Sumgait Pogrom - Background - Rallies and The Fuelling of Anti-Armenian Sentiments

Rallies and The Fuelling of Anti-Armenian Sentiments

After the claims of unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia were voiced by the Armenians the Azeris also launched counter-protests in Baku and elsewhere and strenuously objected to any alteration to their territory. Strong anti-Armenian sentiments began to be voiced: in response to the demands of Armenians the Azerbaijanis threatened to employ physical violence. These threats were made not only by ordinary Azerbaijanis but also by state officials. On 14 Feb. 1988 the head of the department of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Asadov announced publicly, “a hundred thousand Azerbaijanis are ready to storm Artsakh (Karabakh) at any time and organize a slaughter there.”

On February 26 several minor rallies took place on the central Lenin Square of Sumgait. On the streets the issue of Karabakh was discussed incessantly and many Azeris aligned with the government's stance on Karabakh. In these rallies there were explicit calls for violence against Armenians and for their expulsion from Azerbaijan. Another factor that contributed to anti-Armenian sentiments were the Azerbaijani refugees who had fled Armenia (the largely Azeri populated towns of Armenian Kapan and Masis) and were relocated to Baku and Sumgait by that time. At the same time under the guise of ‘refugees from Kapan’ there were also provocateurs which, for the purpose of igniting the crowd, were telling stories of murders and violence supposedly carried out by Armenians against the Azerbaijanis, which however were not verified. According to Kulish and Melikov, one of the provocateurs claimed his family was brutally murdered by Armenians, while the further investigation revealed that he was not even a resident of Kapan as he had claimed but a criminal convicted for multiple times. Zardusht Ali-Zade, who took active participation in the social and political life of Azerbaijan from 1988-1989 and was one of the founders of Azerbaijani national front, visited Sumgait 10 days after the pogrom and met with the workers of the aluminium factory who reported seeing “strange, not local young men who were igniting the crowd.” Baku’s local Party leader Fuad Musayev, who was called back to Baku because of the unrest, stated in the interview given to Thomas de Waal, “Someone was provoking them, propaganda work was going on.” The actual picture of the refugees and provocateurs during these events however remains obscure.

The demonstrations in the Lenin Square were concluded with strong anti-Armenian sentiments. During the demonstrations there were apparent threats and accusations against the Armenians for distorting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. The Armenians were also blamed for being much better-off than most of the Azerbaijanis in Sumgait. Slogans such as “Death to Armenians!” and "Armenians get out of our city" were being voiced.

There were also many public figures attending the rallies, among them the head of public school No: 25, an actress of the Arablinski theatre, Azerbaijani poet Khydyr Alovlu (a strong supporter of Heydar Aliyev) and others, who called for the punishment of Armenians, for “killing and expelling them from Sumgait and from Azerbaijan altogether”. Almost each speech was concluded with the slogan “Death to Armenians!”. Since the speakers used microphones these calls were heard not only in the square but also in the nearby streets.

According to Victor Krivopuskov (officer of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR and participant in peacekeeping mission in Nagorno-Karabakh),

The atmosphere in the meeting was one of mass psychosis and hysteria in which the people felt they were to take revenge for their compatriots supposedly killed in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. From the platform they would call for the duty of Muslims to come together in a war against the infidels. The passions were at their highest. The situation got out of control... All this “allowed the organizers to easily provoke a certain part of Muslim population of the town for pogroms and murders of Armenians.

A further factor contributing to the ignition of violence was an announcement on the murder of two Azerbaijanis. On 27 February the Soviet Deputy Federal Procurator, Aleksandr Katusev announced on the Baku Radio and Central Television, that two Azeris, Bakhtiyar Guliyev and Ali Hajiyev, ages 16 and 23, were purportedly killed in a clash between the two ethnic groups in Agdam region of Karabakh on February 22 (at least one of them was killed by an Azerbaijani police officer but this was not mentioned in the announcement). Katusev would later receive a stinging rebuke for revealing the nationalities of both the young men and the Armenians. The secretive nature the Soviet Union was still attempting to shake off had many Azeris interpret that Katusev's broadcast was most probably underreported. Azerbajanis insist that this was the reason, for the violence against Armenians.

Efforts to calm the crowd made by Azerbaijani figures such as the secretary of the city's party committee, Bayramova and poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh who addressed the crowd atop a platform, were to no avail. V. Huseinov, an Azeri and the director of the Institute of Political Education in Azerbaijan also attempted to calm them by assuring them that Karabakh would remain within the republic. Huseinov also stated that the refugees' claims were false; however, when attempting to convince the crowds of this, he was heckled with insults and forced to step down. Jehangir Muzlimzade, Sumgait's first secretary also spoke to the crowd, in which he told them to allow Armenians to "leave the city freely." But according to witnesses, this message agitated the crowd even further. The Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a report warning that the meeting in Sumgait ended with strong anti-Armenian sentiments, but this did not raise the concern of authorities on either republican or union level.

Read more about this topic:  Sumgait Pogrom, Background

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