The Collapse Of The USSR: Processes in and around Sumqayit
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Processes in and around Sumqayit, situation in the USSR, in particular, in the NKAA
Processes in and around Sumqayit, situation in the USSR, in particular, in the NKAA
In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was going through a difficult
period, which was marked by failures in foreign policy, deteriorating
standing in the international arena, difficulties in the national
economy and crisis of leadership. Communist Party Central Committee
General Secretary L.I. Brezhnev was the leader of the country, and his
death in 1982 resulted in a hard power struggle among different
groupings within the Party Central Committee Politburo.
After
Brezhnev's death, in quick succession at the helm of the USSR were from
November 1983 Yuriy Andropov (his tenure as the general secretary was
16 months) and from February 1984 Konstantin Chernenko (one year and
several days). Both were severely ill and passed away. In the opinion
of the majority of political analysts and historians, Andropov and
Chernenko were transitional figures who were selected after Brezhnev's
death for the period of power struggle among the groupings in the
Politburo. After Chernenko's death, Mikhail Gorbachev took the post of
the general secretary in March 1985, and his candidature temporarily was
temporarily found satisfactory and reconciled different groupings of
officials in the Kremlin.
Gorbachev's activities in the post of the Communist Party leader and
head of state are best remembered for a large-scale attempt to reform
the USSR -- the Perestroika -- which ended with a collapse of the
communist system in the world and dissolution of the Soviet Union, and
for the end of the Cold War. The public opinion about Gorbachev's role
in these events is most remarkably polarized, but almost everyone
concurs that precisely Gorbachev's very unskilled ethnic policy
eventually brought about unprecedented domestic political cataclysms
which resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev started with a personnel reshuffle and dismissed from
important posts in the Kremlin the officials who disagreed with his
method of reforming the USSR and the foreign policy of the region.
Gorbachev's relations with Heydar Aliyev, member of the Party Central
Committee Politburo and the first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of
Ministers who was considered one of the most talented Soviet leaders in
the top echelon of power, were also uneasy.
In 1987, Aliyev was removed from the Central Committee Politburo. The
official theory was that he retired on account of poor health. However,
the main reason was Mikhail Gorbachev's envy for Aliyev. The point is
that back in the early 1980s, the Western press wrote a lot about Heydar
Aliyev and named precisely him as the most likely successor of
then-USSR leader Konstantin Chernenko. The energetic personality, hard
work of Heydar Aliyev and universal respect for him in the Politburo
worried Gorbachev, and he could not rest until he achieved Aliyev's
dismissal from all the posts he occupied. At the Politburo meeting on
11 March 1985, where the issue of election of the new general secretary
was discussed, Aliyev voted for Mikhail Gorbachev's candidature. But
when Gorbachev came to power, Heydar Aliyev fell into disfavor.
It has to noted that, together with dismissals of the most experienced
Soviet leaders, Gorbachev's ethnic policy, especially in the issues of
relations among a number of Soviet republics, was no lesser blow to the
USSR.
Ethnic conflicts and addressing problems using armed force
That Gorbachev was too lenient toward Armenia, its leadership and
ethnic Armenian communities abroad from the very outset was proven by
the meeting of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee Politburo,
chaired by Gorbachev who was not yet elected general secretary but
already chaired Politburo meetings.
On Gorbachev's initiative, the issue of "measures to commemorate the
70th anniversary of the Armenian genocide" was entered on the agenda for
the top Soviet leadership to examine, which was perceived by many of
the participants in the meeting with ambivalence. The point is that the
issue of "genocide" of Armenians was raised in the 1960s by the USA and
a number of the Western European countries. From the very outset, the
USSR adopted a cautious attitude toward that campaign and gave it to
understand on numerous occasions that raising the issue of
unsubstantiated "genocide" of Armenians was a political game which was
launched by the "capitalist West." However, the meeting under
Gorbachev's chairmanship in February 1985 turned the established views
on the issue upside down.
