YEREVAN (Armenpress) — The Sumgait Pogroms were acts by Azerbaijan that were planned and organized by the authorities to make a push for the expulsion of Armenian people from Azerbaijan. The pogroms were also Azerbaijan’s reaction to the peaceful activities of the people of the recently independent Nagorno-Karabakh.

According to the official data of former USSR, 27 people were killed during the days prior to and after February 27, but in reality this figure goes higher than 100.

The entire post-Sumgait politics and propaganda prove that the Sumgait Pogroms were a crime against Armenians carefully planned and intentionally organized by Azerbaijani authorities. Immediately after the crime was perpetuated, the continuation of that policy took place in the form of hiding the tracks of the state-organized crime of Sumgait, glorification of the Sumgait murderers, and developments in Kirovabad, where the re-occurrence of Sumgait was hampered only due to organization of self-defense by Armenians and military interference in Artsakh.

The continuation of this kind of dementation led to the glorification of mentally handicapped Safarov (he killed a sleeping Armenian officer with an axe in Budapest in 2002) and the mass killing of Armenian prisoners of war and captives.

What else does the global community need in order to realize that all the attempts of Baku, trying to demonstrate itself as the bearer of such values as “tolerance” or “multiculturalism”, to distort the reality about Sumgait are useless, as they themselves confirm the truth every day.

That truth has been also confirmed on a global level. Here are a number of examples:

-George Soros: “Local mafia headed by Heydar Aliyev instigated the first Armenian massacres in Azerbaijan in order to create hardships for Mikhail Gorbachev.”

-Andrei Konchalovsky: The documentary film “Burden of power. Heydar Aliyev” made in 2003 at Azerbaijan’s request: “Bloodshed in Azerbaijan’s industrial center Sumgait, where over 100 Armenians were killed overnight, was the response to Karabakh tragedy.”

-V. Reva – member of the group of the USSR Prosecutor’s Office investigating the Sumgait crimes: “In fact, what happened in Sumgait was genocide. People were killed there for their ethnic belonging.”

-Academician Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Laureate: “If prior to Sumgait incidents some might doubt, after that tragedy no one had the morality to insist on keeping Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Region (NKAR) within Azerbaijan.”

-USSR Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov: “The breasts of two women were cut off, the skins were rendered… Cadets seeing the corpses of Armenians fainted.”

-Alexander Lebed: “Sumgait smelled by medieval sadism, brutal, inhumane cruelty often mixed with stupidity…”

-“20th century and the world”, conference, Moscow, 1988, N12: “An example of genocide (defined as operations directed against entirely or partially against a nation, ethnic, racial or religious group aimed at its elimination) was the Armenian massacres in Sumgait.”

-Prosecutor General of Azerbaijan SSR, 1988: “Those to blame for inciting massacres in Sumgait carry deputy mandates in their pockets and are sitting in the Majlis,” (2003).

Mass slaughter of civilians, accompanied by unprecedented brutality and plunder, in the “international” city of Azerbaijan SSR was carried out by the Azerbaijani authorities during the period of February 26-29, 1988, due to the inaction of USSR leadership. Armenian massacres of Sumgait had been carefully organized. The leadership of the city openly called on violence against Armenians during the February 26 assemblies. The February 27 assembles turned into actions of violence with the participation of hundreds of murderers. Armed with axes, knives and bottles filled with petrol, the murderers, already possessing the list of the addresses of Armenians, broke into the houses of Armenians, killed them and looted. They often took people outside to mock them publicly. After abusing and mocking them, they poured petrol and burned alive.

On February 29, troops entered Sumgait, but without an order of interference. Only in the evening, when the mob started to attack the Soviet troops, the units launched decisive actions.

The exact number of Sumgait victims is not known up till now. 27 people were killed according to official data, but there are numerous documentations proving that the number exceeds a number of hundreds. There are also evidences that the massacres were coordinated by personnel of Azerbaijani Committee for State Security (KGB). The murderers of Sumgait were later declared national heroes of Azerbaijan. The same policy is continued by today’s Aliyev regime, glorifying anyone who kills an Armenian (Safarov).

Years after the Sumgait genocide, the tradition of glorifying the murderers of Armenians has again revived in Azerbaijan. The best illustration of which is the People’s Artist of Azerbaijan and MP Zeynab Khanlarova, nicknamed axe-Khanoom. According to the testimony of numerous Armenians from Baku, that woman “chosen by people” glorified the Sumgait murderers standing on the demonstration platform in 1989. She made an announcement in 2012 after the scandal of the extradition of Safarov that shocked even many Azerbaijanis. “Safarov is the hero of not only of Azerbaijan, he is a world hero. His statue must be erected. Not every man could have done that. We have two heroes, Mr. Ilham Aliyev and Ramil Safarov.”