From: dbd@urartu.sdpa.org (David Davidian)
Subject: Eyewitness Accounts of Anti-Armenian Pogromsin Azerbaijan #021
Summary: Azerbaijani Barbarians 
Organization: S.D.P.A. Center for Regional Studies
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 04:01:24 GMT


     Accounts of Anti-Armenian Human Right Violations in Azerbaijan #021
                 Prelude to Current Events in Nagorno-Karabakh

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       | They dragged Karina out onto the landing, completely undressed, |
       | naked, and kicked her down the stairs. ... They took her out,   |
       | dragged her out into the yard and continued their violence      |
       | outside. That savage mob went at her again outdoors, and beat   |
       | her terribly.                                                   |
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In Turkish Historical Revision <1992Jun18.054838.19984@ddsw1.mcs.com> via its
servile dolt hbm@ddsw1.MCS.COM (Hasan B. Mutlu) responded to <4272@unixhub.
SLAC.Stanford.EDU> vadim@thnext.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Vadim Kaplunovsky) who 
wrote:

[Vadim] The big deal was the oil-exploration machinery made in Baku -- that 
[Vadim] city was the Soviet equivalent of Houston.  I say was, because that 
[Vadim] industry went down the pipes after the pogrom of 1988 (or was it 
[Vadim] 1987?).

[(*] Where shall I begin? Here we are, almost at the end of the 20th century, 
[(*] and a whole community, the Azeri Turks of x-Soviet Armenia and Karabag, 
[(*] is facing forced assimilation, torture and murder on one hand and 
[(*] forced exodus, expulsion and genocide on the other, all because 
[(*] of their ethnic and religious background. And one should ask herself: 
[(*] is the world community really so powerless? Where are all those human 
[(*] rights advocates? Where are all the decent people? Are we going to 
[(*] let this human tragedy go on and do nothing about it? The number
[(*] of Azeris murdered by the terrorist Armenian army and its savage
[(*] gangs is increasing. On the one hand they wish to distort the truth
[(*] and on the other, they beg mercy from Turkiye.

The following is part of a series of eyewitness accounts of anti-Armenian
human rights violations -- outright barbarism -- in Azerbaijan.

DEPOSITION OF ALEKSNDR MIKHAILOVICH GUKASIAN

Born 1950
Physics Teacher
Sumgait Secondary School No. 23

Resident at Building 5B, Apartment 27
Block 41A
Sumgait [Azerbaijan]

After the tragic events, I mean the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait, my
life was divided into two parts: Before and After. I don't know which is
more painful, to see those atrocities or to remember them all later. But for
me the pain is doubled. Before, I had my home and a job I loved. I can't say 
that things weren't going well for me; on the contrary, I had good 
relationships with my pupils, their parents, the other teachers, and my
friends. And what's more, I felt and valued their love for me. The habit of 
working until the wee hours, struggling with sticky problems, preparing my
lesson plans and struggling with an excited mind that won't go to sleep. Now I
can't sleep for an entirely different reason: the thoughts, the bitter and
dismal thoughts, the doubts and questions, questions which, or rather, not all
of which, l can answer. I see the scenes and images constantly, they won't go
away.

To get an understanding of the horror of what took place it suffices to
recall March 2. On that day we were in the Sumgait City Party Committee
where more than a thousand Armenians, citizens of Sumgait, had gathered.
The City Party Committee was divided into two sections: on the left half
was the military, where they did the job of rescuing the Armenians from
their apartments ... and on the right was a terrible sight. In a building not
designed for people to live in, which had offices on its floors where the City
Party Committee instructors worked, in all the rooms and on all the floors,
stairway landings, and stairs were people, Armenians: young people, old
people, children. Many of them were injured and bandaged. Wearing whatever 
they had on at the time; many were shy, while others simply forgot that they 
were wearing only their pajamas, because they had to flee their apartments 
without a thought as to what they were wearing.

On March 2, in the evening, there were very many people in the foyer -- men, 
largely, for the women were in the rooms on the various floors with the 
children. The men smoked nervously and each told of the horrors he had seen
himself or those that had befallen his relatives and neighbors. Members of the
government came to the City Party Committee building. The head of the 
delegation was Pyotr Nilovich Demichev, a member of the Central Committee 
Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; along with him were the 
leaders of the Azerbaijani Republic, Bagirov [First Secretary of the Communist 
Party of Azerbaijan SSR] and his deputies. They went upstairs, and the news of
their arrival quickly spread about all four floors, which were packed with 
Armenians. People demanded that the government officials come to see them. The
huge foyer of the Sumgait City Party Committee building was overflowing with 
these people, their eyes filled with horror and terror. It was announced that 
the government officials would see us. Demichev came. People started to clap, 
to applaud, applauding not him personally, but more likely the Russian people,
the Russians, instead, for it was they who came to our rescue. People were 
crying. They demanded to be evacuated immediately, right from that building.
They demanded that helicopters land right on the square and take them all out 
of there. And probably not yet having a complete grasp of the entire 
situation, Demichev addressed all the Armenians: "Don't worry, everything will
settle down, you'll be able to return . . . " He didn't get to say "Home, to 
your apartments," because a tremendous number of hands shot up and everyone,
in one voice, shouted, "No! Never! We want to go to Russia! We want to leave 
this hell!" It was then that he lowered his head, realizing that something 
truly terrible had taken place. People, particularly women, came up to him, 
pulled on his sleeves, and pleaded and begged: "Look what they've done to us!"
He asked everyone to try to calm down, and left.

And one more episode. When the danger of keeping such a huge number of people 
in a building not designed as a residence became clear, for an epidemic of 
dysentery could spring up in a moment, evacuation began. People refused to go,
they didn't want to leave, saying, we'll stay here, because they knew that the
City Party Committee building was the only reliably safe place in the city, 
because that's where the government was, and so they would be safe there too. 
We tried to convince people all the same. Specifically, I too was responding 
to the appeal of Lieutenant General Krayev, who was then the City Commandant
and who asked for assistance in convincing people to leave. He guaranteed our 
safety. And so we left the city. We were in a convoy of buses, led by two 
armored personnel carriers with soldiers, with two more in the middle, and 
another two bringing up the rear. There were four soldiers with machine guns 
in every bus, from the landing forces. Two sat up ahead, near the door, and 
two sat in the back of the bus, and they answered to an officer who was on the
bus, a lieutenant, as a rule. That's how they evacuated us from the city. The 
convoy of some 30 buses leaving the central square, from the City Party 
Committee building, got under way. They took us to the village of Nasosny, 
which is a couple of miles outside of town, where there are essentially only 
military units. We were transported safely.