Speaking to the Politburo, Gorbachev, acting as a mouthpiece for
promotion of the interest of the ethnic Armenian communities abroad,
noted that "24 April 1985 will mark the 70th anniversary of the
genocide of Armenians which was organized by the ruling circles of the
Turkey under sultans." Then he said that "The US House
of Representatives passed a resolution to declare 24 April the Day of
inhuman attitude toward people and genocide of Armenians. The ruling
circles in France and a number of other countries are taking steps in
the same direction..."
"In view of this, the Armenian Communist Party Central
Committee proposed to pass a decree by the Armenian Presidium of the
Armenian SSR Supreme Council to declare 24 April the Day of
commemoration of the victims of genocide and to organize an appearance
of the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party on radio and TV,
as well as publication of the text of his broadcast speech in the
republic's press,"-- Gorbachev voiced the initiative.
Naturally, he was "staunchly supported" by Karen Demirchyan, first
secretary of the Armenian Communist Party Central Committee.
However, this initiative by Gorbachev and Demirchyan encountered
disagreement by the majority of the Party Central Committee Politburo
members, especially the oldest and most experienced members like V.I.
Grishin, V.V. Gromyko and M.S. Tikhonov, who justly accused the
leadership of the Armenian SSR of attempts to aggravate the
Soviet-Turkish relations and promoting US interests by raising this
issue. As a result, the "test run" by Gorbachev, which was apparently
commissioned by the Armenian side, did not enlist much support. But
despite this, Gorbachev persuaded the Politburo to pass the decision to
carry out in April 1985 at the union and republic levels the "traditional
public events, based on the proposals by the Armenian Communist Party
Central Committee and taking into account the exchange of opinions at
the Central Committee Politburo meeting."
Gorbachev was apparently "oblivious" that Armenian nationalist
terrorism was a staunch opponent of the Soviet system. Just the series
of explosions which were carried out by Armenian terrorists in January
1977 would suffice to prove this. A group of Armenian terrorists, headed by Stepan Zatikyan, blew up explosive devices on 8 January 1977 in Moscow: In
a metro system (the Pervomayskaya station), Bauman district shop No 15,
and on the 25 Oktyabrya street. The terrorist acts killed seven
(according to other reports, 29) people, and 37 were wounded. Thanks to
the fact that the Soviet secret services were able to detain the
terrorists, Zatikyan's plan to carry out a series of explosions on the
eve of the 7 November (October Revolution Day) celebrations in the same
year of 1977 was thwarted.
The inability of the Gorbachev team which came to the Kremlin power in
1985 to find a common language with the republics of the union was
demonstrated by the unjustified replacement of a number of leaders,
which resulted in growing public displeasure locally. As a result,
disorders took place in 1986 in Kazakhstan, the situation in the
Transcaucasus grew tenser, and the unjustifiably bloody deployment of
the Soviet troops in Tbilisi, Georgia in April 1989 took place. Then
the situation aggravated in Transdniester Region in Moldova, ethnic
clashes took place in Novyy Uzen, Kazakhstan, a conflict broke out in
the Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan, bloody deployment of the Soviet troops
in Baku, Azerbaijan, was carried out in January 1990, unrest broke out
in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, troops were deployed in Riga, Latvia, and
Vilnius, Lithuania. However, the most tragic and bloody conflict on the
territory of the former USSR was the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in
Nagorno-Karabakh.
There are many other facts which prove that the steps which Gorbachev
took on the issue of the Karabakh problem which started smoldering again
were made in the pro-Armenian direction from the very outset. When
Gorbachev came to power, the appetites of the ideologues of the Armenian
nationalist separatism started to whet not even by the day, but by the
hour. It was no accident that, precisely after the removal of
Heydar Aliyev from the important posts in the Kremlin in 1987, Armenia's
claims on the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Area (NKAA) gained a new
impetus and acquired a different nature against the backdrop of the
Perestroika-induced innovations in the USSR.
Precisely Gorbachev and his entourage gave the green light to stir up
separatist sentiments among the Armenian nationalists. In the fall of
1987, a delegation Armenians from the NKAA arrived in Moscow to meet
with the Party Central Committee leaders. They arrived to petition for
"miatsum" -- incorporation of Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. If in the
past, these types of attempts by Armenians were firmly curbed by the
Soviet leadership, this time around one of the Party Central Committee
secretaries promised total support to the Karabakh Armenians and told
them to "stand firm."
