[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 10 (Thursday, January 18, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E141-E142]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           THE ANNIVERSARY OF ``BLACK JANUARY'' IN AZERBAIJAN

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. VIRGINIA FOXX

                           of north carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, January 18, 2007

  Ms. FOXX. Madam Speaker, on January 20th, the people of Azerbaijan, 
both at home and abroad, will commemorate the 16th anniversary of what 
has become known as Black January. The terrible event remembered by 
this commemoration was an atrocity--but it also gave birth to a hope 
that led eventually to independence and freedom.
  At around midnight, on the night of January 19-20, 1990, Azerbaijan 
was invaded by 26,000 Soviet troops pursuant to a state of emergency 
that had been declared in secret by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 
in Moscow. Dozens of people would be dead in the streets of Baku, 
Azerbaijan's capital, before the Soviet authorities in Moscow ever even 
deigned to acknowledge that a decision had been made to suppress the 
pro-independence and pro-democracy movement in Azerbaijan.
  A courageous resistance by Azerbaijanis to the Soviet invasion 
continued into February. Eventually, 140 Azerbaijanis were killed, 
about 700 more were wounded, and still hundreds more were rounded up 
and detained indefinitely.
  The Soviet attack against innocent civilians in Azerbaijan followed 
massacres in other constituent republics in the then-Soviet Union, 
including Kazakhstan in 1986 and Georgia in 1989. Tragically, the 
Azerbaijani experience would be replicated in large part 1 year later 
in Lithuania.
  In a report issued shortly after the tragedy of Black January, Human 
Rights Watch put the onrush of events into a larger perspective: ``. . 
. the violence used by the Soviet Army on the night of January 19-20 
was so out of proportion to the resistance offered by Azerbaijanis as 
to constitute an exercise in collective punishment. The punishment 
inflicted on Baku by Soviet soldiers may have been intended as a 
warning to nationalists, not only in Azerbaijan, but in the other 
Republics of the Soviet Union.''
  But brute force was not enough to hold the Soviet Union together.
  Indeed, Mr. Speaker, the night of January 19-20, 1990 gave birth to 
Azerbaijan's independence. It was on that night that Azerbaijanis lost 
their fear of the Soviet Union. It was on that night that Azerbaijanis 
realized their dream of independence and freedom could not, and would 
not, be denied.
  On August 30, 1991, in the wake of the attempted coup in the Soviet 
Union, Azerbaijan declared its independence--one of the first 
constituent republics to do so. And the last troops from the former 
Soviet Union were finally removed from Azerbaijani soil in 1993.
  Every January 20, as many thousands gather in Martyr's Cemetery in 
the hills above Baku, the dead are honored and the nation's commitment 
to independence, democracy, and freedom is renewed. The victims of 
Black January did not die in vain.

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