Pogrom of Armenians in Baku - Aftermath

Aftermath

On January 20, 1990, after the Armenian population was already expelled from the city, the Soviet troops intervened in Baku and a state of martial law was declared. This however did not accomplish its officially stated goal of quelling the violence as most Armenians fled Baku. By the end of April, 1993, it was estimated that only 18-20,000 Armenians remained in Baku, mostly in hiding. The World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov and his family was among the evacuees. As an eyewitness he later testified:

No one would halt the Armenian pogroms in Baku, although there were 11 thousand soldiers of internal troops in the city. No one would intervene until the ethnic cleansing was carried out. The pogroms were happening not in a random place but in the huge capital city with blocks of flats. In such a megapolis as Baku the crowd simply cannot carry out targeted operations like that. When the pogrom-makers go purposefully from one district to another, from one apartment to another this means that they had been given the addresses and that they had a coordinator.

The authorities of Azerbaijan must have known what result these organized demonstrations were going to have but they did not ask for a curfew to be imposed in Baku. The authorities thus not only failed to stem the anti-Armenian attacks, but also raised serious doubts about whether the Soviets wished to stem the violence at all or merely to hold the power in Baku. In this regard the article in Moscow News, February 4, 1990 reported:

Unlike Sumgait, the Soviet army was late in Baku not for 3 hours, but for a whole week. Moreover, to stop the pogroms it was enough to let in the forces of Baku army garrison and the internal troops. The troops entered the town seized with pogroms not to stop them, but to prevent the final seizure of power by the People’s Front of Azerbaijan, which was planned for January 20.

Leila Yunusova, a member of the National Front of Azerbaijan, said that these acts were supported by the state authorities "since they were in favour of the ideas of the right wing of the National Front. The authorities of the Republic closed their eyes also on the intentions of Azerbaijani right wing to escalate the confrontation with Armenia... the arson of the Armenian church with no police intervention was one of the examples of this policy.

The pogrom in Baku was in many ways compared to the pogrom in Sumgait in 1988. That the perpetrators of the Sumgait pogrom did not receive due punishment and that the actual information about the pogrom was censored and hidden from the public, largely contributed to the repetition of analogous events in Baku in 1990. The ways and means employed against the Armenians in Baku were also similar to those employed in Sumgait.

The newspaper Novaya Zhizn at the time of the pogroms reported, "The number of Armenians killed in Baku has already surpassed that of Sumgait; this new tragedy was the direct consequence of the authorities trying to silence the first one."

In 1990, an "Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union" was initiated by the Helsinki Treaty Watchdog Committee of France and intellectuals from the College International de Philosophie, Paris:

"As recently as January 1990, the pogroms continued in Baku and other parts of Azerbaijan. The mere fact that these pogroms were repeated and the fact that they followed the same pattern lead us to think that these tragic events are not accidents or spontaneous outbursts."

The European Parliament (July 1988, par. 1, C) passed a resolution which “condemn the violence employed against Armenian demonstrators in Azerbaijan” and announced:

he deteriorating political situation, which has led to anti-Armenian pogroms in Sumgait and serious acts of violence in Baku, is in itself a threat to the safety of the Armenians living in Azerbaijan.

Non-official sources estimate that the number Armenians living on Azerbaijani territory outside Nagorno-Karabakh is around 2,000 to 3,000, and almost exclusively comprises persons married to Azeris or of mixed Armenian-Azeri descent. The number of Armenians who are likely not married to Azeris and are not of mixed Armenian-Azeri descent are estimated at 645 (36 men and 609 women) and more than half (378 or 59 per cent of Armenians in Azerbaijan outside Nagorno-Karabakh) live in Baku and the rest in rural areas. They are likely to be the elderly and sick, and probably have no other family members.