ARMENIA-AZERBAIJAN Armenians and Azerbaijanis remember the victims of mutual massacres

In the Sumgait pogrom 35 years ago in Azerbaijan, 26 Armenians were killed. In February 1992, Russian-Armenian troops attacked the Azerbaijani city of Khodzhali. The permanent tension in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Moscow () – Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, along with President Vaagn Khachaturyan and other Yerevan authorities, visited the Tsitsernakaberd Hill Memorial in the capital. The monument, dedicated to the victims of the Turkish genocide, commemorates the 35th anniversary of the pogrom in Sumgait, an Azerbaijani city where 26 Armenian victims died. This started a conflict in the region that led to the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s. In recent years, fighting has escalated again.

Pashinyan affirmed that “after 35 years, the Armenians of Artsakh [Karabaj] they are once again faced with the need to defend their right to live in their own home, in their own homeland.” Khachaturyan also reiterated the accusations against Azerbaijan, which since the end of the Soviet period has been trying to “forcibly deport the Armenians to plunder their land and property.” The Armenian leadership considers that the lack of punitive measures for the events that occurred in February 1988, still in the Soviet era under Gorbachev, later led to the repetition of these tragedies in Baku, Ganzak and other parts of Azerbaijan, to the detriment of local Armenian minorities.

The stinging tone of the statements also reflects the situation after 80 days of the blockade of the Lachin corridor, “whose objective – Pashinián affirmed – is to expel the 120,000 Armenians remaining in the territory”. The Armenian prime minister also pointed out that the blockade “continues to ignore even the decisions of the highest international judicial bodies, and the destruction and desecration of Armenian historical-cultural monuments and religious sanctuaries continues.”

The Armenian republic, according to its leaders, “expresses its consistent adherence to the prospects for peace and stability and considers it a shared imperative to achieve long-term peace, which includes all the necessary conditions.” The US and EU embassies in Yerevan have expressed their solidarity at the commemoration of the fallen of Sumgait.

At the same time, the victims of the Khodzhali massacre were remembered in Azerbaijan. On the night of February 25-26, 1992, a battalion of Armenians stationed in Stepanakert, together with a division of Russians, attacked the Azeri town, after several warnings, and killed the civilian population. Since Khodzhali, the Azerbaijanis have repeatedly attacked the Armenian capital of Nagorno-Karabakh.

This was the most tragic episode of the Karabakh war, which lasted from 1992 to 1994 and was the result of the tensions of the last Soviet years. The conflict dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and had two bloody stages between 1905-1907 and 1918-1920, after the disintegration of the Russian empire and in the midst of the upheavals of the revolutionary period.

In 1994 both parties signed the Bishkek Protocol on the suspension of hostilities, with the mediation of Kyrgyzstan and Russia. The agreement “froze” the war without resolving any territorial issues, and Nagorno-Karabakh remained a de facto independent Armenian republic until the 2020 44-day war, with Azerbaijan’s aggression and further massacres of soldiers and civilians on both sides. .

The commemorations of past events certainly do not help to calm the situation and add more motivations for mutual aggression, which could soon lead to new tragic episodes. The Russian and European mediations have so far failed to achieve any concrete results and even risk complicating the situation.