At the military unit we were housed in barracks that the soldiers had given up
for us. By the way, there is much to tell about the soldiers--our very great 
thanks to them! Sincere thanks! From all of us. From all the Armenian refugees
whose lives they saved.

We lived in the barracks until March 11. After March 11 we were taken back to 
town, once again, under guard After that we left the city of Sumgait forever. 
The largest number of people went to Stavropol, Krasnodar, and to Armenia...

Recently I was in Sumgait again in conjunction with the work of the
investigative team of the USSR Procuracy. I spent the night with friends. And 
my friend's daughter showed me a letter, one she had recently received from my
daughter Gayane, she's 15. They still write to one another now. In her letter 
there are lines like this: "If only you know how much I wanted to go home, but
I don't have a home anymore."

I'm not a weak person, but now that life has been divided into two parts, the 
images really won't let me sleep. I ask myself a great number of questions, 
but question number one, of course, is how could it happen? How?

I lived in that city 38 years. Thirty-eight years. The city of Sumgait. At the
entrance to town there is a huge sign reading: "Sumgait is the living 
embodiment of the ideas of Vladimir Ilich Lenin." I should say that I noticed 
here on this last trip that the sign had been taken down, probably out of 
shame, shame because of what happened there.

Yes, really the town was young, there were many Armenians living there,
something on the order of 18,000. Mostly they worked in such places as schools
and the service industries, such as stores, appliance repair, hair-dressers, 
tailoring, and shoe and watch repair. And of course, a tremendous number of
Armenians worked at the plants. These were highly skilled specialists, all of 
whom knew their jobs well and loved them. The total population of Sumgait was 
about 260,000.

If we were to speak of what people did besides their work, the spiritual and 
cultural side of life in the city, even if it wasn't tremendously 
sophisticated--nothing's ideal in our country anyway--in any case, it was well
organized. We had many clubs, and recently--now I can't say exactly, probably 
it's been going for a couple of years--we got the big Khimik cultural 
facility, a huge, beautiful building erected between the ninth and fourteenth
microdistricts. My family and I went to all the concerts, there were 
appearances by performers from out of town, the satirist Ivanov was there, the
one from the show "Laughter Everywhere," and actors came too, Karachentsev
and Zbruyev were there, and ensembles from Leningrad would come through on 
tour. The last performance I saw there was a concert by Laima Vaikule. There 
were decent sporting events there too. Anyone in town could sign up for 
whatever they wanted, soccer, weight lifting and wrestling, track and field--
there were qualified instructors. In particular, on Primorskoy Boulevard, for 
example, there were groups of weight lifters. Primorskoy Boulevard is a 
beautiful place, the city itself is on the shore of the Caspian Sea. And 
recently a wonderful sport, tennis, had become popular, and a group from our 
town traveled around the Soviet Union. I can say that all in all, if you look 
at the whole picture, spiritual and everyday living, the town was well run.

And again you have to ask yourself: How could it happen? How? If you think 
about it there shouldn't have been any prejudices. But now that I'm here, 
analyzing all the events, I come to the notion that in the end there probably 
was a pattern [prejudice, discrimination.] When and how did it evolve?

I think that the events were received impetus from incorrect policies on the 
part of the Republic's leaders. All of us Armenians living in Sumgait, despite
the fact that we went to work, enjoyed the theaters and sporting events, 
nonetheless inside we always felt that we were Armenians, not just Soviet 
citizens, but Armenians. And when there was talk of who was to receive awards 
at work, then of course it would have to be Mamedov or some Alekperov 
[non-Armenian], for example. When a delegate was to be sent to a meeting, 
conference, or congress etc., then, of course, again it would be some Mamedov 
or Alekperov. I can now say with conviction that our rights were always 
encroached upon, and with the tolerance of the Republic's leaders. Always. We 
were aware of this, even if perhaps in times like the time of stagnation [the 
Brezhnev years] it really wasn't said out loud, and who would we have said it 
to, anyway? Who would have listened to you? We kept our misfortunes to 
ourselves: we'd talk about them, but what was the use, we'd just let it drop. 
And so it all went downhill. All the good positions, the good jobs, were 
usually held only by Azerbaijanis. In Sumgait I can't name--and that's because
there weren't any--a single plant director or school principal who was an 
Armenian, nor were there any in the town leadership. That's probably the 
pattern, the root of it all.

Having lived in the city for 38 years I had somehow imperceptibly become 
accustomed to the discrimination, as though it were a natural state of 
affairs. But here in Armenia, both my family and I sense a new value in
ourselves, we feel liberated. To be sure, from childhood on we had grown used 
to being called Armenians. There isn't a special pejorative word like Yankee, 
spic, or yid: the word "ermeni"--"Armenians" was often imbued with such hatred
and loathing that sometimes we couldn't restrain ourselves and we would defend
our dignity. Among young people such insults often led to fistfights. Imagine 
this situation: two Armenians are on a bus, standing in line, or meet on the 
street, and, naturally, are speaking their mother tongue, and suddenly a 
complete stranger comes up to them and demands that they "speak like human 
beings." I suspect that something like this happened to everyone who lived in 
Sumgait.

I can pursue this idea from another angle: there never was an Armenian school 
in Sumgait, there was only a small Armenian-language section. It still exists 
now; roughly put, it's a sort of appendage to the larger picture in the city. 
This appendage never grew for one reason: everyone tried to continue their 
education, tried to obtain a higher education so at some future time they 
could work in a field they loved, but it wasn't possible. Why not? The answer 
is quite simple: there wasn't a single educational institution, or section, or
even a small group in the city where advanced studies were conducted in 
Armenian. That is to say that a person who had graduated from the Armenian-
language section could not continue their studies in Sumgait in their native 
language. The same is true in Baku: there were only the mathematics and 
physics departments at the Azerbaijani State Pedagogical Institute, of which
I am a graduate, and those two departments were later eliminated. 
Incidentally, more than 200,000 Armenians live in Baku, and there hasn't been 
a single Armenian school in how many years.

Such was the gross discrimination of national rights that, as a rule, fueled
the nationalist element in the Azerbaijani people.