And during the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to the USA in
December 1987, his wife Raisa Gorbacheva met with representatives of the
Dashnaktsutyun organization, and the ethnic Armenian community
presented her jewelry and valuable gifts. Dashnaktsutyun is an
organization with a wide network of affiliates wherever ethnic Armenian
communities live, which was banned in the USSR as nationalist and
terrorist. However, after the Gorbachevs received Dashnaks, the Soviet
press published a report: The Dashnaktsutyun party will have a central
office, a newspaper and an information center in Armenia for the first
time since the anti-Soviet revolt in 1921. It was an open signal for
the Armenian nationalists, terrorists and ethnic communities abroad.
This signal was understood by everyone except the Azerbaijani SSR
leadership of the period, which kept relying on Gorbachev and his
entourage.
After the meeting in the USA, a number of foreign Armenian terrorist
groups adopted the slogan: "Lenin, Party, Gorbachev!" In view of this,
the opinion of researchers D. Furman and S. Asenius on Armenian
nationalism of the period of dissolution of the USSR is of interest: "If
the nationalist mindset with its trend toward self-delusion and
operating with mythologemes considered regaining control of the Turkish
Armenia as a distant and hardly achievable goal, gaining
Nagorno-Karabakh with Moscow's help seemed quite realistic."
The point is that as early as in 1985, at its 23rd Congress in Athens, the Dashnaktsutyun party set as its top-priority goal "creating
a united and independent Armenia" and achieving this goal by occupying
the Azerbaijani territory in the NKAA and Naxcivan Autonomous Republic
and the Georgian region of Javakheti.
As always, the Armenian Church, nationalistically inclined strata of
the intelligentsia and the foreign ethnic Armenian communities got
involved in the implementation of the plan.
Under M. Gorbachev, implementing this plan became a possibility, and
the first phase was the process of fuelling separatism in the NKAA. In
that period, the attitude of the Soviet leadership toward the
Azerbaijani SSR became unjustifiably negative, which was particularly
noticeable against the backdrop of connivance for nationalist appetites
and separatist sentiments in the Armenian SSR. And this is not
surprising too. The entire entourage of M. Gorbachev -- political and
economic advisors and experts on ethnic issues were ethnic Armenians --
G. Shakhanazarov, E. Bagramov, A. Aganbegyan, S. Sitaryan and many
others. During M. Gorbachev's visit to France in October 1985,
Gorbachev's advisor Academician Abel Aganbegyan, who was a member of the
Soviet delegation, delivered a speech in Paris to the representatives
of the ethnic Armenian community, in which he said that "Nagorno-Karabakh will be incorporated into Armenia, and M. Gorbachev's approval for this has already been received."
In August 1987, Karabakh Armenians sent to Moscow a petition, signed by
tens of thousands of citizens, with request to "make the NKAA part of
the Armenian SSR." And in mid-November 1987, Abel Aganbegyan expressed
his desire to "learn that Karabakh has become part of Armenia" in
France at a reception which was given in his honor by the Armenian
Institute of France and Association of Armenian Veterans. On 18
November of the same year, in his interview with the French newspaper
L'Humanite, A.G. Aganbegyan made a statement: "I would like
to learn that Karabakh has become part of Armenia. As an economist, I
believe that it is more linked with Armenia than with Azerbaijan."
Roughly at the same time, the Armenian terrorist organization, Union of
Armenians (UA) was created, which established close relations with the
paramilitary subunits of Dashnaktsutyun. The goal was providing members
of the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA with forged documents and
counterfeit money for their unrestricted movement in the USSR. The UA
played an active role in supplying weapons and mercenaries for the
purpose of organizing terrorist acts in the mountain areas of the
Azerbaijani Republic's region of Karabakh. The ties with ASALA were
maintained by the terrorist organization mainly though the terrorist V.
