Refugees from Sumgait insist that pogroms in 1988 were genocide

On February 28, Nogorno-Karabakh marked the anniversary of the tragedy in Sumgait. The eyewitnesses of those events believe that the pogroms should be adequately assessed by the world community, while Azerbaijan should compensate the material damage and moral harm suffered by the victims.

The Sumgait pogroms committed on February 26-29, 1988, were accompanied by acts of mass violence, robberies and murders. According to the General Public Prosecutor's Office of the USSR, they resulted in the death of 26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis; over 100 persons were injured.

Ruzanna Avakyan, an activist of the refugees' public organization in Stepanakert, before 1988 lived in Sumgait. Her family managed to move out before the pogroms.

"On February 26 I saw a crowd dressed in black was pursuing an Armenian, calling to capture and kill him. The crowd crashed cars and shops. People were visiting all the enterprises and institutions of the city collecting addresses of Armenians. My father saw, on his way from work, the crowd killing an Armenian man and a pregnant Armenian woman," she said.

Arzik Arutyunyan was 12 in those days. Her family survived because they were outside the city during the pogroms. "Two women – my mother's relatives – were killed," she now recollects. "In a week we returned to Sumgait; however, fear was inside us; people were looking askance at us; and we left."

In the opinion of the Azerbaijani party, the interethnic clashes in Sumgait had been caused by the poor national policy pursued by Mikhail Gorbachev and provocative actions of soviet special services.