In further discussing the origins of the Sumgait tragedy one cannot ignore the
nakhaltsroy [shanty towns]: hundreds of cardboard, tin, and plywood shacks--
virtually entire settlements, slums, on the edge of town, basically part of 
the industrial plants, inhabited by thousands of people who had come to 
Sumgait from different parts of the Azerbaijani SSR. It's not all that hard to
imagine the situation in these slums: dirt, unsanitary conditions, a lack of 
cultural sophistication, hooliganism, and drug abuse. It's no coincidence that
these slums were the main "supplier" of manpower for the Sumgait bands: Why 
not solve one's material and housing problems at the expense of those 
"ermeni"?

Now I'll tell of how the tragic events touched me--how I learned of them and 
how I saved myself and my family.

I hadn't been to work since February 24 because I had a bad cold. I was ill
and took sick leave. My sick leave was to run out on March 1. I was going to
return to work on March 1. On February 28 I was feeling a little better, and
since my family and I don't live with my mother, who lived in a different
part of town, in Block 9, on Pushkin Street, I decided to visit her. She had
recently had an operation. This was about 4:30, after the noonday meal. As
though in spite, the weather was perfect. The sun was shining. Spring in
Sumgait passes quickly, unnoticed. I left the house. I stood at the bus stop
and when the bus didn't come for a long time, I decided to go on foot. Having 
walked about 150 yards--the streets, for some reason, were empty, I saw only 
two people, young ones--I saw a woman coming in my direction. As I later found
out, she lived in our block and knew me, since I'm a teacher a lot of people 
know who I am. She started coming toward me. There were two children with her.
She, an Azerbaijani, came up to me and said: "Please turn back, go home." Well
I was of course quite surprised: out of the blue a perfect stranger comes up 
to me and tells me to go home. I ask, "What's going on? What happened?" She 
says, "Near the Sputnik store I just saw two Armenian men thrown off a 
balcony." And then: "Downtown, right near the store and the bus station, a 
huge, wild crowd is smashing shop windows and beating Armenians, they're 
beating and killing them." Without saying a word I turned around and went the 
other way. On the way home thoughts were creeping into my head. Automatically 
I started to recall the stories my grandmother had told me, she lived through 
the slaughter of 1915. And all of a sudden I saw it all sharply and clearly: 
a massacre had begun. I remember exactly that that was my first thought, that 
a massacre had begun. Before I reached home I realized that we would have to 
flee, we'd have to hide. I decided to buy bread because we'd need it for the 
road. I bought the bread and went home and rang the bell, and my wife opened 
the door. I went in and closed the door behind me. She was surprised: "Back
so soon? What's up?" I was silent, I didn't answer her. My son, Grant, he's 
not yet 17, was in the hall by the door, getting ready to go out. I tell him, 
"Take your clothes off, stay at home." More questions. I drew my wife off to 
the side and quickly explained what was happening, and we started to think of 
what we should do, what steps we should take. I said, "Don't rush, we have to 
think it all over." Our first thought was to flee. But of course if there was 
unrest near the bus station, the way was cut off, we couldn't leave by bus.

This was on Sunday the 28th. It had already started getting dark. I began
looking off the balcony into the yard, trying to find one of the neighbors so
we could find out more. But they were too far away, and I didn't want to
shout or go out of the building. Then I saw a neighbor woman approaching, she 
had an empty bag in her hands, she was holding her head and saying something
to the other neighbors. When she came closer--we live in the same entryway--I
told my wife, "Go ask her what's going on." My wife went out to talk to her, 
and the woman told her, "Please, take your name plate off the door." When my 
wife started asking, "Well what's going on, anyway?," she said, "It's awful, 
I was going to the bazaar near the bus station, near the Sputnik store, and 
there was a huge, terrible mob, several thousand people, and there was 
frightful, frightful fighting, they were burning cars and turning them over, 
looking for Armenians, going into apartments and throwing things out ..." Then
another neighbor, a man who lives in our entryway on the fifth floor, came by.
He has a Moskvich, it's an old one. I asked him if he would take us to Baku, 
to the railway station. We wanted to leave, to get out of Sumgait. He said 
that his engine was misfiring and he couldn't go very far; moreover, it was 
dangerous to leave town because there were gangs on the roads everywhere, 
stopping cars and checking documents.

We realized we couldn't leave that day. Well we couldn't sit at home quietly 
waiting for them to come and kill us, either. I started getting things 
together to mount a resistance. I spear fish, and I got my spear gun and
loaded it and put it on the balcony, and got an axe and my father's old 
dagger. Then I thought awhile, assessing the situation. We lived on the first 
floor and had two balconies. My son and I -- my son is of course
inexperienced, he's a sophomore in high school--what could we do? And I 
decided all the same that it would be better if we left the house. There were
four of us altogether: my wife and I and our two children. Our son and 
daughter, our daughter was soon to be 15. We decided to leave, but to where? 
We had several options. The thing is that our block is far from downtown, on 
the edge of town, and the only way through the rushes and the open spaces was 
on the Baku Highway. That was my first thought. My second thought was to go
out through the factories on foot and hide in Nasosny with the military. Our
third option was to hide in the basement of our building. The fourth was to
hide on the roof, and the fifth was to try to find a special vehicle, like an
ambulance or a fire truck. At that time I still naively supposed that official
vehicles would be left alone, that no one would bother them. It was only
afterward that we found out that both ambulances and fire trucks had been
stopped and burned. It's a good thing that isn't what I chose to do. My wife
suggested we do the following: In the neighboring entryway on the second
floor was a quite educated and intelligent family of Azerbaijanis. The man of
the house, his name is Nusret, he worked with me at school, and so did his
wife--by the way, my wife teaches mathematics--and she proposed that we
go to their place and ask to spend the night there. I went to their place and
knocked. The wife opened the door--her name is Zumrud--and I asked her.
I was so embarrassed, it was uncomfortable to have to ask out of fear for the
fates of my children and my wife. She immediately said, "Yes yes, come in,
come in! Come quickly!" We spent the night in their home. We couldn't eat a
thing, even though Zumrud laid out a full table. We drank some tea. We 
couldn't sleep the whole night, all of us watched out the window and off the
balcony to see if they were coming or not. That night no one came.