Sislyan, who acted as a mediator. (Materials of the State
Commission of the Republic of Azerbaijan for the affairs of prisoners of
war, hostages and missing citizens. Vozrozhdeniye-XXI Vek magazine,
issue 37, 2001).
The Armenian Church stepped up its activities and took an active part
in the hot phase of the new round of anti-Azeri actions in
Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian SSR. On 25 February 1988, Catholicos of All Armenians Vazgen I said in his televised address from his residence in Echmiadzin: "I
have received in the last few days many letters and phone calls from
our clergymen abroad, who on behalf of 2 million Armenians who live
abroad have asked me to petition the Soviet leadership for a fair
assessment of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue... I have conveyed these
requests in my telegram to Mikhail Gorbachev, who commands our highest
respect, in which I asked him to address this issue in a manner which
would satisfy the Armenian population of the NKAA... I reassure you
that the NKAA issue will be addressed in a special way at the very high
level in Moscow... Our goal is not to prevent a just decision with our
actions, but to successfully see this through..." By
making this statement, the head of the Armenian Church urged his
congregation to openly defy the official authorities of the Azerbaijani
SSR and continue the undeclared aggressive war of the Armenian SSR
against the Azerbaijani people.
Catholicos of All Armenians Vazgen I, who was one of the leaders of the
Karabakh separatist movement in the period of dissolution of the USSR,
urged the Armenian people in the summer 1988 to continue its "peaceful"
expansion as the Soviet Union was dissolving.
The mechanism of action is shown in Catholicos Vazgen's address dated
12 June 1988, which is cited in G. Shakhnazarov's book "Destiny" (pp
50-52 in the Armenian-language book). It read: "It is no
secret that our lands still do not belong to us, but time will come to
conquer and inhabit them. In the last 40 years, Armenians have been
settling in the lands of their ancestors. Now Armenians account for 60%
of the population there.
It is common knowledge that separatism gains support in those countries
where the central authorities are weakened and the institutions of
state are undermined. Another essential precondition is support for
separatism from outside. In case of the NKAA, both conditions were in
place: The central Soviet authorities were weakening by the hour, and
the newborn Armenian separatism had massive support from the ethnic
Armenian communities abroad and political circles in the Western
countries which were interested in the dissolution of the USSR.
Beginning from 1987, with open connivance and sometimes even tacit
agreement of the Kremlin authorities, all types of terrorists, criminals
and provocateurs from different parts of the world started to flood the
Armenian SSR for the purpose of preparation and provoking the bloody
phase of the Armenian-Azeri ethnic conflict. The official government
bodies, police, departments and organizations of Armenia got involved in
this process -- the process of pushing out the native ethnic Azeri
population of the republic started all over the country.
The Armenian organizations Krunk in the NKAO itself and the Karabakh
Committee in Yerevan, which mushroomed after Perestroika, had again set
out to implement the project of effective secession of
Nagorno-Karabakh. In October 1987 in Yerevan, Armenia, the
Dashnaktsutyun party founded so-called Karabakh committee, which was to
carry out large-scale combat operations to expel ethnic Azeris and Kurds
by force, using the methods and tactics of mass terror. First, the
process of pushing out 200,000 Azeris from Armenia was launched.
The first Azeri refugees from Armenia appeared in Baku in front of the
Azerbaijani Communist Party Central Committee building in the fall of
1987. They were residents of the Kapan District of Armenia. Political
analyst Arif Yunus (who researched the history of expulsion of the
ethnic Azeris from the Armenian SSR in 1987-1990) wrote than he
personally saw four buses with refugees from the Kapan District in the
last decade of November 1987. In his interview with journalist Thomas
de Waal, the second secretary of the Kapan District Communist
Party Committee Aramais Babayan did not deny the fact that the ethnic
Azeris left the Kapan District in November 1987, but claimed that there
was no violence, simply "Azeris left because something scared them."
