Larisa Alaverdyan: Armenian pogroms in Baku are continuation of 1915's Genocide

PanARMENIAN.Net - I already put forward a number of suggestions, previously discussed with Azerbaijan's Armenian refugees, on increasing children' awareness of Sumgait and Baku events, Heritage party secretary, parliamentarian Larisa Alaverdyan said.



In a conversation with PanARMENIAN.Net reported, she gave high assessment to RA Education and Science Ministry's initiative to conduct history lessons on 1990's Armenian pogroms in Baku.



"Tragic events in Baku and other Azeri cities are not solely Armenia's issues; they are, in fact, crimes against humanity," Alaverdyan noted, adding that representatives of other nationalities also fell victims to Baku pogroms. As she stressed, age-long historical experience proves that the impunity of genocide perpetrators leads to other genocides. "Baku pogroms are continuation of 1915's Armenian Genocide."



The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.



The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.



The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate description of the events. In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide.



To date, twenty countries and 44 U.S. states have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view. The Armenian Genocide has been also recognized by influential media including The New York Times, BBC, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.



The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.



Armenian pogroms in Baku. In January 1990, Azerbaijani authorities instigated the Armenian pogroms in Baku. Some 400 Armenians were killed and 200 thousand were exiled in the period of January 13-19. The exact number of those killed was never determined, as no investigation was carried out into the crimes. On January 13, a crowd numbering 50 thousand people divided into groups and started "cleaning" the city of Armenians. On January 17, the European Parliament called on EU Council of Foreign Ministers and European Council to protect Armenians and render assistance to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. On January 18, a group of U.S. Senators sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev to express concerns over the violence against the Armenian population in Azerbaijan and called for unification of Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia.
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