Policy of violence went on until ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh – Armenian MFA statement on Sumgait pogrom anniversary

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia has released a statement on the 37th anniversary of the Sumgait pogrom. 

Below is the full statement. 

"During these days in 1988, on February 27-29, a series of crimes took place in the city of Sumgait in Azerbaijan, which marked the beginning of the undisguised state-sponsored and guided mass pogroms against Armenians in the territory of that state, transforming the decades of pressure and persecutions into explicit and mass violence. The mass murders and torture of ethnic Armenian citizens in Sumgait continued in Baku, Kirovabad and Maragha, with the same pattern and hideous cruelty. As a result of these events hundreds of Armenians were killed and around half a million Armenians were forcibly displaced. The cycle of the policy of violence went on until early September 2023, when the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was ethnically cleansed. Commemorating these events, every year we pay tribute to the memory of the innocent victims. At the same time, we believe that these events are not simply dates for commemoration, but moments to value the need for overcoming hostility with the purpose of ruling out the repetition of its manifestations in the future.”