Sumgait genocide was not exceptional event in Azerbaijan - Larisa  Alaverdyan 

ArmInfo. 37 years ago, on February 27-29, 1988, an act of genocide against the Armenian population of the city of Sumgait in the Azerbaijan SSR was  committed. As a result of the targeted and planned actions of the  Azerbaijani authorities and with the connivance of the USSR  authorities, mass pogroms and murders of Armenians were committed,  crimes against humanity that shocked the world community with their  savagery and cruelty. The entire Armenian population of 18,000 people  was completely expelled from Sumgait, reads a statement by Armenia's  first human rights defender Larisa Alaverdyan. 

The Sumgait genocide was not an isolated or exceptional event in  Azerbaijan. The massacre of Armenians, ethnic cleansing of the  indigenous Armenian population, a consistent policy of artificial  assimilation of Armenians and other non-Turkic peoples in Azerbaijan  were carried out from the very beginning of the creation of the state  under this name and continued under Soviet power. Here is one of the  many examples of the implementation of the Armenian genocide,  described in a letter from a member of the Communist Party of  Azerbaijan Musayev to the government of the RSFSR about the March  1920 pogroms in Shusha.  Here are excerpts from his letter: "The  merciless extermination of defenseless women, children, old men, old  women, etc. began. Armenians were subjected to mass slaughter... The  pogroms continued for more than six days, all the houses in the  Armenian part were destroyed, plundered and burned to the ground...   Khosrov-bek Sultanov, while giving speeches, announced to the Muslims  to start a holy war and called for a final end to the Armenians of  the city of Shusha, without sparing women, children, etc."

In Soviet Azerbaijan, the policy of ethnic cleansing continued  intensively. When the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic was created,  Armenians made up about 50% of the population, but by the mid-80s,  there were none left! By 1992, almost 500,000 Armenians were expelled  from more than 300 settlements. Almost the same number of Jews and  Russians were expelled. Why did Armenians and representatives of  other peoples leave, or rather flee, Azerbaijan? From pogroms,  massacres and forced expulsion!

In both Soviet and modern Azerbaijan, the falsification of the  history and culture of the Armenian people pursues the goal of  destroying the material evidence of this culture and distorting its  spiritual component. It is being carried out very aggressively, in  its arsenal it is a crude manipulation and falsification of  historical documents and evidence, creation of various  anti-scientific myths. The destruction and appropriation of  historical heritage, the so-called "Albanization", is aimed to tell   the whole world in regard of the Armenians - "you were not here,   there is nothing of yours here". The pogroms and massacres of  Armenians organized in Sumgait in February 1988 at the state level  did not receive an adequate political and legal assessment, and their  organizers and perpetrators were not brought to justice. Impunity  created a precedent for the subsequent genocide of Armenians in  January 1990 in Baku and similar crimes in other regions of  Azerbaijan, as well as in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Sumgait genocide gave the green light to new unprecedented crimes  against civilians in Nagorno- Karabakh, ultimately leading to the  start of armed aggression by Azerbaijan against Nagorno-Karabakh in  1991-94.

States parties to the Genocide Convention have undertaken the duty to  prevent and punish genocide. The International Court has ruled that  States Parties must not wait until genocide has been committed, and  the whole point of the obligation is to prevent or attempt to prevent  the commission of this act. In the resolution of the European  Parliament of 7 July 1988, it was stated that the Armenians were  subjected to massacres in Sumgait and atrocities in Baku, which  created a dangerous situation for them and led to their expulsion  from Azerbaijan. However, no concrete practical steps were taken to  punish the perpetrators and prevent the genocide of Armenians in  Azerbaijan. The culmination of Azerbaijan's genocidal policy was the  44-day war of 2020, the 280-day blockade of all transport  communications linking the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic with the outside  world, the large-scale military aggression against it on September  19, 2023, accompanied by violence, killings of civilians, including  children and the elderly, and other acts of vandalism - all testify  to deliberate acts aimed at the genocide of Armenians by expelling  them from their native land.

All of the surviving Armenian population left Nagorno-Karabakh. What  happened also characterizes the results of the negotiation processes  that took place between the parties to the conflict on Russian,  American and Brussels platforms, and were accompanied by optimistic  statements and calls for the protection of the rights and security of  the Karabakh Armenians. However, measures envisaged by the  international obligations of the UN member states were not taken  against the criminal acts of Azerbaijan to prevent the genocide of  the Armenians of Karabakh. The UN Security Council, having considered  the issue of the humanitarian catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh at an  emergency meeting, limited itself to calls for restraint and respect  for human rights, addressed to both the aggressor and its victim. 

Today, the Azerbaijani authorities are publicly making territorial  claims against Armenia, including the capital of Armenia, the city of  Yerevan. The armed forces of Azerbaijan have occupied the sovereign  territories of the Republic of Armenia. There are dead and wounded,  including among the civilian population. Following the policy of Nazi  Germany, Aliyev demands to build an extraterritorial transport  corridor through Armenian Syunik, just as Hitler demanded that Poland  allow Germany to build extraterritorial railways and highways through  its territory. And he openly threatens to solve it by force!

In line with the active continuation of the genocidal policy of  Azerbaijan, an illegal trial of the leaders of the Nagorno-Karabakh  Republic has been organized in Baku, which is a kind of continuation  of "Sumgait".

We, the undersigned, appeal to the leadership of the UN, as well as  the countries that are members of the UN Security Council, the Human  Rights Council, with an appeal to take immediate effective measures  to restore the rights and ensure the return to the original homeland  of the indigenous Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh,  expelled as a result of the ethnic cleansing committed by the  Azerbaijani regime, the genocide of Armenians who have lived in their  native land of Nagorno-Karabakh for thousands of years.

We appeal to the leaders of the countries that are co-chairs of the  OSCE Minsk Group, to the leaders of the European Union, the leaders  of the BRICS countries, all countries of good will with an appeal to  give an adequate assessment of the legal basis for the  self-determination of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, their right  to live in their native land. It is necessary to condemn the criminal  acts of Azerbaijan, take decisive measures in support of the  Armenians of the NKR, apply sanctions to the state that subjected the  people to aggression and genocide. We call on international  organizations, political, legal institutions and organizations  dealing with issues of human rights protection, parliamentarians,  political and public figures, and the expert community to raise their  voices against the illegal trial of the leaders of the Nagorno-  Karabakh Republic and other Armenians who were captured as a result  of the criminal aggressive acts of the Azerbaijani anti-people  authorities, and demand their immediate release from the dungeons of  Baku prisons.