In the morning they went to work, and we went back to our apartment. We 
started thinking, how could we go on? What should we do? A neighbor came by, 
a different neighbor, from the fourth floor. I asked him to go outside and try
to stop a car on its way to Baku. And I said, "Don't worry how much it costs, 
a hundred rubles, two hundred, three," even though at other times a few rubles
would have been plenty. He went out and stood for a half an hour, an hour, and
came back and said, "Sasha, not a single car stopped, they all go right on by,
no one wants to stop, and I don't know anyone who is a driver."

I was still counting on a friend who worked with me. I had called him on the 
28th and asked him to find a car and come get us, and in the worst case, to 
give us shelter for the night. So we were waiting for him. At about eleven
o'clock his wife came over, she worked at a school too, she's a math teacher.
No sooner had I closed the door behind her than she dropped her purse and
started to cry. I asked, "What's the matter?" She worked in School No. 13, in
Microdistrict 3, not far from us, seven or eight minutes' walk. She says, 
"It's awful! It's so awful! What I saw! I went to work and there were things
strewn on the ground everywhere, around the buildings there were mattresses, 
blankets, furniture, television sets, refrigerators, all thrown outall of
it lying on the ground. In one of the courtyards there were two corpses ... "

She told us everything and cried and cried, she couldn't stop weeping. It was 
all completely clear now. A full-blown massacre was under way, in all its 
terror, a massacre of Armenians, and not like what they were saying on
Central Television: "People of various nationalities have died." These weren't
convicts, and they weren't hooligans, either: it was a gang of nationalists.
Who had organized it all, I thought, would become clear soon enough, but for 
me it was no secret that it was being done first and foremost by the
Azerbaijanis and that it was directed against us, the Armenians.

Well I'll go on with my story. She proposed that we go to her place on foot. 
She said, "I just came over, everything seems quiet, no one stopped me,
although there were some people out there. Maybe we can use a roundabout way, 
through Microdistrict 8" We put our coats on. Honestly, I had my doubts all 
the same, I didn't want to leave the apartment, yet, I hadn't made up my mind 
completely yet, but my wife was urging me.

So they all went out into the entryway, with me following after them, and
literally in the doorway of our entryway l ran into our building manager.
The manager of the buildings in our block. An Azerbaijani. He asks me, "Where 
are you going?'! I say, "To see a friend." He says, "Don't go anywhere, it's 
very dangerous in town, they're stopping cars and checking passports for 
Armenians--they might kill you." I said, "Well, we're going to go by the
courtyards, we're not taking the streets." "No," he says, "don't do it, 
please, go home." I only now realize why it was he wanted us to go home: 
because of all the Armenians who were sincerely told to hide and save their 
lives, none of them was told to go home and sit, on the contrary, everyone 
said leave the house, go anywhere, go to your neighbors', just don't sit at 
home. You couldn't stay in an Armenian apartment! But this scum, this creep 
was sending me back to our apartment, and would be sure that I would be 
sitting at home and he would probably bring the hoard with him, which, by the 
way, is probably what happened.

My friend's wife left alone. Around noon my wife and daughter went upstairs to
a neighbor's to call and find out what was happening in town, and to try to 
somehow arrange our departure. The thought---leave, leave, leave this town--
stayed in our minds. My wife and daughter were gone too long, already ten 
minutes had passed and they hadn't returned; the main thing for me at the 
moment was that we stay together, because if there were an attack on our 
apartment I would be separated from my family. I became quite upset and went 
upstairs to our neighbor's myself, and see my wife--it was quite interesting 
actually--my wife and daughter standing in the hall next to the telephone, not
calling. I ask, "What's going on?" She says, "It's busy, we called a friend, 
wait a minute, we're getting ready to try again." So my son and I are standing
there in the neighbor's entry hall, at any other time he had always said come 
in, come in, he'd invite us into his apartment to sit down, have a cup of tea 
and wait for the phone to be free. But this time he didn't invite us in, and 
I immediately sensed that he was afraid that we would get caught in his 
apartment. When I realized this I became angry and told my wife, "Let's go
home." She says, "Well let's try once more." I repeated what I had said and 
emphasized the word "home" so that he would think we were going home, although
I was thinking something entirely different, but I didn't want him to know 
where I was taking my family. If a person doesn't invite me into their home 
and offer me shelter at their place, it means that they could give away our 
whereabouts at any time.

We went downstairs to our apartment. I asked my wife when the neighbors where
we had hidden the night before were due home from work. She says, "The wife 
promised to stop by at three o'clock." Now this was at noon, twelve-thirty at 
the latest. And literally 15 minutes later our neighbor came by, the one I had
asked to drive us to Baku, the one with the car. He says, "Sasha, I was just 
downtown, there are terrible things going on, they're checking absolutely 
everyone, they're checking all the passports, burning cars, and wrecking 
apartments. The only way I can help you is to keep you informed about what's
going on in town."

He went out and then came back and said that the disturbances were continuing.
Then the doorbell rings. I open it and there is the woman in whose home we had
hidden. She had her daughter with her, she had already come home from work. 
She says, "Haven't you left?" I say, "No, we couldn't find a way out of town."
And I instantly added, "Can we come to your place again?" She said, "Of 
course, let's go." I say, "No, you go on, we'll come later." I didn't want 
anyone to see that we were going to their place, I was in constant fear that 
someone would give us away. She left and then the other neighbor came back 15 
minutes later and said, "Sasha, get out of here, leave, they're coming to our 
block!" "Who are they?", I ask. He says, "A huge crowd, they turned at the 
light, they're coming our way." I told him, "Go out and look in the entryway 
and in front of the building, see if there are any strangers out there." He 
went to take a look and said, "The coast is clear--run!"

We left. We had gotten suitcases and traveling bags together. I told my wife, 
"Take the most valuable things, basic clothing, and the newest things, the 
best ones." In the suitcase she packed jeans, running shoes, shirts, the
Panasonic tape recorder that had been my father's, about 25 cassettes, and
even a package of tea and those two unfortunate loaves of bread that I had
bought. We hadn't eaten them that day or the day before.

When we were leaving the house my wife said, "Let's at least take something of
our things." I say, "No, don't take anything." It was humiliating somehow, you
know, I don't know how to explain it . . . to run somewhere with our things 
. . . and before whom should we feel humiliated? Whom?! I became furious. I 
said, "To hell with all of it, let them choke on it!" I was also thinking that
if we were carrying things we could be caught easily because we'd really stand
out. So I decided that we wouldn't take anything with us.

