accounts of anti armenian human right violations in azerbaijan accounts of anti armenian human right violations in azerbaijan prelude to current events in nagorno karabakh i saw a naked girl with her hair down they were dragging her she kept falling because they were pushing her and kicking her she fell down it was muddy there and later other witnesses who saw it from their balconies told us they seized her by the hair and dragged her a couple of blocks as far as the mortgage bank that s a good block and a half or two from here i know this for sure because i saw it myself deposition of tatyana mikhailovna arutunian nezhintseva born train conductor azerbaijani railroad resident at building apartment microdistrict no sumgait azerbaijan i hadn t lived very long in sumgait only eight years i moved there from novosibirsk my son entered the baku nautical school and so i transferred to azerbaijan later i met someone and married him and now my name is arutunian my husband s name that there would be a massacre was not discussed openly but there were hints and gibes so to speak at the armenian people and they were mocking the russians too i was constantly aware of it at work and not just this past year i couldn t find a definite place for myself in the pool at work because i i ll just say it couldn t steal couldn t deceive and couldn t be involved in bribe taking and when i asked for decent working conditions they told me leave don t keep the others from working you aren t cut out for this kind of work and at work and around all the time i would hear gibes at the armenians like the turks had it right they killed them all the way they ve multiplied here they re making it hard for us to live and things will be just fine if we get rid of them all no problem the turks will help they say if we ask them they ll rid armenia of armenians in half an hour well that s the way it all was but i never thought of course that it would spill over into a bloody tragedy because you just couldn t imagine it here we ve been living under the soviet government for years and no one even considered such an idea possible but i had been forming my own opinions and in the presence of authoritative people i would often ask where is this all leading do people really not see what kind of situation is emerging here the russians are fleeing sumgait there are very few of them left why is no one dealing with this what s going on and when it all happened on the th and th it became clear that everything had been arranged by someone because what else are you to make of it if the first secretary of the city party committee is marching ahead of the demonstration with an azerbaijani flag i wouldn t be saying this now if i hadn t received personal confirmation from him later because when we were under guard in the sk club on the st he came to the club that muslimzade the women told me there he is there he is that s muslimzade i didn t believe the rumors that he had carried an azerbaijani flag i thought that they were just false rumors i went over to him and said are you the first secretary of our city party committee he answers me yes and i ask him tell me did you really march ahead of that gang carrying an azerbaijani flag and behind you they were carrying denigrating signs i don t know exactly what they said but there was mention of armenian blood and he tells me yes i was there but i tried to dissuade them from it then i asked him another question and where were you when they were burning and slaughtering us and he said i we didn t know what to do we didn t know we didn t anticipate that that would happen in sumgait comrade mamedov the first deputy chairman of the council of ministers of the azerbaijani ssr answered the same question for me no we actually didn t anticipate the slaughter in sumgait at that time we were trying to contain the crowd of in baku that was preparing for a massacre those are his exact words the ones he said in the office of the council of ministers of the armenian ssr and now about the events themselves of course it s painful to discuss them because it may seem that it s not true to someone else various rumors concerning what happened are making the rounds some are true others aren t but unfortunately there are more true ones than false because it was so horrible in our age here in the space age the age of science the age of progress i don t know if someone had told me this story if i were living in or around moscow i wouldn t have believed it why not because it was really a genocide it was a massacre that s genuinely what it was for example on that day the th i didn t know about the th because my husband and i were both sick both of us had the flu and we were in bed on the th our neighbor comes to our place and says you re in bed you don t know anything about it there was a demonstration in town and after it they were overturning armenian cars and burning them they were looking into cars and asking are you an armenian if they answered in armenian then they turned the car over and burned it this isn t made up the wife of the senior investigator of the baku ministry of internal affairs told us he was returning home from his dacha with his wife raisa sevastyanova she s my neighbor she immediately came and told lis that they had landed right in the middle of it i don t know what to call it the cavalcade of automobiles they were stopping he answered in azerbaijani they let them go but they made him honk the horn they were kicking up a fracas we didn t