ArmInfo.Chairman of Assembly of Azerbaijani Armenians Grigory Ayvazyan called on the Armenian authorities to recognize the events in Sumgait as genocide. At a meeting with reporters on January 8, the expert noted that in the 1990s, Azerbaijan made an attempt to repeat the genocide of the Armenian population in Sumgayit and Baku in Karabakh.
Ayvazyan expressed hope that this year the Armenian authorities will recognize the tragic events of those years in Sumgait and Baku as genocide, which will play an important role, including in promoting the right of the Karabakh people to self-determination on international platforms.
As noted, Baku launched an agent network directed against Armenia, which is actively operating in the region. So, during the years of the Karabakh war, the activity of this network manifested itself even in the North Caucasus, where false rumors spread about the plans of the Armenian side to seize the Krasnodar Territory and Stavropol Territory.
The Sumgayit pogroms took place on February 27-29, 1988, and were accompanied by mass violence against the Armenian population, robberies, murders, arsons, and destruction of property. According to the British journalist Tom de Waal, who published the Black Garden art documentary in 2005 on the history of the Karabakh conflict, these events became "the first outbreak of mass violence in modern Soviet history". Ethnic-based Armenian pogrom in Baku occurred on January 13-20, 1990. According to official data from the USSR Prosecutor General's Office, 26 citizens of Armenian ethnicity were killed and more than a hundred people were injured in the riots.