Thirty one years have passed since one of the most terrible events of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict - the Gugark pogrom. During the night of November 27, 1988, nationalists attacked Vartanli village of the Gugark district of the Armenian SSR, their target was the Azerbaijani population.
On November 26-27, 20 local Azerbaijanis were killed during exchanges of fire with extremists who came from Kirovakan (Vanadzor), the rest had to flee, despite heavy snowfall. The Armenians who helped fellow Azerbaijanis were brutally beaten. A similar pogrom was organized in Kuybyshev village.
The Prosecutor General's Office of the USSR instituted criminal proceedings into the killings, but the criminals were never found. The organizers and perpetrators of this crime, like many others committed in the Armenian SSR and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region of the Azerbaijan SSR in the late '80s and early '90s, have not yet been established.
At the time, First Prosecutor General of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ismat Gayibov drew attention to the inaction of Soviet justice in relation to anti-Azerbaijani pogroms in Armenia.
"20 Azerbaijanis were killed in the Gugark district. 40 thousand people lived in Gugark district, while more than 300 thousand lived in Sumgayit. The destruction of the village in Gugark region are beyond comparison with Sumgait. I have arrested and sanctioned 96 criminals in Sumgait, subsequently, they all were sentenced to various prison terms by the court’s verdict," he recalled, noting in the first place that all criminals in the Sumgayit case were punished.
"However, only 4 people were held criminally responsible for Gugark, Kirovakan, Leninakan, numerous killings, mass riots at the Zvartnots airport, the looting of military units equipment, the robbery of military warehouses, attacks on police stations, DOSAAF offices, in theft of weapons in a particularly large amount and murders that I listed," Ismat Gayibov emphasized the unwillingness of the Armenian authorities to impose justice.
"This is outrageous, just to speak about it. It’s a shame for the law enforcement system both of the country in general and Armenia. How is this possible? We are talking about the inevitability of punishment, we are talking about the inevitability of responsibility. Everyone should be held accountable for their guilt. And every guilty party should be prosecuted," the First Prosecutor General of Azerbaijan concluded.
Ismat Gayibov, along with other representatives of the top Azerbaijani leadership, as well as Russian and Kazakh citizens, soon became a victim of an equally unpunished crime - the helicopter en route to Martuni was shot down near the Garakend village of Nagorno-Katabakh on November 20, 1991. This attack was a heavy blow to the settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, as key peacekeepers who sought to resolve the conflict before it developed into active hostilities were killed.
The prospect of promptly investigating and solving the crimes committed in Armenia and Karabakh in the last years of the existence of the USSR also disappeared.