even believe it and i said certainly that didn t happen how can that be and she said muslimzade was leading the crowd and the sputnik store was completely smashed because most of the salespeople there are armenians and when he saw that they had started breaking the glass in that store he said don t break the shop windows don t destroy state property but do whatever else you want i didn t hear this with my own two ears but it is a fact that the store was torn up and the director of the store was beaten for employing armenians although he s an azerbaijani while we were talking all of a sudden right across from us sevastyanova is the first to look out the window and say look there s a crowd out there and sure enough when we looked out there we saw that the crowd had already started wrecking the neighboring building there was an armenian family there a woman and two girls they lived across from us i m sorry i don t know the building number or the people s names since we were in my husband s apartment in microdistrict and i lived in microdistrict no there was awful looting going on there at the time the most hideous things were going on there then one building there ours was attacked twice once wasn t enough for them they returned to the places where they hadn t finished the armenians off if an azerbaijani family dared to conceal armenians they beat the azerbaijanis too they also beat russians if it was russians doing the hiding because there were russians among them they said so on television there were people of various nationalities but they didn t tell us why there were people of different nationalities because they wouldn t have touched the azerbaijanis if they hadn t dared to stick up for the armenians and give them temporary shelter in their homes at the time i saw this from the window i was there sevastyanova was there and so was my husband we went out onto the balcony and saw a television fly off a balcony all kinds of things even a sofa then when it was all down there they burned it up then we saw the crowd and they were all oohing at first i couldn t figure out what was happening and later i told my husband lendrush l think they re beating someone out there and he answered i don t know could be suddenly the crowd separated for a moment and i saw it and raisa sevastyanova saw it too my husband had turned the other way he didn t see it i saw a naked girl with her hair down they were dragging her she kept falling because they were pushing her and kicking her she fell down it was muddy there and later other witnesses who saw it from their balconies told us they seized her by the hair and dragged her a couple of blocks as far as the mortgage bank that s a good block and a half or two from here i know this for sure because i saw it myself then the crowd rushed toward our building we were standing there and you can of course imagine what we were feeling were they going to kill us or not and i also had the awful thought that they might torment me the way they tormented that woman because i had just seen that i asked my husband i gave him an axe and said you kill me first and then let them do what they want with the corpse but our neighbors it s true defended us they said there aren t any armenians in our entryway go away only muslims live here disaster missed us that time but at two o clock in the morning a crowd of about people approximately came back to our place my husband was already asleep he can sleep when he s upset about something but i can t i was standing running from balcony to balcony our power was out i don t remember for how long but it was as though it had been deliberately turned off there were no lights whatsoever and i was glad of course i thought it was better that way but then i look and the crowd is at our balcony this was at in the morning the first time they were at our building it was and now it was in the morning but i never thought that that old woman on the first floor the azerbaijani was awake and watching out there were human beings among them too so she goes out with a pail of garbage as though she needed to be taking garbage out at two o clock in the morning she used it as a pretext and went toward those young people they really were youngsters from my balcony you could see perfectly that they were young azerbaijani boys they spoke azerbaijani and when they came up to her she said what do you want and they answered we want the armenian family that lives here pointing toward the second floor with their hands she says i already told you we don t have any armenians here now leave do you hear this is an old muslim woman talking to you and grabbed the hand of one boy who was trying to walk around her and enter the building anyway and started pushing him away and so they seemed to listen to her they were all very young they started apologizing and left that was the second time death was at our door i forgot to mention about one other apartment a man named rubik lives there i don t know him really i knew his daughter i mean i saw her around but we really didn t know them but i do know that that guy who lives on the fourth floor across from our entryway went to chernobyl and worked there for eight months to earn money can you imagine what that means he risked his life to earn x amount of money in order to better his family he bought new furniture and was getting ready to give his daughter s hand in marriage but alas everything was ruined by those creeps and scoundrels they threw everything out the windows