We put on our coats and went out. Again we cautiously made our way to the 
neighbors' entryway: I came last, looking around to see if anyone saw us. It 
seemed we were unobserved. We went upstairs to the neighbors. The husband 
wasn't at home, only the wife and daughter, the daughter was the same age as
my own, they still stay in touch with one another.

We were sitting in their apartment and I couldn't calm down, I couldn't sit 
still, or walk around, or stand, or talk, we were just waiting, waiting for
something. Death, probably. Fifteen minutes go by, thirty, and suddenly I
hear the sound of breaking glass. Our buildings were 5-story buildings, they
stood parallel to one another, and it was dangerous for us to go to the 
windows: we'd be seen from the neighboring balconies. Meanwhile, people who
were just curious and were watching what was going on were standing on their 
balconies. And to this day, when I see those images in my mind, I ask myself, 
watch what? The killing? The brutal slaughter, the axe murders of adults and 
children? Once I heard the sound of the glass I instinctively went to the 
window, and the neighbor woman went out onto her balcony; nothing was 
threatening her, it was her apartment and she was an Azerbaijani. She said, 
"There's a gang in the courtyard."

I couldn't stand it and peeped out from behind a curtain. There was a large 
crowd, between 100 and 150 people. They all had axes and knives in their 
hands, and they were kitchen knives, big ones, and some sort of metal rods, 
and there was a car down there, I didn't get the license number, like a
Zhiguli with a police siren on it. That siren, by the way, was a bit confusing
to us at first. We thought, "At last!" I'll tell you about the police in a 
minute. The crowd was carrying flags, large silk flags, I saw two of them, 
they were the flags of Azerbaijan.

Armenians lived on the first floor in the building across the way. There were 
young men in coats there, aged 17, 18, and 19, having a field day throwing 
things off the balcony. The mound of belongings under the balcony was growing.
There were end tables, chairs, and lamps. Then one of them went up and poured 
gasoline on them and put a match to them. The fire took hold. Armenians lived 
on the third floor, too. I looked and saw the windows being broken, they had 
come in from the entryway, which was on the opposite side of the building, 
and I could only see the balcony facing the courtyard. Things flew out of 
there and then there was another fire. Meanwhile you could hear someone 
talking through a megaphone. I could not see him, he was standing near the 
building, but you could hear the voice clearly all over the block. A man 
speaking Azerbaijani, good, educated speech. The things he was talking about
--he was a good orator, but maybe it would be more appropriate to call him a 
Master of Ceremonies, an MC. An MC who inflamed the crowd with his words, 
because he began--I speak Azerbaijani well--by saying that they had come from 
Armenia, from Kafan, where the Armenians had beaten them badly, had raped 
their women, raped their young girls, cut their breasts off, and on and on in 
that vein. And he raised his pitch higher and higher. At the end he howled 
out: "Give us the Armenians! Show us where they are! We will take our revenge 
on them, we'll carve all of them up, too!" And after he said that there was 
whistling, noise, shouting, and a howl . . . well animals, they were exactly 
like animals! It made you . . . I'm not a weak person, but when I heard that 
speech I just. . . I don't know, my fear, of course, was not for myself, it 
was for the safety of my family, my daughter. I imagined what would be 
happening to us had we been in our apartment . . . And the man in the mob was 
still talking, and some boys separated off from the mob and raced into the 
neighboring entryway and started wrecking an apartment.

l moved away from the window. I thought, suddenly they would come through
. . . It's such a bourgeois feeling, fear for one's home. I thought, they'll 
be getting to our place. Then I thought, burn, fire, burn, let them choke on 
it all, but at the same time I asked the neighbor, "Well, have they left?" She
says, "Yes, they left, they went to the next building." And I thought, maybe 
they wouldn't go into our home. But then she went out on the balcony and said,
"Oh no, they're coming back to our building!" And right then, immediately 
after she said those words, I felt them going into our apartment.

I can't find the words to express it. I only heard the shout and the howl as
they broke in through our veranda and the windows, even though we were on the 
second floor, and our apartment was 011 the first floor and one entryway over,
but the walls in our building were thin and you could hear very well, all the 
new buildings are like that. You could hear the blows of the axe, the sound of
glass and dishes breaking in the apartment, the tramping of feet, and the 
din. Our neighbor couldn't stand it, she said, "Go into the small room and 
hide." I realized that at that moment she had started to fear for herself,
too, because someone might give her away, and maybe they would not be spared, 
either. We went into the next room, a small bedroom, and sat down on the floor
near the beds. Just then there was an awful crash. My wife asked, "What's 
that?" I had figured it out, and said, "They threw out the television." Then 
axe blows rained down on the piano . . . The bastards! We had a Byelorus 
piano, our daughter was taking music lessons, and our son had graduated from 
a music school. Our daughter started to cry, "They're smashing the piano."
Toward the end we clearly heard one of them outside call his pal inside, 
"Enough, let's go." And his pal answered, "Just a minute, I'm not finished 
playing yet," and again we heard the axe hit the keyboard.

They spent a long, long time wrecking our apartment, the crashing went on for 
about 40 minutes. And I was thinking, "Don't let them find us here in someone 
else's apartment. Don't let them find us here in someone else's apartment." I 
was afraid one of those scum had seen us and would give us away. I feared for 
my family and for the family that was hiding us. Not counting our son I was 
the only man there, I was their only hope.

Probably the last horror we had to endure then was the tramping of feet in the
entryway where we were hiding. Suddenly you could hear loud tramping, a 
terrific number of them had burst into the entryway, and I thought that was 
it, that we had been given away. But the tramping went past our door, 
upstairs. My wife nudged me and said, "Upstairs there's . . . the man is an 
Armenian and the woman is a Georgian, they're probably going for them." But it
was quiet. Then more tramping, down the stairs, past our door.