In his interview with the Moskovskiy Komsomolets newspaper on 6
February 2004, the former chairman of the Azerbaijani SSR KGB, Major
General V.A. Husaynov, pointed out that in February 1988, there were
already several tens of thousands of refugees from the Armenian SSR in
the Azerbaijani SSR. A.F. Dasdamirov (in 1988-1991, secretary of the
Azerbaijani SSR Communist Party Central Committee), wrote that "by
18 February 1988, the number of Azeris who were forced to leave Armenia
as a result of the policy of intimidation and violent actions, had
already exceeded 4,000." (Vestnik Analitiki, issue 3, 2005).
However, the ideologues of the Armenian nationalism knew very well that
the expulsion of Azeris from Armenia which they started would be widely
publicized and have a negative effect on the "long-suffering" image of
Armenians in the USSR and beyond. The Armenian ideologues decided to
provoke a massacre of Armenians in Baku and other cities of Azerbaijan
and then start shouting about "genocide" and encroachments against the
Armenian people worldwide. That would make it possible to prove the
impossibility for Armenians to live in Azerbaijan, and therefore, the
need for incorporation of the NKAA into Armenia. At the same time, the
"angry reaction of Armenians against the pogroms in Azerbaijan" would be
cited as the cause for the growing extent of expulsion of Azeris from
Armenia.
The Azeri refugees from Armenia, and later from the NKAA, were arriving
in Azerbaijan and getting settled in the capital and large cities. The
inaction of the Azerbaijani authorities on the issue of combating
Armenian separatism and their inability to address the issue of Azeri
refugees from Armenia further heated up the situation in Azerbaijan.
Different kinds of provocateurs, who flooded the cities of the republic,
decided to take advantage of this situation. Baku, Kirovabad (now
Ganca) and Sumqayit were chosen as the priority targets for the acts of
provocation.
The fact that on 21 February 1988, the NKAA legislature
declared secession from the Azerbaijani SSR in and accession to the
Armenian SSR in violation of the USSR and Azerbaijani SSR constitutions also added fuel to the fire. Russian researcher S.I. Chernyavskiy noted later: "In
contrast to Armenia, Azerbaijan did not -- and does not -- have an
organized and politically active ethnic community abroad, and the
Karabakh conflict deprived the Azeris of all support from the leading
Western countries with their traditionally pro-Armenian positions."
According to the narratives of the Azeri refugees from the NKAA, in
particular, of a former resident of Xankandi (then Stepanakert) Alamsax
Rahimov, "Already in 1987, our Armenian neighbors started to
openly speak about their secession from Azerbaijan and incorporation
into Armenia, and that is when they will start living freely,
prosperously and happily."
The first many-thousand-strong rally in the center of Stepanakert with
demands for the "reunion" of the NKAA with the Armenian SSR took place
on 13 February 1988.
On 20 February of the same years, an extraordinary session of the NKAA
Council of People's Deputies was held, which passed the resolution "On
petitioning the supreme councils of the Azerbaijani SSR and Armenian SSR
to transfer the NKAA from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR."
On 23 February 1988, the leadership of the NKAA declared secession of
the NKAA from the Azerbaijani SSR at the session of the legislature.
The decision was reached to appeal to the supreme councils of
Azerbaijan, Armenia and the USSR with request to satisfy the NKAA's
desire to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia.
On 26 February 1988, a rally which was attended by almost 1 million
people who shouted "miatsum" took place in Yerevan in support of the
demand of the Karabakh Armenians for the reunion of the NKAA and the
Armenian SSR. Calls were made at the same rally for a violent expulsion
of the Azeri population from Armenia. After the rally, well-organized
and well-governed pogroms of Azeris in different districts of Armenia
started with tacit consent of the local authorities. The Soviet
leadership also remained silent and did not react to numerous facts of
violent expulsion of Azeris from Armenia in any way.
The news about the events in the NKAA and Armenia reached Azerbaijan
very quickly, where in the capital and major cities crowds of Azeris who
were driven out of Armenia started to gather. Their numbers were
increasing day by day, they arrived looking frightening, beaten up, with
frost bites, and told stories of killings and humiliation which they
had to endure in Armenia. Protest rallies started in Baku and other
cities.