and the rest we saw from our balcony how the neighbors on the left and right ran into the apartment and carried off everything that hadn t already been smashed or taken what is one to think of that it means that the parents in those families were in on it too unfortunately i came to be of the opinion that it was all organized and that everything had been foreseen in advance both the beating of the armenians and the stripping of apartments something on the order of we ll move the armenians out and take over their apartments i have worked honestly my whole life you can check everything about me i came as a patriot from china waited for nights on end in front of the consulate general of the ussr i came to my homeland as a patriot because i knew that the party and the komsomol were holy things but when i saw in sumgait that there wasn t anything holy about them that party membership was bought that komsomol members joined only for personal gain that there were no ideals no ideas god save me everything was being bought and sold i saw all of it and understood how they could allow that crap to go on like it did i can t talk any more about it the image of that beating when i went out of my own apartment they picked us up under soviet army guard they had arrived from all over to suppress that gang not only armenians but some russian families and their children too came out of their apartments and joined us because no normal person who had seen that could stay there with the situation the way it was and what s interesting is that when we left on the buses i rode and thought that at least one group of people for sure people would basically rise to the situation would have some compassion for the armenians would somehow understand the injustice of what was done but having analyzed and weighed the whole thing once i calmed down having thought it all through i came to a conclusion that is shared by many people if a lot of azerbaijanis didn t want their armenian neighbors to be killed and that basically depended on that muslimzade he said that he had wanted to calm them down then is it possible that he didn t have people at hand to whom he could whisper at the last minute go and announce it on television citizens of sumgait take what you can into your hands let s protect our neighbors from this massacre those crowds weren t such that there was no controlling them basically they were unarmed they didn t have firearms mostly they had knives they had all kinds of metal parts like armature shafts sharpened at the ends special rocks different to a degree that we noticed them there aren t rocks like those in sumgait soils they were brought from somewhere as though it were all specially planned so as i was saying i weighed it all out and if any of our neighbors had wanted to defend us why wasn t it arranged it means that the government didn t want to do it when the crowd was moving from the city party committee to the sputnik what there was no way of informing baku no there was no way it turns out the crowd was doing violence in our microdistrict i won t mention the things i didn t see myself i ll only talk about the things i myself witnessed they were in microdistrict beginning at o clock in the evening when i saw them from the other building and they were somewhere else until mid night or one o clock in the morning because at they came back to our building they hadn t completely finished making their predatory rounds of microdistrict when they returned to our building i told my husband lendrush now the police are probably going to come my god now the authorities are probably going to find out and come to our aid well alas no there were to be no authorities not a single policeman not a single fireman not a single ambulance came while they were raging as it turns out as we later found out beginning on the might of the th there were dead people ruined apartments and burned autos one car near the bus station it was burned and overturned it was probably there about four days everyone saw it and what went on in block those who live there know they saw from their balconies how they attacked the soldiers in the buses how they beat those poor unarmed soldiers and how on that square i can t remember the name of it where there is that fork coming from the bus station that intersection now i m upset and i can t think of the name there s a tall building there a story and from the balconies there people saw that butchery when the poor soldiers wearing only helmets with shields and those unfortunate clubs moved against that mob and when they fell those to year old boys ran up and using stones big heavy stones beat them to death on their heads who could have guessed that something like that could happen in the soviet union and under the soviet government the upshot is that this republic has not been under soviet control for a long time but no one wanted to pay any attention or get involved if you were to go and ask at my work many people would confirm that i tell the truth i ve been struggling for truth for five years there already the five years that i worked at the azerbaijani railroad some people there considered me a demagogue others who knows what some think i m an adventure seeker and some a prankster but i wanted everything to be right i would become outraged how can this be why is it people treat one another this way on a soviet railroad as though the azerbaijani railroad were azerbaijani property or the property of some magnate or some mafia if i want to