L. Alaverdyan, “Azerbaijan was born as a pogrom perpetrating country and goes on coming forward as a state full of risks of new genocides up today”
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YEREVAN, JANUARY 14, ARMENPRESS: January 13-19, 1990 Armenian pogroms were committed in Baku. Member of the NA Larisa Alaverdyan referred to the theme.
- Mrs. Alaverdyan, it has many times been spoken about the tragic events in Baku. This year the 20th anniversary of the events is marked. Will you once again refer to the main causes of the Armenian pogroms?
- The ideology and policy of political figures in Azerbaijan has remained unchanged from the very first years of the establishment of Azerbaijan. If in 1915 the massacre of Armenians took place in the territory of the Ottoman Turkey, then in 1918-1988s Armenian political and public figures underwent persecutions, pursuits and pressures by Azerbaijanis. In 1988 Karabakh Movement matured which was a response to the pressures manifested by Azerbaijan in apparent or concealed way. The movement started under peaceful mottos; it was then that Azerbaijan showed its political and legal inhuman face by continuing the genocide taken place in the Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of the century. Afterward, some years later, the cruel murder of Armenian Military Officer Gurgen Margaryan took place. The Azerbaijani murderer got a title of a hero by the homeland. This brings to only one conclusion; Azerbaijan was born as a pogrom perpetrating country and goes on coming forward as a state full of risks of new genocides up today. The policy assumed by them is a manifestation of racism, which is more horrible than fascism. This, by the way, is not my assessment. An open letter was published in 1990 in “New York Times” signed by over 100 scientists and public figures, where the Azerbaijani crime was assessed as a manifestation of a peculiar racism. Since then neither the Azerbaijani society has dared to reject that policy carried out by their government, nor international community managed to confront such a racism policy.
-How is the assessment of Armenian massacres from the international viewpoint?
-Armenia is to be consistent in that issue. The assessment of the international community is not known up to now, as because of our passiveness Azerbaijan has managed to cynically misrepresent both those events and Nagorno Karabakh issue. Azerbaijan tries to develop an opposite idea among international institutions with false and distorted “facts”, and the latter is in delusion.
-How would you define the events taken place in 1990?
-It was genocide for sure. Such an assessment was also given by the authors of the above mentioned letter who also noted that the most terrible is that the genocide taken place in 1915 is being repeated again. The activity which the Azerbaijani government is currently implementing – the destruction of Jugha cross stones, Armenian churches and monuments, is the continuation of the Armenian Genocide.