On 23 February 1988, groups of residents of Barda and Agdam and
refugees who joined them started a march towards Stepanakert to put up
resistance to Armenian nationalists from among the NKAA leadership.
Near Asgaran, the crowd was stopped and clashes took place with the law
enforcement bodies, in which two young Azeris were killed. On the same
day, Hero of Socialist Labor Xuraman Abbasova stopped a huge crowd of
enraged men by throwing her headscarf, a symbol of feminine dignity, at
their feet. Many party functionaries and law enforcement officers have
noted on numerous occasions that, had the mass of people not been
stopped back then near Asgaran, they would have marched across the
entire Karabakh and wiped the Armenian separatists out of there. That
the phone calls were made from the NKAA legislature building in
Stepanakert to Baku, in which the callers begged to do something because
the local Armenian population was in panic and ready to flee to
Armenia, testifies to this.
In Baku and Sumqayit, where most of the refugees from Armenia arrived,
the situation was getting aggravated and finally became explosive. On
19 February convoked a meeting of the heads of the party and police
bodies of all the 11 districts of the capital, heard their reports and
analyzed the situation. The picture of what was going on: Refugees
were arriving from Armenia to Azerbaijan, settled in the villages near
Baku, where other Azeris lived. The refugees told them about grievances
and injustices which they endured in Armenia. The stories by the
refugees inflamed youth. Passions were flying dangerously high. At any
moment, there could emerge provocateurs who would lead the angry crowd
to attack ethnic Armenians in Baku.
Had been rdered to block off all the motorways from the villages in the
vicinity to Baku. Next day, buses with refugees from Armenia were
stopped by traffic police cordons and they went to Sumqayit, where the
already tense situation started to further aggravate. Academician Arif
Malikov, deputy of the USSR Supreme Council, reminisced that on
someone's instructions from Moscow, criminals who were pardoned shortly
before these events started to arrive in Sumqayit in large numbers from
all over the USSR. In his book, "I Accuse," Arif Malikov wrote: "Already
from the early 1988, repeat offenders from all corners of the USSR
started to arrive in Azerbaijan in large numbers. The Interior Ministry
reported that a meeting of criminal kingpins took place back then in
Baku, which developed an action 'plan.' Those criminals played
the 'first fiddle' during the tragic events in Sumqayit... About 4,500
'visiting' criminals were detained, who perpetrated robberies and brutal
murders of Azeris, Russians, Tatars, Armenians, Jews and others. Among
the criminals, there were quite a few ethnic Armenians who killed other
Armenians: V.G. Kagramyan from the Stavropol Territory, Russia, R.Kh.
Pogosyan from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I.A. Bayanduryan from Spitak,
Armenia, G.A. Balasanyan from Donetsk Area, Ukraine, Minasyan from
Yerevan, Armenia and others. As a deputy of the USSR Supreme
Council, I had the right to inspect prisons and detention centers where
the people who were detained for the crimes were held in custody. The detained 'visiting' criminals openly bragged that they had arrived in Baku for an 'uproarious break.'"
It becomes clear that the Armenian separatists had very influential
sponsors both among the Soviet leadership and outside the USSR, who did
their best to make the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict irreversible.
These forces used the Armenian provocateurs as a cat's paw to rule out
any possibility of the talks or dialogue and pushed for shedding more
blood. For this purpose, provocateurs of all types organized
pogroms in the city of Sumqayit, flooded by refugees from Armenia, on 28
February. In one day of pogroms, 32 people were killed, including 26 Armenians and 6 Azeris.
Arrests of participants in the pogroms started in Sumqayit, and then
the USSR Prosecutor's Office started an investigation which made it
clear that the crowd was led by ethnic Armenian Eduard Grigoryan, who
killed and raped several Armenians. Further investigation of E.
Grigoryan's role in the Sumqayit events established a huge number of
facts which proved that Grigoryan carried out the specific task of
kindling ethnic hatred. State prosecutor Aslan Ismayilov in the court
hearing of the case of Grigoryan and other accused individuals was
directly involved in the legal procedures. When Ismayilov read the
volumes of the case materials, he visualized the full picture of the
extent of the Armenian act of provocation in Sumqayit and the role of
the external forces which wished to present the Azerbaijani people as
merciless murderers in it. Provoked by Armenian provocateurs, not
without participation of the USSR KGB, the February 1988 events in
Sumqayit became later the main propagandistic trump card for the
Armenian nationalists and their sponsors in kindling the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict for the purpose of occupation of the
Azerbaijani territories.
