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or murdered their Armenian occupants.
At least fifty-three Armenians were killed, most set afire after being beaten and tortured. Hundreds of innocent people received injuries of ranging severity and became permanently impaired. Women and girls were raped. More than two hundred apartments were robbed, dozens of cars were destroyed and burned, dozens of art studios, shops and kiosks were demolished. Thousands of people became refugees. This was Sumgait, the first entry on the long list of crimes against humanity committed by Azerbaijani authorities during the past decade.
However, its organizers and primary executors were set free and to this date their names remain unknown to the world. Despite the fact that everything possible was done to conceal the circumstances of the crime committed in Sumgait and to distort its nature, there are sufficient documents, eye-witness accounts and other facts confirming that the pogroms were organized and executed on a governmental level. In his address to the Supreme Council of the Nagorno Karabagh Autonomous Region, a leader of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Mr. Hidayat Orujev, stated days before the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait: "If you do not stop campaigning for the unification of Nagorno Karabagh with Armenia, if you don't sober up, 100,000 Azeris from neighboring districts will break into your houses, torch your apartments, rape your women, and kill your children." The same Orujev is currently the State Advisor for Ethnic Policy in Heidar Aliyev's presidential staff. No wonder there is still zero tolerance towards Armenians in Azerbaijan.
The weapons of murder (sharpened armature pieces, spears and knives) were manufactured at Sumgait factories, rocks were delivered in advance to the areas of pogroms, roadblocks were setup on the escape routes from the town, lists of Armenian residents were given to the mobsters, telephones were disconnected by the local telephone company and electricity was shut off in entire blocks and neighborhoods during the days that the pogroms took place. The mobs were well disciplined and subordinated hierarchically to one another. These facts contradict allegations that the crime was spontaneous. It should be noted that immediately after the pogroms, on order of the Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers (Prime Minister) of Azerbaijani SSR G. N. Seidov, the belongings of Armenians, which had been thrown out of their apartments to the streets, were hastily removed,
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yards and building entrances were washed, and mobbed apartments and public buildings were frantically repaired. The bodies of many victims were later discovered in the morgues of Baku and other towns near Sumgait. Thus, the physical evidence of the crimes was destroyed, noticeably hampering the investigation.
From 18 October-18 November 1988, the Supreme Court of the USSR reviewed one of the eighteen criminal cases filed after the Sumgait atrocities, in which, as the prosecution stated in its conclusion, "hundreds of people of Azeri nationality" participated. During the investigation many witnesses were questioned, the testimony of which marked the unusual cruelty and the organized nature of the crimes. The hearings revealed that Armenian tenants were dragged from their apartments to the street. If they tried to escape, the mob attacked them, beat them, tortured them and threw them into fire. "He was still moving, trying to escape from fire, but five young men were pushing him back into the fire with metal rods" (witness A. Arkhipov). The Interior Ministry troops did nothing. Witness S. Guliyev: "A man was being beaten near the windows of a police station. The police gave up the town to chaos. They were not [present] in town. I did not see them [there]." "The Police knew everything", - stated witness D. Zarbaliyev, a son of an Interior Ministry major himself. During the May 21, 1988 plenum of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, the former Sumgait city Communist Party Chairman D. M. Muslim-Zadeh blamed the authorities of Azerbaijan for the Sumgait tragedy.
In May, 1988 the Shushi regional Communist Party Committee initiated deportations of Armenians from Shushi. In November-December of the same year, a wave of Armenian pogroms swept Azerbaijan, reaching its high point in January of 1990 in Baku, where hundreds of Armenians fell victim to the pathological hatred of Azeri nationalists. Massacres also took place in Kirovabad (Gyanja), Shemakha, Shamkhor, Mingechaur and Nakhichevan. The Sumgait tragedy and its bloody repetitions throughout Azerbaijan in 1988-1991 led to the disappearance of a 450,000-strong Armenian community of Azerbaijan.
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