i ll get you out of here if i want to i ll get rid of you if i want to i ll do something else and there s a black market price for everything in the most brazen way a coach to moscow costs so much a coach on a local train costs so much once when i was complaining to the head of the conductor s pool he had the nerve to tell me maybe you won t even believe this but this i m afraid i heard with my own ears tatyana just how long can you fight for something that you know will never have any effect you re alone against everyone so instead why don t you give more money to the chief conductor and everything will go fine for you i started to cry turned and left what else could i do where else could i go to complain i realized that everything was useless and the root of the whole thing is that it all goes on and no one wants to see it i filed a written complaint and they ground it into dust they destroyed it i still have a copy but what s the use when the general procuracy got involved with the investigation of the bloody sumgait affair in addition to the information about what i saw what i was a witness to i gave testimony about the mafia at the railroad they accepted my petition but i don t know if they re going to pursue it or not because you ll excuse me i no longer believe in the things i aspired to the things i believed in before it s all dead they just spit on my soul stomped on everything physically and most important spiritually because you can lose belongings that s nonsense that all comes with time but when your soul is spit upon and when the best in you your beliefs are destroyed it can be very difficult to restore them i want to tell of one incident i just don t know at the time i was in such a state that i didn t even take minor things into account here is an example of course it s not a minor one my neighbor raisa sevastyanova she has a son valery who is in the th grade in a school in microdistrict a boy vitaly danielian i don t know his last name goes to school with him or rather went to school with him i was just sitting in an apartment trying to make a phone call to moscow oh yes and there s one important detail when the massacre began for two to three hours the phones weren t working in armenian apartments and later in several russian and azerbaijani apartments but the fact of the matter is that service was shut off you could not call anywhere why again it means it was all planned how come service is cut off for no reason and the lights went off and those brats were raging as they liked they weren t afraid they ran about freely they that no one would slap their hands and no one would dare to stop them they knew it now i m going to tell about the incident so this little vitaly vitalik an armenian boy went to school with valery they were in the same class according to what valery and his neighbor pal said at the time i was in the same apartment as they were i sat at the phone waiting for the call to be put through a mob attacked the building where vitalik lived so valery ran to his mother and said mamma please let me go to vitalik s what if they kill him maybe he s still alive maybe we can bring him here and save him somehow he s a nice guy we all like him he s a good person he s smart his mother wouldn t let him go in tears she says valery you can t go because i am afraid he says mamma we can get around the crowd we ll just watch just have a look they made it through i don t know i think vitalik s parents lived in microdistrict no and when they got there they made a superficial deduction knowing that balconies and doors were being broken everywhere that you could see from the street which were the armenian apartments in the building they went here and there and looked and saw that the windows were intact and so they calmed down but even though the windows in that apartment were not broken everything inside was totally smashed and vitalik lay there with a broken skull and his mother and father had already been murdered little vitalik didn t even know they were dead so two weeks ago i don t know he was in critical condition no maybe it was longer we left sumgait on march spent some time in moscow and then we came to yerevan so it s been about a month already it s so hard to keep all this straight so valery the next day when he found out that vitalik s family has been killed and vitalik was ling in the semashko hospital in baku valery and his classmates got together and went to visit him but they wouldn t admit them telling them that he was in critical condition and that he was still in a coma they cried and left having also found out that the girl i saw being kicked and dragged was in that hospital too as it turns out she was brought there in serious condition but at least she was alive at the time when we got to the sk club we would see first one friend and then another throw ourselves into their arms and kiss them because you had wondered if these friends were alive or not if those friends were alive or not and when you saw them you were so glad to find out that the family had lived when you saw people you heard things that made your hair stand on end if you publish everything that happened it will be a hideous book a book of things it is even difficult to believe and those two girls who were raped were entirely black and blue the ones at the sk they know i m not lying that girlfriend came up to one of them and said what happened and she bared her breasts and they were completely covered in cigarette burns those rogues