Yerevan statistics: 2592% of lies about Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Last Saturday, Yerevan made another attempt to deceive the world community, as well as Armenian citizens, by publishing "statistics" of Armenians who became victims and refugees during the hot stage of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict from 1988 to 1994. It was presented in the report of the coordinator of the Congress of Armenian Refugees Mariam Avagyan during a meeting with foreign and Armenian media outlets.

At the same time, the authors of the report do not even try to bring their figures into line with the official data on Azerbaijan's population and the results of the investigations into the events of those years - apparently they expect that no one will check their 'data', and it will provoke a state of terror among listeners and will strengthen the sense of the Armenian people's 'sacrifice' in the conflict that was unleashed by the Karabakh separatists and Yerevan.

But all the data presented in the report are beneath all criticism. Thus, Avagyan's report says that, according to statistics, 1 million Armenians lived in the AzSSR before the start of the conflict (after which it is unfoundedly asserted that their number reached 2 million people). Meanwhile, the documents of the State Statistics Committee of the USSR show that the highest number of the Armenian population the AzSSR was in 1970 - back then their number in the republic was 483 thousand. The 1979 census showed the demographic decline - 475 thousand Armenians, and the 1989 census indicates there were 390 thousand Armenians in Azerbaijan. Avagyan's figure is overstated by 156%.

It turns out that modern Yerevan classified all the nationalities living in the AzSSR as Armenians, in addition to Azerbaijanis (whose number in the republic was fluctuating around 80% from year to year), that is, Russians, Lezgins, Georgians, Talyshs, Tatars, Ukrainians, Jews, Kurds, an appreciable part of whom still live in Azerbaijan, became Armenians. The "real number" of the Armenian population of the AzSSR of 2 million people indicates that Yerevan also classified no less than 800 thousand Azerbaijanis as Armenians (according to the 1989 census).

Further, it is asserted that about 660 thousand Armenians left the AzSSR in 1988-1990, which number was 390,000 people, according to the official Soviet statistics, so we can confidently say that over a third of them have stayed on their lands: 138.6 thousands of Armenians lived in Nagorno-Karabakh in those years. Thus, even if all other representatives of the Armenian people left the AzSSR in the first three years of the conflict, their number could not exceed 250 thousand people. Avagyan's figure is overstated by, at least, 164%.

Then comes the most terrible figure: 9 thousand Armenians killed during pogroms, including 700 people killed during the riots in Sumgait. Meanwhile, according to the materials of the criminal cases, in those days in late February 1988, 32 people were killed in Sumgait, including 26 Armenians and six Azerbaijanis. Avagyan's figure is overstated by 2592%. It should be added that Eduard Grigoryan and his accomplices, as well as the Armenians Ohanyan, Samoilov and Pavlovsky were recognized as the main killers during the investigation. Grigoryan alone was convicted of killing six people, which does not fit into the picture of anti-Armenian atrocities by Azerbaijanis.

The total number of deaths of 9 thousand people could not made even from the maximum estimates of mortality in the AzSSR in those years: according to the death rates of 1988-1990, assuming that the emigration rate was zero, about 7,5 thousand Armenians died in the republic over the past three years. That is, all of them, as well as another 1,5 thousand living people were classified as 'victims of pogroms'.

All these figures were made up to provide at least some counterbalance to the true statistics on the ethnic cleansing committed by Yerevan and the Karabakh separatists against the Azerbaijanis. Over the years of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, more than 250,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia, while 226 were killed and 400 were injured. Around 600 thousand Azerbaijanis were expelled from the occupied regions and 128 thousand people from the front-line territories due to the occupation. Thus, the total number of Azerbaijanis affected by the conflict has exceeded 1 million people.

The Sumgayit 2592% lie about the Armenian victims is needed in order to counterbalance the Khojaly massacre, where 613 civilians were killed by the separatists, including 106 women, 63 children and 70 elderly, 150 people were missing. During the years of the war, about 20,000 Azerbaijani military and civilian personnel were killed before a ceasefire was in effect, and another 5000 were missing. Yerevan is not able to hide all these facts and therefore it tries to cover them by false "data", hoping that listeners will be so amazed that they will take all the "statistics" on faith. But no one trusts invaders.