[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 34 (Friday, February 27, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E264]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            SUMGAIT POGROMS

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ADAM B. SCHIFF

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, February 27, 2015

  Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the 27th 
anniversary of the pogrom against the Armenian residents of the town of 
Sumgait, Azerbaijan. On this day in 1988, and for three days following, 
Azerbaijani mobs assaulted and killed Armenians. When the violence 
finally subsided, hundreds of Armenian civilians had been brutally 
murdered and injured, women and young girls were raped, and some 
victims were tortured and burned to death. Those that survived the 
carnage fled their homes and businesses, leaving behind all but the 
clothes on their backs. The Sumgait Pogroms came in the wake of a 
pattern of anti-Armenian rallies throughout Azerbaijan, aided and 
encouraged by high ranking officials in the Azeri government, and 
touched off a wave of violence culminating in the 1990 Pogroms in Baku.
   In a pattern all too familiar to the Armenian people, the 
Azerbaijani authorities made little effort to punish those responsible, 
instead attempting to cover up the atrocities in Sumgait to this day, 
as well as denying the role of senior government officials in 
instigating the violence.
   The Sumgait massacres led to wider reprisals against Azerbaijan's 
Armenian ethnic minority, resulting in the virtual disappearance of a 
once thriving population of 450,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan, and 
culminating in the war launched against the people of Nagorno Karabakh. 
That war resulted in thousands dead on both sides and created over one 
million refugees in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.
   Time has not healed the wounds of those killed and hurt in the 
pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku. To the contrary, hatred of 
Armenians is celebrated in Azeri society, a situation most vividly 
exemplified by the case of Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army captain 
who savagely murdered an Armenian army lieutenant, Gurgen Margaryan 
with an axe while he slept. The two were participating in a NATO 
Partnership for Peace exercise at the time in Hungary. In 2012, Safarov 
was sent home to Azerbaijan, purportedly to serve out the remainder of 
his sentence. Instead, he was pardoned, promoted, and paraded through 
the streets of Baku in a sickening welcome home. And as we speak, 
Azerbaijan continues its dangerous and provocative behavior along its 
border with Armenia and in Karabakh.
   Mr. Speaker, this April we will mark the 100th Anniversary of the 
Armenian Genocide, an event the Turkish government, Azerbaijan's 
closest ally, goes to great lengths to deny. We must not let such 
crimes against humanity go unrecognized, whether they occurred 
yesterday or 27 years ago or 100 years ago. Today, let us pause to 
remember the victims of the atrocities of the Sumgait pogroms. Mr. 
Speaker, it is our moral obligation to condemn crimes of hatred and to 
remember the victims, in hope that history will not be repeated.

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