the Baku and Sumgait pogroms as Armenian Genocide, Grigory Ayvazyan, Chairman of the Assembly of Armenians of Azerbaijan, said at a press conference in Yerevan on Wednesday.   

"Baku continues its aggressive policy because it takes advantage of the fact that the international community fails to adequately assess the Baku and Sumgait pogroms. Moreover, the sabotage attacks and ceasefire violations will continue until the international community recognizes those events as genocide", he said. 

Ayvazyan added that neither the Government of Armenia nor the refugees take proper measures to raise the international community's awareness of the real developments in Baku and Sumgait. "Meanwhile, Azerbaijan is trying to tell its own tale about a genocide in Khojalu and black January", he said. 

To note, the pogrom (massacre) of the Armenian population in the Azeri town of Sumgait took place on 26- 29 Feb 1988. The Sumgait pogrom became the first mass outbreak of ethnic violence in the Soviet history.  The Sumgait pogrom lasted for three days. Armenians were raped, robbed and murdered. The pogrom also resulted in the first outflow of refugees from Azerbaijan to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia. As a result of the three-day pogrom, dozens of people were wounded and 53 were killed, with most of them harried to death and with their dead bodies burnt. On Feb 29, the Soviet army finally entered Sumgait, however, it did almost nothing to defend the Armenian population.