NKR residents come out to commemorate victims of Sumgait pogroms

The NKR is hosting mourning events in memory of the victims of the pogroms in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait. Today, 27 years after the massacre, at least 924 refugee families from Sumgait are still in Armenia on the waiting list of especially needy persons.

The Sumgait pogroms occurred on February 26-29, 1988; they became the first mass explosion of ethnic violence in the latest Soviet history. The pogroms were accompanied by mass violence, robberies and murders, which led to first refugee flows from Azerbaijan to the NKR and Armenia. According to one of the versions, the pogroms were provoked by the USSR's KGB.

On February 27, activists of the public organization of NKR's refugees organized a memorial rally in Askeran.

The solution of the issue of Sumgait and Baku pogroms could be the key to the solution of the Karabakh conflict as such, Grayr Ulubabyan, the author of the book "Sumgait... Genocide... Glasnost?", is convinced.

The events in Sumgait were primarily an act of state terror; however, they have similarities with the Armenian Genocide, says Granush Kharatyan, a social activist and an ethnographer.

He added that refugees, who have not acquired the Armenia citizenship yet, are facing serious problems: they cannot get a visa and cross the border.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.