had put cigarettes out on her breasts after something like that i don t know how you can live in a city and look at the people in it now when we stayed at the military unit for a while they provided well basic conditions for us there the military unit is located in nasosny some six miles from sumgait and living there we met with a larger group of people there were about people at the unit you know there was a point when i couldn t even go outside because if you went outside you saw so much heartbreak around you and when you hear the false rumors yes by the way false rumors were spread in sumgait saying that the armenians around yerevan had destroyed azerbaijani villages and razed them to the ground with bulldozers i didn t know whether to believe it or not and people who don t know any better get the idea that it was all done in revenge but when i arrived in armenia and was in spitak and in spitak all those villages are not only intact but at that time had even been protected just in case they were guarded they got better food than did the inhabitants of spitak not a single person there died and no one is planning to harm them around yerevan all the villages are safe and unharmed and the armenians didn t attack anyone but actually after an evil of the magnitude suffered in sumgait there could have been a feeling of vengefulness but no one acted on it and i don t know why you sometimes hear accusations to the effect that the armenians are guilty that it is they who organized it rumors like that are being spread in azerbaijan and if one old person says it and ten young ones hear it they not only perceive it with their minds but with their hearts too to them it seems that the older person is telling the truth for example one says did you know that out of people killed by the way originally they said people but later they found a nd were azerbaijani and one was an armenian of course i m upset but it s utterly impossible to discuss such things and not become upset sometimes l forget things but i know i want to return to the time when we were in the sk club across from the city party committee when i saw muslimzade in the sk club building i went to him to ask because i couldn t believe that he had marched in the front carrying a banner i already mentioned this and if i repeat anything please excuse me i asked him why did you do that and why are you here now why did you come here to laugh at these women who are strewn about on the floor the overcrowding there was tremendous it was completely unsanitary and several of the children were already sick it s true the troops tried to make it livable for us they cooked for us on their field stoves and provided us with wonderful food but the thing is that their main job was to ferret out the gang that was still at it everywhere that was continuing its sordid affairs everywhere plus they were never given any direct orders they didn t know what they were authorized to do and not to do and it was only on march at five o clock in the evening that krayev himself the lieutenant general the city commandant of sumgait was given full authority and told everyone over a microphone from an armored personnel carrier that now he could do what he wanted to do as his heart advised him and relocate people to the military unit but that s not what i want to talk about now muslimzade characteristically tried to get me out of the sk building and take me to the city party committee which is across the square from the club he took me by the hand and said citizen don t worry we ll go and have a talk in my office i told him no after everything you ve done i don t believe one iota of what you say if i go to the city party committee i ll disappear and the traces of me will disappear too because you can t stand it when oh yes and there was another interesting detail from that meeting it was even very funny although at the time i wasn t up to laughing he was in a nice expensive hat and so as to put him to shame so to speak i said oh why did you come here all duded up like a london dandy you smell of good perfume you re in your starched shirt and you have your expensive hat on you came to ridicule the poor women and children who are lying on the floor who are already getting sick whose relatives have died did you come to laugh at them and the one who was accompanying him an azerbaijani i don t know who he was or what his title was he quickly snatched the hat off muslimzade s head and hid it then i said my god we re not marauders we re not you we didn t come to you with the intention of stealing well kill me kill me muslimzade says to me but i m not guilty kill me kill me but i m not guilty and i say ok fine you re not guilty have it your way but give us an answer we re asking you where were you when they were torturing and raping those poor women when they were killing the children burning things carrying on outrageously and wrecking all those apartments where were you then you know we didn t expect it we did not know what to do we didn t anticipate that something like that would happen in sumgait i started laughing and said it s truly funny he says what could i do we didn t know what to do and i say i m sorry but it ll be ridiculous if i tell you the first secretary of the city party committee shouldn t march out in front with a banner he should fall down so that the gang would have to cross over his dead body that s what you should have done that s the way it was during the war not a single party committee secretary