ADLP Armenian Rights Council of Australia Communiqué - RE: SUMGAIT MASSACRES‏

PO BOX 462, Ryde NSW, 2112 Australia, Tel & Fax (02) 98097290 Email:ARCAustralia@hotmail.com 25 February 2013 The Sumgait Massacres a great crime against humanity This week marks the 25th anniversary of the tragic events of Sumgait, when Azeri mobs initiated pogroms against the city’s Armenian population. Sumgait located just 30 kilometers from the Azeri capital Baku as a consequence became synonymous with another chapter in the Azeri people’s history of misrule and atrocities committed against the Armenian people. The crimes committed by Azeri mobs peaked during February 27-28, 1988. The tragic events were associated with a wave of anti-Armenian rallies that took place across Azerbaijan during the month of February 1988. Almost the entire territory of the city of Sumgait with a population of 250,000 became an arena for unobstructed mass pogroms of its Armenian population. Azeri mobs broke into apartment buildings with lists prepared in advance outlining the precise residents of Armenians. Armed with a range of crude and barbaric weapons such as iron rods, hatchets, knives, broken bottles, rocks and gas tanks they unleashed a wave of violence and terror against unarmed Armenian citizens of the city. Soviet accounts at the time put the death toll at 32 but testimonies and eyewitness reports of the massacres place the number of Armenians killed in the hundreds, majority of whom were set afire alive after being beaten and tortured. Hundreds of others received injuries of different severity and became physically impaired. Women, among them minors, were raped. More than two hundred apartments were robbed, dozens of cars were destroyed and burned, dozens of hops and kiosks were demolished. Thousands of people became refugees. The pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait amounted to genocide organized at a governmental level. The fact that mass rallies, which attracted thousands of Azeris and where direct calls to kill Armenians and commence the pogroms were declared, were allowed to take place points to a policy of deliberate sanctioning of the pogroms by the Azeri authorities. There are also numerous examples of assistance provided by Sumgait law enforcement bodies to the mobsters and murderers of Armenians, and later the involvement of officers of the Azerbaijani Interior Ministry and the KGB in the sabotage of criminal investigations and concealing of the criminals. The weapons of murder were manufactured at Sumgait factories, rocks were delivered to the areas planned for pogroms in advance, roadblocks were installed on the escape routes from the town, lists of Armenian residents were given to the mobsters, telephones were disconnected by the ARMENIAN DEMOCRATIC LIBERAL ORGANISATION SYDNEY AUSTRALIA workers of the local telephone company, electricity was shut off in entire blocks and neighborhoods of the town during the days that the pogroms took place. All of these contradict the allegations that the anti-Armenian crimes had a spontaneous nature. The physical evidence of the crimes was destroyed, which noticeably hampered the investigation. The bodies of many victims were later found in the morgues of Baku and other towns near Sumgait. The policy of silence around the genocide committed in Sumgait as well as the permissive attitude of the international community towards the Azeri perpetrators of the Sumgait genocide allowed the organizers and active participants of pogroms to avoid criminal punishment. It also helped to foster the launch of further atrocities against the Armenians residing in Azerbaijan resulting in the January 1990 killings of hundreds of Armenians in Baku. The Sumgait tragedy and its bloody repetitions across Azerbaijan from 1988-1991, led to the forced dispersion of the 450,000-strong Armenian community of Azerbaijan and the military aggression against the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh during 1992-1994. Today, 25 years on from the tragic events of Sumgait, the Armenians of the Nagorno- Karabakh Republic have successfully and resolutely established a modern functioning state, this despite daily examples of aggression and threats of launching mass violence against them by the Azeri authorities. Reflecting on the words of Andrei Sakharov, renowned Soviet physicist and human rights activist: "No half-measures or arguments about friendship of nations can calm down the people. Even if some doubted it before Sumgait, no one sees a moral opportunity to insist on territorial unity of NKAO and Azerbaijan after the tragedy happened". Or as eloquently stated by Armenia’s Diaspora Minister, the Hon. Hranush Hakobyan, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic can never be in the structure of a state where peaceful people are killed, tortured and deprived of their land, like the tragedy in Sumgait, only for being Armenian”. The Armenian Rights Council of Australia the advocacy and human rights branch of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Organisation, pays its due respects to the victims of the Sumgait tragedy on the eve of the 25th anniversary of what has become another dark chapter in the history of the Armenian nation. The victims of the Sumgait tragedy are not only those who prematurely lost their lives, nor those that sustained physical injuries, but also those who endure the emotional scars of those bloody days of February 1988, with the full knowledge that the perpetrators of the Sumgait pogroms have not yet been summoned before courts to account for the crimes they committed against humanity. The Armenian Right Council of Australia calls upon all representative and legislative bodies across Australia to officially condemn the Sumgait atrocities committed against the Armenian people and demand an immediate cessation to all forms of anti-Armenian violence that continue to be perpetrated by Azerbaijan against the peaceful citizens of the Republics of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.