ArmInfo. The National Assembly of Armenia, at a meeting on February 28, a minute of silence honored the memory of the innocent victims of the Sumgayit massacres.
As the Speaker of the Parliament Ara Babloyan noted in his speech, hundreds of Armenians were brutally killed in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait 30 years ago as a result of a crime organized at the state level. The crime, planned and implemented by the Azerbaijani authorities 30 years ago, has not yet received the appropriate political and legal assessment from international structures.
"The absence of condemnation of the Sumgait events caused ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Azerbaijan, and led to mass pogroms in Kirovabad, Baku, Maragh and other Armenian settlements of Azerbaijan," the head of the Armenian parliament said, adding that the purpose of mass pogroms organized by the Azerbaijani authorities was to scare Armenians genocide and force them to abandon the national liberation movement. Ethnic disorders in the city of Sumgait began on February 27, 1988, and lasted three days, accompanied by massive violence against the Armenian population, looting, murder, arson and destruction of property. According to the British journalist Tom de Waal, who published the documentary book "Black Garden" about the history of the Karabakh conflict in 2005, these events became "the first in the modern Soviet history an outbreak of mass violence" .
According to official data of the Prosecutor General's Office of the USSR, during the riots 26 citizens were killed Armenian nationality, more than one hundred people were wounded. According to unofficial estimates, the number of Armenians killed is hundreds. As stated in the materials of the human rights center "Memorial", the lack of timely investigation of the circumstances of the pogroms, the establishment and punishment of the guilty parties led to further escalation of the Karabakh conflict.