Peter Lyukimson, Kuryer, Israel, No 28-32, June 1992
An author of Vestnik Kavkaza, Peter Lyukimson, lived in Baku before 1991, where in the late 1980s and the early 1990s he worked as a journalist and witnessed the events that preceded the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, the events in Sumgait, Khojaly…
The feature story “Nagorno-Karabakh: chronicles of a conflict. Notes of a Jew from Baku” was written in 1992, soon after the author moved to Israel. It was published in a Russian-language newspaper in Israel called Kuryer. Those were the times when the tone in the cultural and the public life of the Russian-speaking community of Israel was set by the Moscow and Saint Petersburg clerisy. It had a big impact on the attitude of Israeli society towards the events on the territory of the former USSR. They sympathized with Armenia in its conflict with Azerbaijan. As it turned out, most Israelis knew nothing about the origin of the conflict or the truth about its development. The position of the Jewish clerisy in the issue was formed based only on publications in the central Soviet and partly in the Western press, which were not always impartial.
See Part 1 Search for causes of USSR disintegration in Karabakh-1
… The silence of Moscow and giving “full freedom” to meetings and demonstrations in Armenia and NKAO were considered to be support for “the righteous cause of the Armenians” and improving the forces of the initiators of the Karabakh campaign; and the whole Armenian nation was sure that victory was close, the only thing they needed was to put pressure on Moscow…
Soon meetings turned into mass strikes; almost all the enterprises of NKAO and Yerevan were shut down. In Armenia, anti-Azerbaijani attitudes reached a peak, or so it seemed at the time. In Zangezur’s villages anti-Azerbaijani massacres started. Armed people burst into houses of Azerbaijanis and gave them 10-15 minutes to pack. They were forbidden to take documents about the property or bank accounts… Sometimes the picture was much worse – women were pulled by the hair, children were thrown onto January snow, men were beaten severely. Often the crowd of pogrom-makers raped all the women living in a house, while two-three people held the host, burning his face with a lighter…
After that parents and children were brought to the republican border by trucks and left there on frozen ground. Thousands of beaten and raped people who wore underwear only walked through snow to the closest villages of their countrymen… Hundreds died, as they couldn’t resist the cold… The world press didn’t report on it, neither did the Soviet media. Only later did the Soviet Russia Newspaper publish barefoot children in white shirts, climbing the mountains toward Nakhichevan, and the title under the pictures said: “Let’s not ask whose the children are… These are our children…” But these were Azerbaijani children, many of them died on their journeys.
By the end of February 1988 crowds of miserable people, caring for the deformed corpses of their relatives, moved to Baku, trying to find truth and defense there. However, thousands of refugees could cause anti-Armenian attitudes in the capital and destabilize the situation, and the Azerbaijani government understood this quite well. They decided to settle them in Sumgait…
They say that when Gorbachev returned from the U.S., where he met representatives of the Armenian Diaspora, he asked one of Azerbaijani officials: “Tell me, what kind of a nation are the Azerbaijani people? He answered immediately: “Mikhail Sergeevich, the Azerbaijanis are a sleeping tiger. It is a peaceful creature when it sleeps, but if it is awoken…”
On February 21st, 1988, the tiger began to wake up. Thousands of people were indignant at rumors about refugees and the silence of Moscow on territorial claims and went to meetings in Baku and Sumgait under the slogan “The NKAO is an integral part of Azerbaijan.” It was a countdown to the Sumgait tragedy…
Hundreds or even thousands of articles were written about the Sumgait tragedy in these four years, but still the tragedy which happened in 1988 is a mystery. Who was the initiator and inspirer of the massacres? Why did Armenian workers leave the town several days before the massacres? Why did Armenian cinematographers come there? How could the pogrom-makers know the exact addresses of Armenians? Questions, questions, questions…
Answers to the questions should be found in the developments of the dreadful days and their consequences. It was started by a meeting on the central city square, where speakers criticized the unprecedented decisions on “reintegration” made by the regional committee of the NKAO and supported by the Armenian Central Committee, the silence of Moscow, and massacres in Azerbaijani villages in Armenia. Suddenly a naked woman with loose hair jumped into the center of the crowd and shouted how cruelly she was raped by the Armenians. “Where is your honor, Muslims?! Where is your honor?!” she repeated…
It was enough for excited refugees and teenagers… The crowd went along city streets, destroying shops on its way. Then it divided into two streams, one of which was led by Grigoryan (an ethnic Armenian), a person who was sentenced to prison three times. This group was the most violent; they killed all 28 victims of the Sumgait tragedy and cruelly raped women… Members of another group burst into Armenian houses and robbed them. When the pogrom-makers burst into the flat of the elderly lady Shushanik, they realized that there was nothing to take, and they started to trample two volumes of “The History of Armenia.”
“Don’t be sad, Mrs. Sushanik,” one of pogrom-makers told her. “These volumes were written wrongly. Try to write a third one…”
The Sumgait police ran away from the crowd, and if it had not been for hundreds of Azerbaijanis who hid Armenian neighbors in their houses, there could have been many more victims. It is interesting that the flats of Armenians who left the town before the tragedy were not robbed by the pogrom-makers…
To be continued