Then our neighbor's wife came in and said, "They've left our building." We 
went out of the bedroom into the hall and then into the kitchen, a large,
bright kitchen. The mob skirted around our building--you could see the
whole block very well from the kitchen, all the buildings around the open
space. I started watching the mob and its flag, waving their axes and knives, 
went into the neighboring building, into the entryway, and I saw them carry a
man out the door and throw him about ten yards away. There were Armenians 
living on the third floor in that building. And then out flew the belonings
and furniture, and more fire. Then the mob went on to the neighboring 
building, it was parallel and next to ours They only wrecked one apartment 
there. By the way, they also smashed up Valery Oganian's apartment, he was 
with us in the boarding house, his family's here too. And in that same 
building where there was a pogrom of Oganian's apartment, there was another 
Armenian family, the husband was named Valery, too, and his wife was a 
colleague of mine, we worked in the same school, and now she's on maternity 
leave, their baby will soon be a year old. So from the kitchen I see Valery 
just standing there on the balcony. And I could not shout "Hide! It's a 
pogrom!" But he couldn't see the mob for our building. And then when the mob 
rounded the corner of our building he saw them, he saw them and hid. Well, 
I'm thinking, they also went to hide at the neighbors'. Later I ran into 
Valery in the Khimik cultural facility, we call it the SK: he didn't trust his
neighbors and they hid in the basement of the building: he, his wife, their 
older daughter of six years, and the grandmother, who's about 80. They hid in 
that basement, up to their waists in water, the whole night through until 
morning. That's how they survived.

Then the mob went on to Building 2B and were there a long time, about an hour 
and a half. It was only later that I learned how they had slashed up a whole 
family, the Melkumians.

When they had finished their atrocities in that building the mob left our
block shouting, "Long live Azerbaijan! Death to the Armenians! Long live the
Azerbaijanis of Sumgait!"

After the mob had gone our neighbor's husband came home from work and we 
discussed ways to save ourselves. I was afraid that the mob would return. I 
later found out they had been to Microdistrict 3 three times! They were 
hunting for people hiding in the basements . . . Judging from what we had seen
they hadn't killed anyone in the apartments they had wrecked in the building 
across from us: probably the Armenians there had hidden, like we did. I knew 
that they would figure out that the Armenians were hiding here somewhere, and 
would of course come back. I was sure that they would start checking 
Azerbaijani apartments. That was what I feared most of all.

All night we discussed what we might do, how we could get out of there.
Somewhere in the early morning, around five o'clock--it was winter, and was 
still dark--we saw large vehicles drive into the yard. When they got close to 
the streetlights I saw that it was a panel truck, the back was down, like 
during funeral processions. A flatbed truck. It drove up to the man who had 
been killed in front of his own home. He had been there all night, all night 
long. When it was light the mob passed by him, looked at him, and passed by, 
and some people didn't even look, as though it were a dead cat or chicken 
lying there instead of a person. They were utter animals, do you understand?! 
He was lying there and two guys came up to him, those two creeps kicked him 
with their feet, turned him over, and left. A dead person!

Some people got out of the truck, at that distance I didn't see their faces,
and picked him up and tossed him in the truck, and the truck drove off. I
realized they were gathering up the corpses. I had seen one corpse, and
there must have been more elsewhere. They were driving around the 
microdistrict before dawn, when everyone was still asleep, and removing
the corpses. I don't know the name of the man who was killed [Artaha
Levonovich Arakelian, resident at Building 5A, Apartment 9,Block 41A.] Our 
building is on the inside of the block, and the one he was dragged out of is
on the edge of the block, perpendicular to ours.

After the truck had gone, somewhere around five-thirty, two more vehicles 
appeared. I honestly didn't know what they were at first, but our neighbor 
said, "These are military vehicles." Then I looked at them more closely: they
were armored personnel carriers. There were soldiers sitting on them. They 
drove into our block and stopped right in front of the building where Valery, 
as I later found out, had hid in the basement. That was about 200 yards from 
us. It stopped in front of their entryway. Our neighbor said, "Look, the 
military! They're probably evacuating the Armenians," he said, "the ones who 
are hiding." And sure enough: down the stairs--there are lights in the 
entryways--down the stairs come children, and with them, adults. They get on 
the armored personnel carriers with the soldiers, and are preparing to leave. 
Then our neighbor says, "I'll run over to them and tell them that you're here,
and you can go with them." I say, "Try, see if you can catch them!"

So he ran out of the apartment and downstairs. He got around the building and 
ran up to one of the armored personnel carriers, the other one was already 
leaving. But he caught the one and came back and said, "Quick, let's get our
clothes on!" As a matter of fact we had never taken them off. The soldiers had
said that their vehicle was overloaded and that they would come back in five 
minutes, and that we should come out. Our neighbor went downstairs with us, 
but we were afraid to go out of the entryway. We stood in the entryway, it was
dark, and it was drizzling, this was the morning of March 1, it drizzled on
March 1. We stood there, and the atmosphere was tense. We stood there for five
minutes and the armored personnel carriers didn't return, and the minutes 
dragged on, it seemed that we had been there a long time. Our neighbor said, 
"OK, let's go back to the apartment." We went back up, but I couldn't stand it
any more . . . I felt that the soldiers were nearby, that help was close to 
us. "No, let's go." And with tears in his eyes he said, "OK, if you've made up
your mind, go." We went out of the entryway and put on our hoods, and I told 
the children, "Hide your faces, put your scarves over them." And the four of 
us set out.

Neither my wife nor my children looked back at our apartment. But I did. In 
front of our balcony was a huge mound of things, all of it wet from the rain. 
And I turned away.

We walked about 300 yards and come out on the highway, it runs right by our 
building. It was quiet in town, we only rarely came upon passersby, people who
were going to work. I was surprised that anyone was still going to work. 
Suddenly I looked and saw a convoy of vehicles: two armored personnel carriers
out front, military trucks behind, their beds covered with tarpaulins. I ran 
out into the road and stood in front of the armored personnel carriers, my 
hands crossed on my chest, pleading with them to stop. They stopped. It was 
raining, drizzling, and the hatch opened up, and an officer looked out of the 
carrier. "What do you want?", he said. I said, "We're Armenians." And that was
it. I said but two words. He said, "Just a moment." He went back down inside, 
apparently they were discussing us. . . or something. Then he looked out and 
said, "There's no room left in here, get on the truck behind us." The military
truck in the convoy. We went to the driver, he said, "Quick, quick, get on." 
We got onto the bed, there were military officers in there, five people: 
colonels and lieutenant colonels. My wife started sobbing. We felt saved, at 
last.