compromised himself either he died or he led people into battle and what did you do you ran away you left you hid you marched with a flag because you were afraid excuse my language you feared for your own damned hide and when we ask you you tell us that you got confused and you ask me what you could have done that s right i told him the city party committee got confused all the party committees got confused the police got confused baku got confused they all lay in a faint for two weeks and the gang ran the show with impunity and if it weren t for the troops it wouldn t have been just two days there wouldn t be a single armenian left in sumgait for sure they would have finished their bloody affair because they brazenly went up to some russians too the ones who tried to say something to them and they told them as soon as we finish with the armenians we ll come after you too and by the way there was a colonel who took us to the military unit he was the one with the light blue collar tabs who flew in and two hours later arrived on an armored personnel carrier when we were at the sk and took us to the military unit and who later started moving us from the military unit we asked him what how what will come of us he openly said you know for us the main thing now is to catch that gang we ll finish that quickly you ll stay at the military unit for the time being and we ll decide later the general procuracy of the ussr arrived it consists of investigators from all cities there were some from stavropol from everywhere just everywhere because the affair was truly frightful about this by the way comrade katusev spoke as everyone knows he s the first deputy general procurator of the ussr when he gave us a speech from the armored personnel carrier at the military unit by the way he told us the honest truth because he couldn t not say it because he was still experiencing his first impressions of what he had seen and he said there was afghanistan and it was bad but sumgait it s horrible and the people who dared to do such a thing will be severely punished in accordance with our laws and that s a quote then one mother throws herself at him her two sons had died before her very eyes and says who will return my sons who is going to punish the culprits they tried to calm her down and he said in order for us to conduct a proper investigation in order that not a single scoundrel avoid responsibility you must help us because we don t know maybe there was someone else in the gang who is now being concealed in homes and maybe the neighbors know maybe someone saw something don t be afraid write about it in detail so that you re not afraid everyone knows that many of you are afraid having lived through such horrors they think that if they write the whole truth about let s say their neighbor or someone else that they will seek revenge later we re going to do it like this we re going to set up an urn and you can throw what you write in there we don t need to know who wrote it the names of the people who write won t be made public but we need all the information let each and every one not be afraid let each write what is necessary who they saw in that gang who made threats or shouted threatening gibes about the armenians you must describe all of these people and put the information into the urn two soldiers and a major guarded the urn and sure enough many people people who didn t even want to write i know one woman who asked me she came up and said you as a russian the same thing won t happen to you as will happen to me so please i ll give you the information and you please write it down for me so she was afraid and there were a lot like her but later after katusev made his speech she sat and wrote down everything she knew and we threw it all into the urn now we don t know if it will be of any use for a factual picture will emerge from all that information one person can lie but thousands can t lie thousands simply can t lie you have to agree with that a fact is a fact why for example should someone say that black is white if it is really black the first deputy chairman of the council of ministers of the azerbaijani ssr mamedov as i said was in yerevan my husband and i were at the council of ministers of the armenian ssr and found out that mamedov was present the one who had come to convince the people of sumgait to return to their previous dwellings to their old apartments we asked for a meeting with him and it was granted when we went to see him he tried to behave properly very politely delicately but when the truth was told right to his face and when i asked him some of the same questions i had asked muslimzade where were you personally when they were beating us now you re trying to convince us to return why didn t you think at the time that they were slaughtering us where it was all leading he says you re telling the truth let s not mince words you ve told me right to my face and i ll tell you straight i ll tell you the pure truth i was gotten out of bed in the evening the whole government was up including me and we were restraining a crowd of about in baku but we never expected that in a city like sumgait with its fine international record such a thing could happen we expected it in baku i say so that means you expected it all the same why were you expecting it and he says you know it just happened that way we were expecting it in baku we were trying to restrain it but in sumgait i say fine you didn t know for the first three or four hours but then you