The events which followed had a tragic end, both for the Azerbaijani
and the Armenian people. Describing the consequences of the despicable
act of provocation by the Armenian nationalists, Azerbaijani
Presidential Staff Chief Academician Ramiz Mehtiyev noted: "Have the incumbent leaders of the country, as well as ordinary Armenians, have ever wondered what
the South Caucasus region would have been like today had the mock
patriots from the Krunk and Karabakh committee had not embroiled their
people into this senseless adventure in those years? There can
be no doubt that this would be an exemplary region with a closely
integrated economies of the three countries, in which the ethnic origin
of a person would have little importance, everyone would be able to
maintain his identity, and the peoples would be able to continue
cultural development. But what have the adventurists achieved instead?
Apart from a pointless war, thousands of deaths, millions of
refugees, economic breakdown, large minefields instead of plowed fields,
defense spending instead of social safety spending -- they have
achieved nothing: Nagorno-Karabakh has not been incorporated into
Armenia, and it never will be. Neither 20 years ago, nor today or 100
years from now." (Ramiz Mehtiyev, Goris-201: The season of the theater of absurd, Baku, 2010, pp 3-4).
It is clear that the Sumqayit events were a well-prepared act of
provocation against the Azerbaijani people, Armenian author Robert
Arakelov confirms in his book, Nagorno-Karabakh: The culprits of the
tragedy are known. Arekelov notes: "In different places in Stepanakert
and in the Yerevan newspapers, the idea was reiterated again and
again: 'We have failed to take a full advantage of a favorable factor
like Sumqayit in the process of resolving the Karabakh issue." Sumqayit
Armenians, who testified at the court hearing in Yerevan, also
confirmed that these events were organized by Armenians. For example,
L. Mezhlumyan testified: "Grigoryan entered my apartment, hit my mother
with the leg of a chair which he had broken, I made an attempt to
resist, but I was too weak. He dropped me on the floor and did what he
wanted." Participant in the events Nacafov said: "The group headed by
Grigoryan broke into building No 512, and stripped Emma, who lived
there, naked. Then Edik Grigoryan suggested that they should take her,
naked, out onto the street, and then Emma was brutally killed."
These
facts clearly demonstrated the readiness of Armenian nationalists and
their foreign sponsors to achieve their expansionist goals at all costs,
and first and foremost at the cost of the blood of their own fellow
Armenians. The war which they later started on the Azerbaijani
territory of Karabakh resulted in halving of the population of Armenia
and Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians have been leaving what they call
"damned" Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh in large numbers for the last 20
years.
The Armenian-language periodical Yerkramas (it is published in the
Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation) reported that in the last
20 years, after the dissolution of the USSR, the number of ethnic Armenians in the North Caucasus decreased by 80-85%. The
last census of the Soviet period was conducted in 1989, and its
comparison with the Russian Federation's statistics for 2009 makes it
possible to see the dynamic of migration of the ethnic Armenians.
According to statistical data, the ethnic Armenian population has been
steadily leaving the Caucasus, including Armenia. "According to
unofficial data for 2002, about 1.8 million people remain in Armenia (compared to 3.5 million before the Karabakh conflict), and in Nagorno-Karabakh, there are about 70,000 residents (compared to 120,000 Armenians before the conflict).
Is there a need for a writing on the wall for the Armenian people to
understand what price it had to pay for becoming the epicenter of
putting into practice the chimera of "Great Armenia," which drives mad a
handful of nationalists in the ethnic Armenian communities abroad? The
Armenian diaspora lives prosperously in the USA and Europe and exports
to Armenia the virus of nationalism which has already almost halved the
number of Armenians in the South Caucasus.
Rizvan Huseynov
Rizvan Huseynov
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