They took us to the City Party Committee. When we drove past the bus station--
our building was on the outskirts of town--I looked out the little window in 
the bed of the truck and saw a LAZ bus, entirely burned, and the square goes 
on a bit there, and all the fences had been torn down, the fence posts were 
bent, and there was another LAZ, a yellow one, apparently also completely 
burned, its paint was all blackened, and it was facing towards a post, and 
there was a car, I'm not sure what kind it was because it was charred beyond 
recognition, overturned on the pavement. There were spots everywhere on the 
pavement, large black spots from fires. We passed on to the center of town 
and to the City Party Committee.

The Sumgait City Party Committee is a large, four-story building on Lenin 
Square. It's in the center of town, it's where are all the festivities and
parades are held. There's a Lenin monument there, and a stage. Across from
the City Party Committee, as I mentioned, is the Khimik building, we call it
the SK. The first thing we saw were soldiers standing around the City Party
Committee. In metal helmets, with machine guns, like landing forces. When
we got out of the truck I saw others like us, getting out of the trucks and
armored personnel carriers, all under guard.

That was on the morning of March 1. They led us into the City Party Committee 
building, where I had often been for teachers' meetings. I just can't find the
words to convey what I saw there; a tremendous number of people, as it turned
out they had been bringing people there since the 29th. They were all
Armenians, and I knew many of them. There, in that building were my pupils, 
their parents, and acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. We immediately 
noticed that many of them had cuts all over their faces, scabs, and bruises, 
one man had a wound, a bloody welt on his head, and his shirt was completely 
spotted with blood. It was nightmarish. But all the while I kept thinking that
we had been saved, the soldiers were protecting us. I didn't yet have an 
understanding of the scale of what had happened, and of course I couldn't
concentrate entirely. Later, while talking with people and hearing their 
tales, the contours of the overall tragedy, the whole terrible picture of 
what had happened began to emerge.

As I said, I met many of my pupils, acquaintances, and friends there in the 
City Party Committee. There was pain, horror, and terror in the eyes of one 
and all.

After the government officials came, the next morning two fellows came to me
-they were instructors in the City Party Committee--and asked, "Are you 
Aleksandr Mikhailovich, the teacher?" I said, "Yes." They told me, "You have 
been summoned to see Demichev." Well to be honest I was surprised. . . Off we 
went. Demichev, Bagirov, Lieutenant General Krayev, the First Secretary of 
the City Party Committee, Muslimzade, and other Party and government
functionaries were seated at a table in a large room. They asked me to tell 
them what I knew, to give them information. From what I gathered they needed 
information from below, that is, they wanted to hear from us directly.

When I had finished talking Demichev asked me a question. He had met with the 
refugees the previous evening, and he asked me, "All the same, why don't 
people want to return to their homes?" That's the way the question was put. 
Well I concluded that the city authorities must not have shown him our wrecked
apartments. They had probably shown him areas that weren't hit by the pogroms,
and so he didn't have a complete understanding of what had happened. I said, 
"How can you explain it if, at two o'clock in the afternoon when the sun is 
shining, you're sitting at home watching television, or reading a book, or 
listening to music, it's Sunday, and suddenly--suddenly!--a gang of wild, 
frenzied people, whom you can't even call people, a gang of animals rather, 
pours into the apartment and starts to beat the husband and rape and beat the 
wife? How are you to take it? That's number one. Number two: All of this 
happened during the daytime. Not a single policeman showed his face in our 
block! Whom should we trust? No one came to our defense. We would perhaps have
agreed to return to our homes, but when we saw that no one defended us, no 
one, not one person! Naturally the terror penetrated into our hearts and 
literally down to our toenails." Well Bagirov starts to tell me, "Do you see, 
we just can't have everyone leaving town because then the hooligans who 
smashed all the apartments will say that they got what they were after." And 
I say, "You'll excuse me, but I personally will be the first to leave here, I 
will not stay here. I think that all the rest of the Armenians who survived 
feel the same way." Lieutenant General Krayev agreed with me. He got up, and
addressing Demichev, said, "Pyotr Nilovich, Aleksandr Mikhailovich was correct
regarding what he said about the police. When I arrived in Sumgait there were 
850 policemen concentrated here. Eight hundred fifty! And no results 
whatsoever! The entire police force had scattered. It was a miracle," the 
general went on, "that I and my battalion survived there at the bus station! 
A miracle! We barely got out of that hell, where torrents of stones rained 
down on my soldiers and me. They hurled rocks at us. The soldiers' shields 
couldn't withstand it, they broke apart! It was a miracle that I survived 
myself!" Demichev lowered his head and said, "Raising their hands against the 
military, now that's going too far! Get Seidov in here!" Seidov was the 
Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan SSR.

When Seidov came in, he ordered him . . . At first he said, "I request" but
then he said, "No, I order you: put together lists of those policemen who
were supposed to be near the bus station on the 28th and 29th, who was there 
at the time. Put the lists together and have them stand trial." He said this
in my presence, while I sat there. And then he turned to Muslimzade: "And 
you?" he said, "What were you doing? Where were you?" So Muslimzade gets up, 
he had been seated, too, the First Secretary of the City Party Committee, the 
former First Secretary. "You see," he began, I . . . " So on the 28th he flew 
in from Moscow, this is what he said, and found out about all the rallies. "I 
went out ahead of the crowd. I was thinking to lead the crowd to the sea. I 
appealed to the crowd, and went with them. I wanted to get them out of the 
center of town, to take them to the edge of town," he said. The City Party 
Committee is not far from Primorskoy Boulevard, and he had led them in that 
direction. He said, "I led the crowd that way. But the thing was that they
followed me as far as Primorskoy Boulevard, but then they stopped following. 
They ignored me and turned around and went back into town." That is, they 
started pogroms of apartments. That was on the 28th.

I was advised to go among the refugees and calm them down. But Seidov turned 
to me and asked that I help him compile a list of the dead. When I left they 
gave me a special pass, and paper and ballpoint pens. So several of us started
making lists. We didn't record only names of the dead. At our own initiative 
we simultaneously wrote down where people wanted to go outside of Sumgait so 
it could somehow all be arranged. There were the names of about 16 dead in the
list we drew up at the City Party Committee. And we tried to write more than 
just "I heard" or "someone told me;" we tried to get reliable information: 
Were you 100 percent certain that your relative, your brother, or someone 
specific had died? I was then asked to draw up a similar list among those who 
were in the SK building. I went over there, but in the SK building, in the 
cultural facility, the situation was hideous by comparison to the one in the 
City Party Committee: a fantastic number of people! The SK was packed, people 
were sitting on the concrete floor because there was just no other place to 
sit. The entire foyer was completely jammed with people. And to try to get 
something organized in there, even something elementary like finding a place 
to put a little chair or a table o write on was impossible. I returned and 
said that I couldn't do it. Then we finished the job and turned in the lists, 
and started organizing people so as to evacuate them from the City Party 
Committee.

