In late February, the victims of the tragic events in Azerbaijani Sumgait were remembered in the post-Soviet space. Three decades have passed since the riots, which are known as ‘Sumgait pogrom on ethnic grounds,’ but there is still no unity of opinion on what caused the events of February 27-29th, 1988 and who is responsible for them.
Political scientist Sergey Kurginyan speaks about what and why happened in Sumgait: "In the late 1980s, I arrived in Baku. The events unfolding there had absolutely nothing to do with either the officialdom or the propaganda of our democratic opposition. I can say with all responsibility that when Armenians were brutally murdered in Sumgait, they were mocked and there were some ritual actions committed, it was done not by Azerbaijanians, but by outsiders, hired representatives of the international private organizations".
"We know these representatives by their names, we know the structures they worked for then and work for now. These people were killing Armenians, involving Azerbaijanis to do so, then they were killing Azerbaijanis, involving Armenians to do so, then confronted Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The uncontrolled tensions were starting to unveil. We saw it all, we saw who stood behind it,’’ the political scientist said.
According to him, the picture was horrifying, but the most horrifying was the other thing: "The fact that democracy and liberal myths that had nothing to do with this were perceived as the ultimate truth, as something self-evident, as something absolutely correct, they had already controlled consciousness. All these viruses had already bitten into the consciousness, and the crowds fled in the right direction, towards their own death, to their own miseries, to their own ultimate ill-being, in which they later found themselves. "
