ArmInfo. What happened in Baku 30 years ago was planned and prepared by the Azerbaijani leadership. Grigory Ayvazyan, chairman of the Assembly of Armenians of Azerbaijan, said this on January 13 in an interview with reporters at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex.
According to him, at first the Azerbaijani authorities made an attempt to free themselves from the Armenians of Baku, and then "transported this genocide machine" to Artsakh. At least 500 Armenians were brutally killed during the Armenian pogroms in Baku. "And this country is now trying to offer a certain status, it speaks of territorial integrity, while its leadership was the initiator of violence against its own citizens in the capital of the republic. We lost everything, but our problem can serve our country," he added. According to him, according to official statistics, half a million Armenians lived in Azerbaijan, and more than 250,000 Armenians lived in Baku. "After the pogroms in Sumgait, Baku and Kirovabad, about 404 thousand Armenians emigrated from Azerbaijan to Armenia. Soviet Armenia has repeatedly recognized these actions as genocide, and independent Armenia must confirm this position," said Grigory Ayvazyan.
He emphasized that deprivation of Azerbaijani Armenians is a matter of moral, material, territorial damage, and should be brought to the negotiating table.
Recall that exactly 30 years ago, on January 13, 1990, ethnic unrest began in the capital of Azerbaijan, which were accompanied by massive violence against the Armenian population, robberies, killings, arson and destruction of property. According to various sources, from 48 to 90 (according to some sources - up to three hundred) people became victims of pogroms. According to Human Rights Watch spokesman Robert Kushen, "the pogroms were not completely (or perhaps completely not) spontaneous, as the pogroms had lists of Armenians and their addresses." By the beginning of the Karabakh conflict, about 200 thousand Armenians were living in Baku with a total population of 1.7 million. At the end of February 1988, a pogrom with numerous casualties among Armenians took place in Sumgait, which became a landmark event and a turning point in the aggravation of the Karabakh conflict.