I could go on and on about the horrors that reached my ears. Among the vast 
number of people I saw was a former pupil of mine, Karina. Karina M. She lived
in Microdistrict No. 3, there were three sisters, Karina, Lyuda, and the 
smallest, Marina. The girl's face was covered with cuts, she couldn't even
stand up, her sisters held her, holding her by the arms. I thought that she
had probably been beaten, but afterward, after talking with Lyuda and her
other sister, found out that the worst imaginable had happened to them.

A huge gang had attacked their apartment. Karina had been able to hide but 
decided to stay with her parents, who were trying to calm the gang down. You
have to know Karina well to understand her feelings at that moment. Karina--I 
taught her until the eighth grade--is a very nice girl, tall, she was always 
the first in the class, all the girls gathered around her, she was brave, and
she was brave with her words, she was never afraid to tell the truth, and if 
necessary, she could put up resistance, even to the boys. If anyone insulted 
her she was able to take them on in a fight and give them their due. This was 
a girl with the kindest heart, she loved being with others, and loved to have 
a good time. I remember once I was at a friend's wedding, she was there too--
and how she could dance! And it was this same  girl who broke. Well and who 
wouldn't have?! Defending herself, she fell upon those scoundrels and started 
scratching their faces, fighting back, and of course they immediately got rid 
of the parents, striking them and knocking them out of the way, and then 
attacked the girl. They did terrible violence to her.

Then they decided there wasn't enough room in the apartment because there were
so many of them--about 30, according to Lyuda. They dragged Karina out onto 
the landing, completely undressed, naked, and kicked her down the stairs. She 
still has scars on her face. They took her out, dragged her out into the yard 
and continued their violence outside. That savage mob went at her again 
outdoors, and beat her terribly. They kicked her ribs and her head. She lost 
consciousness. They threw her aside and went off to the next entryway, or 
started to leave, rather. When they went into the next entryway, Karina came 
around, she came to and started to get up. And they, seeing her, came back
. . . the animals! . . . and began beating her again. She passed out again. 
It was only then that they left her . . .

Well there are many such stories. I'm not telling all this to evoke tears, but
so that the people who hear it will have a real understanding of the nightmare
we lived through.

We were evacuated from the SK and the City Party Committee under guard. I wish
to again extend our great thanks to the soldiers who gave us their barracks, 
themselves sleeping in buses. They cooked food and fed us.

It was arranged for buses to take people daily from Nasosny into town to
their apartments so they could get things, because many had fled with 
nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. We traveled only under the
protection of soldiers. That's something you never forget. We went to our
apartment, my wife and I, to see if perhaps anything remained, because it
was fairly cold in the mornings and in the evenings, and we had to dress more 
warmly somehow. And it was incredibly difficult, physically and spiritually 
difficult, to go to our apartment knowing that that mob, that gang of 
nationalists had been there.

We went to our apartment. There were one or two people from each family on the
bus. The bus had left Nasosny, there were guards with machine guns on it. When
we approached the building, my wife and I, going up to the door . . . I'm 
just using the word door out of habit, because there was no longer a door as 
such, it had been torn from its hinges, it really just sort of covered the 
doorway area some. I pushed it and it fell into the apartment, into the 
hallway. With us was a soldier with a machine gun. He stopped in the hall and 
said, "Make it quick, we have to get to all the other apartments."

It was painful to see the place, the piano had been grotesquely hacked up with
axes. We had had a wall system, the glass doors in it no longer existed, and 
you couldn't walk on the floor because there were piles of broken and smashed 
dishes. Our things and our sofa were overturned and cut up, the easy chairs 
had been slashed with a knife. It was the same story in all the rooms. There 
wasn't the smallest corner that had been left untouched, everything had been 
overturned. Part of our things had disappeared. Of course the gear we had 
prepared for our escape was all gone, as were all the bags. So it was 
slaughter and pillage in the fullest sense of the words.

We tried to find some things, but to be honest it was quite difficult to find
anything in that disorder, in that chaos. We didn't find a single coat or 
raincoat, my wife couldn't find anything for her feet, her Finnish boots had 
disappeared, too . . . Well they had taken absolutely everything they wanted,
and the rest they threw outside. The refrigerator had been chopped up with
axes, and the washing machine had been completely broken as well. 

I had picked up my books from school. I had a good library, both literature 
and technical volumes. I am a physicist myself, and my wife is a 
mathematician, and we had a great many books related to our disciplines. In 
fact we suffered not so much from the loss of our clothes as from the loss of 
our books. I instinctively started gathering up the books in our apartment. I 
got a sheet and started tossing books onto it, the ones that were still in 
good condition. I found one of the volumes of our three-volume set of Pushkin,
the dark red one. There were axe marks on it. At first I was going to throw it
out, but then I thought, no, I'll hang onto this. I am keeping it because only
barbarians can take an axe to books, only those who lack even the most basic
sense of culture are capable of something like that. I gathered as many books
as I could carry.

After that--our time was limited--we left, we got onto the bus and rode off 
. . .  Oh yes, earlier, when we had been approaching the building, the
neighbors came down. They brought us photographs, I'm a big fan of
photographs, and I had two albums and a large box full of them, there was 
simply nowhere to put them, and I had kept them in that box. Those photos
were strewn about the room, covered with ink, and torn, and a neighbor woman 
brought me nine or ten of them. "Where did you get these?", I asked. She said,
"Your photos are flying all over the block . . . "

  May 8, 1988
  Yerevan



		     - - - reference - - -

[1] _The Sumgait Tragedy; Pogroms against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan,
    Volume I, Eyewitness Accounts_, edited by Samuel Shahmuradian, forward by
    Yelena Bonner, 1990, published by Aristide D. Caratzas, NY, pages 285-302



-- 
David Davidian dbd@urartu.sdpa.org "It has been ever thus in all things, son, 
SDPA Center for Regional Studies    Whatever we thrash we give to the wind, 
P.O. Box 382761                     We too have been blown by the world's wind
Cambridge, MA 02238                 The chaff is gone but the grain remains."