The ongoing “trial” of Armenian prisoners and hostages in Baku is yet another shameful crime against civilized humanity, to which the world community also turns a blind eye. Statement
Day of remembrance for victims of massacres organized in Azerbaijan SSR and protection of rights of Armenian refugees. Statement
On February 27-29, 1988, events took place in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait that will forever be remembered as a crime against humanity.
A crime that has a precise legal classification in full accordance with the criteria of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was indeed genocide, committed over three days without hindrance and with impunity in a city located just 25 kilometers from the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku.
Thirty-five and a half years later, another crime was committed – the expulsion of 150,000 Armenians from their historical homeland, Artsakh, which occurred under conditions of a complete blockade lasting more than nine months, followed by military aggression and the threat of physical extermination of the entire population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The blockade, accompanied by hunger, cold, and a lack of life’s basic necessities, was recognized as genocide and ethnic cleansing by authoritative experts in international law.
These two tragic events are inextricably linked: they are parts of a single, horrifying, monstrous chain called the Armenian Genocide, which began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Ottoman Turkey. At the end of the 20th century, the Sumgait massacre signaled the next stage of the genocide, which was carried out by Azerbaijan and has continued for 37 years.
There are numerous documents, photographs, and videos about the events in Sumgait, as well as hundreds of eyewitness testimonies proving that this crime was carefully planned, organized, and coordinated by the Azerbaijani authorities and special services. Photographs of brutally murdered Armenians and eyewitness accounts leave no doubt that the organizers and perpetrators used the same methods of murder that Turkey employed during the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
The irrefutable fact remains: they were killed and suffered solely because they were Armenians. The same inhuman methods were used after Sumgait – in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, in January 1990; in the Karabakh village of Maragha in April 1992; in the murder of an Armenian officer in Budapest in February 2004; and in the 44-day war against the people of Artsakh in the fall of 2020… Throughout the monstrous chain of events that led to the genocide of the Armenians of Artsakh and their forced deportation from their native land in September 2023.
The Armenian Genocide has continued for more than a century. For 37 years, Azerbaijan, under Turkey’s leadership, has pursued a targeted and systematic policy of genocide against the Armenian people while remaining unpunished. It was precisely the impunity of the organizers of Sumgait and the lack of response from the international community that led to the repetition and continuation of crimes against the Armenian people, during which thousands of civilians were brutally murdered, hundreds went missing, tens of thousands were injured and maimed, and hundreds of thousands were expelled from their homes and became refugees.
The ongoing “trial” of Armenian prisoners and hostages in Baku, including representatives of the military-political leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh, is yet another shameful crime against civilized humanity, to which the world community also turns a blind eye, encouraging Azerbaijan’s dictatorial regime to commit new crimes.
Bowing our heads in memory of the martyrs of Sumgait, we once again call on the international community to condemn and punish, within the framework of legal mechanisms, those responsible for the violent deaths of thousands of Armenians. By doing so, we can prevent new crimes against the Armenian people and humanity.
