The Pogrom
By January 1990, Azerbaijan was in turmoil. Large rallies by the Azerbaijani Popular Front took place in Baku. On January 12 a mass rally took place in the city's Lenin Square, during which the radical nationalists of Azerbaijan's anti-communist Popular Front were calling people for the defense of Azerbaijan's sovereignty from the demands of the Armenians. At the same time groups of young Azerbaijanis were roaming the streets, terrorizing the Armenians and warning them to leave the town.
The rhetoric of some Popular Front leaders, which included calls for the deportation of Armenians from Azerbaijan, was at least harmful to the relations with the Armenian population; that rhetoric was not significantly toned down during the pogroms.
Thomas de Waal has called this pogrom the first part of "Black January" a tragedy with about 90 Armenian victims. According to him, at first a large crowd gathered in the Lenin Square of Baku, and at nightfall different groups separated from the Azerbaijani Popular Front demonstrators, and started to attack Armenians. As in Sumgait, their activities were distinguished by extreme cruelty: the area around the Armenian quarter became an arena of mass killings. During the "pogroms in Baku, Armenian homes were set on fire and looted while many Armenians were killed or injured". Kirill Stolyarov in his book "Break-up" describes beatings of the elderly, expelling them from their homes, burning people alive and other cases of savagery. Soyuz weekly on May 19, 1990 reported “… in the course of Armenian pogroms in Baku raging crowd literally tore a man apart, and his remains were thrown into a garbage bin”. Aleksei Vasiliev, a soldier of Soviet army(an Azerbaijani) testified seeing a naked woman being thrown out of the window into the fire in which her furniture was burning.
The events in Baku were reflected in a report in the UN Committee in elimination of discrimination against women, July 27, 1997:
For five days in January of 1990, the Armenian community of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, were killed, tortured, robbed and humiliated. Pregnant women and babies were molested, little girls were raped in front of their parents' eyes, Christian crosses were burned on their backs, and they were abused for their Christian faith.
Bill Keller, who was in Baku after the events, in his report for The New York Times wrote:
Here and there, boarded windows or soot-blackened walls mark an apartment where Armenians were driven out by mobs and their belongings set afire on the balcony.
The Armenian Orthodox Church, whose congregation has been depleted over the past two years by an emigration based on fear, is now a charred ruin. A neighbor said firefighters and the police watched without intervening as vandals destroyed the building at the beginning of the year.
On January 15 Radio Liberty reported: "Raging crowds killed at least 25 people at night of 14 in the Armenian district of Baku – the capital of Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. According to the preliminary information, the death toll reaches 25."
According to the Izvestya newspaper on January 15, 1990 "On January 13, 1990, after 5 p.m. a crowd of some 50,000 people who were going out on a demonstration from the Lenin square, splitting into groups, committed pogroms, destructions, arsons, violence and murders... a huge mob were yelling slogans glory to the heroes of Sumgait and viva Baku without Armenians".
In the article published on January 18, 1990 Izvestiya newspaper reported: “On January 16, 64 cases of flat pogroms were identified, when Armenians became the victims… In the Lenin district of the capital 4 burnt unidentified bodies were found. Over the past day З0 captive Armenians were released”. On January 19, 1990 Izvestiya newspaper reported: “On January 17, 45 pogroms and arsons of residential houses in Baku were committed”.
Another article published in The New York Times on January 19, 1990 said:
Azerbaijan is no Lithuania... Nationalists in Lithuania are struggling to wrest independence from Moscow by nonviolent, political means. Nationalists in Azerbaijan also talk of independence, but their protest includes bloody pogroms against their Armenian neighbors.
One of the leaders of the National Front of Azerbaijan Etibar Mamedov himself testified of the cruelties and of no official intervention:
«I myself witnessed the murder of two Armenians near the railway station. A crowd gathered, threw petrol on them and burned them, whereas the regional militia division was only 200 meters away with some 400-500 soldiers of the internal forces. The soldiers passed by the burning bodies at a distance of some 20 meters, and nobody attempted to circle the area and dissolve the crowd».
Russian poet David Samoylov referring to Baku pogroms made a note in his diary on Jan 18, «The atrocities in Azerbaijan are shocking. The thoughts are only about that».
Thus the pogrom in Baku resulted in numerous human casualties; dozens of thousands of Armenians lost their houses and were deported from the country - this was acknowledged by the Chairman of the Soviet of the Union Evgeniy Primakov on the closed session of the Supreme Council of USSR on March 5, 1990. The victims of the pogrom were not only Armenians but also "the Jews, Ossetians, Georgians, and all others who resembled Armenians to a greater or lesser extent. They were beating in the face, not in the passport”
The pogrom lasted for about seven days during which Central authorities did little to stop the violence - no state of emergency was declared in Baku. The police was not responding to the calls of the victims. Several eyewitnesses told Helsinki Watch/Memorial that they "approached militiamen(police) on the street to report nearby attacks on Armenians, but the militiamen did nothing". Azaddin Gyulmamedov, a young Azerbaijani who attended the rally in Baku on the 13th and witnessed the outbreak of anti-Armenian violence, gave the following testimony:
We went to see what was happening. We saw these guys in the streets. I don't know who they were -drug addicts, maybe. They had sticks and clubs, and lists of Armenians and where they lived. They wanted to break down the doors of Armenian apartments and chase them out. The police didn't do anything. They just stood and watched. Same with the soldiers, who had weapons. We asked them to help. There were about a dozen soldiers and ten of us, and there were about twenty in the gang, but the soldiers wouldn't help. They said: 'You can do it yourself, Blackie. We're not getting involved."
Read more about this topic: Pogrom Of Armenians In Baku