Pogrom in Baku
The Baku pogrom was one of Azerbaijanis perpetrated pogroms , which at the in January 1990 Armenian population of Baku , at that time capital of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union was committed.
On January 12, 1990, a nine-day pogrom broke out in Baku, killing around 90 Armenians . In addition to murders, most of which were carried out by blows and knife wounds, there were also break-ins and assaults. In addition, the houses of Armenians were set on fire. According to Robert Kushen, a reporter for Human Rights Watch , the attacks were by no means spontaneous as the Azerbaijani attackers had lists of Armenians and their home addresses. The pogroms were only ended with the invasion of the Soviet army after the Azerbaijani authorities ordered the soldiers of the Interior Ministry not to intervene in the riot in Baku.
procedure
In January 1990, nationalist riots broke out in Azerbaijan, and rallies of the Azerbaijani Popular Front took place on a large scale in Baku. The rhetoric of some leaders of the Azerbaijani Popular Front Party was heavily anti-Armenian . One spoke out in favor of the deportation of the Armenians from Azerbaijan. In addition, central authorities and the local militia did very little to stop the violence.
The Popular Front of Azerbaijan began by blocking military barracks . The British journalist and writer Thomas de Waal described the pogrom in Baku as the first part of "Black January" . According to de Waal, a large crowd gathered in "Lenin Square" (now Azadliq Square ); at nightfall, various groups separated from the demonstrators of the Azerbaijani Popular Front Party and began attacking Armenians. As in Sumgait , the attacks were characterized by a high degree of brutality. Massacres took place in the area of the Armenian residential areas. According to the international human rights organization Memorial , eyewitnesses turned to the militia in the streets to report the neighboring attacks on the Armenians, but they remained inactive. On the night of January 19, 1990, over 20,000 Soviet soldiers marched into Baku and put an end to the unrest by force (so-called Black January ). Due to the worsening of the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh at that time, one week before January 20th, 1990, up to 66,000 soldiers (Soviet troops) were already there to protect the Armenians.
The one with the Pulitzer Prize excellent journalist Bill Keller wrote in a report on 18 February 1990 in the New York Times :
“Here and there, smashed windows or soot-blackened walls mark apartments from which the Armenians were driven by gangs and their property was burned down on the balcony. The Armenian Apostolic Church , whose congregation has been decimated by fear-based emigration over the past two years, is now a charred ruin. A neighbor said that the fire brigade and police watched without intervening when the building was destroyed in riots earlier this year. "
Assessment from the international side
On September 27, 1990, an “Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union” was written on the initiative of France's “Helsinki Treaty Watchdog Committee” and the Parisian intellectuals of the Collège international de philosophie . The letter states, among other things, that the mere fact that these pogroms were repeated in Baku and other parts of Azerbaijan, and the fact that they all followed the same pattern, leads to the assumption that these tragic events are not accidental or spontaneous There were outbreaks of violence.
The pogrom in Baku was taken up in a report of the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on July 25, 1997 and described as follows:
“For five days in January 1990 the Armenian population in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, was murdered, tortured, robbed and humiliated. Pregnant women and infants were molested, little girls were raped in front of their parents, Christian crosses were burned on their backs, and they were abused because of their Christian beliefs. "
consequences
The majority of Armenians fled Baku. Among them were the Russian-Armenian world chess champion Garry Kasparov and his family. By late April 1993, it was estimated that only 18,000 to 20,000 Armenians remained in Baku, most of whom kept their Armenian identities secret. The proportion of the Armenian population in Baku has fallen from 16.5% in 1979 to almost 0% in 2009.
literature
- Moscow's strike against Baku. Der Spiegel 05/1990, accessed on December 15, 2012 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Thomas De Waal: Black garden - Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war, p. 90
- ↑ 1990: Gorbachev explains crackdown in Azerbaijan , BBC , January 22, 1990. Retrieved October 24, 2012
- ↑ a b Robert Kushen: Conflict in the Soviet Union: Black January in Azerbaidzhan, 1991, Human Rights Watch , p.7
- ^ Anita Inder Singh: Democracy, Ethnic Diversity, and Security in Post-Communist Europe . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. p. 61
- ↑ Robert Kushen: Conflict in the Soviet Union: Black January in Azerbaidzhan, 1991, Human Rights Watch , p.8
- ^ "Playing the" Communal Card: Communal Violence and Human Rights " , Human Rights Watch . Retrieved October 24, 2012
- ↑ Глава 6. 1988–1990 г.г. Азербайджанская трагедия , BBC . Retrieved October 24, 2012 (Russian)
- ↑ Alexija Kraft: Pogrom in Baku: last wave of the AsSSR. In: masimovasif.net. January 14, 2020, accessed January 16, 2020 .
- ↑ Upheaval IN THE EAST: Soviet Union; A Once-Docile Azerbaijani City Bridles Under the Kremlin's Grip , The New York Times , February 18, 1990. Retrieved October 24, 2012
- ↑ An Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union, by Jacques Derrida, Isaiah Berlin, Alain Finkielkraut, Richard Rorty, and Adrian Lyttelton, et al. , September 27, 1990. Retrieved October 24, 2012
- ^ Committee on the elimination of discrimination against women: Seventeenth session , United Nations , July 25, 1997. Retrieved October 24, 2012
- ↑ Garry Kasparov - Bio ( Memento of the original from December 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ State Statistical Committee of the Azerbaijan Republic, Ethnic composition of Azerbaijan 2009