should have known why did no one help us and he says well ok we didn t know what to do and things like that basically it was the same story i got from muslimzade later when he said you go on back the situation in sumgait is favorable now everything is fine the armenians are friendly with the azerbaijanis to this l answered you know what i m speaking with you as a member of a neutral nation i have never argued with armenians or with azerbaijanis and i was an eyewitness you tell me please comrade mamedov i asked him what would you say about this honestly if you were being completely frank with us then he said yes i admit that i am honestly ashamed shame on the entire azerbaijani nation we have disgraced ourselves not only before the entire soviet union but before the whole world because now the voice of america and all the other foreign radio stations of various hues are branding us with all kinds of rumors too and i say there s nothing to add to what really happened i don t think it s possible to add anything more awful he says yes i agree with you i understand your pain it is truly an unfortunate occurrence i repeat that he said unfortunate occurrence and then he suddenly remembered himself what he was saying he had a pen in his hands he was fidgeting with it nervously and said oh excuse me a tragedy really i take this to mean that he really thinks it s an unfortunate occurrence and of course he says i understand that having gone through all this you can t return to sumgait but it s necessary to cool down and realize that all those people are being tried and he even gave a detail which i don t know if it matters or not that policemen were being tried specifically in relation to that bloody affair yes by the way there is another good detail how i was set up at work in baku after the events i went to an undergarment plant there was an azerbaijani working there and suddenly she tells me what they didn t nail your husband they screwed up i was floored i hadn t imagined that anyone in baku too could say something like that well after that i went up to see to my office i needed to find out about those days what was going to happen with them how they were going to put down those days from february to march and the administrator told me i don t know tatyana go to the head of the conductors pool be grateful if they don t put it down as unexcused absence i was really discouraged by this they all know that we were but a hair away from death and barely survived and here they re telling me that i was skipping work as though i was off enjoying myself somewhere i went to the office of the chief of the pool his last name is rasulov and he s had that position for many years incidentally he s a party member and is a big man in town and suddenly when i went to him and said comrade rasulov this is the way it was he looked at me askance and said and why are you he knows me by my previous last name why did you get wrapped up in this mess i say what do you mean why did i get wrapped up in this mess my husband s an armenian i tell him i have an armenian last name and he screwed up his face made a kind of a grimace as though he had eaten something sour and said i didn t expect that you would what did he mean by that and how should he behave the chief of the pool a man who supervises workers now it s true there was a reduction but for sure there are still conductors working for him and if someone who supervises a staff that size says things like that then what can you expect from a simple uneducated politically unsophisticated person he s going to believe any and all rumors that the armenians are like this the armenians are like that and so on by the way that mamedov now i m going back to mamedov s office when i asked him are you really going to guarantee the safety of our lives if we return to sumgait he answered yes you know i would guarantee them i don t want to take on too much i would guarantee them firmly for years but i won t guarantee them for longer than years i say so you ve got another thing like that planned for years from now so they ll be quiet and then in another years it ll happen again i couldn t contain myself any more and i also told him and how did it get to that point certainly you knew about it how they were treating the russians for example in baku and in sumgait how they were hounded from their jobs certainly you received complaints i wrote some myself why did no one respond to them why did everyone ignore what was going on didn t you prepare people for this by the way you treated them and he says you know you re finally starting to insult me he threw his pen on the desk maybe now you ll say i m a scoundrel too i say you know i m not talking about you because i don t know but about the ones who i do know i can say with conviction yes that comrade was involved in this that and that because i know for certain well anyway he assured us that here in yerevan there were false rumors that sumgait armenians were here and were in sumgait and had gotten back to work everyone was working he said and life was very good we drove about the town ourselves comrade arutiunian first secretary of the communist party of armenia ssr came from the council of ministers of armenian he came and brought information showing that everything was fine in sumgait when i asked mamedov how he had reached that conclusion he said well i walked down the street and i said walking down the street in any city even if i were to go to new york i would never understand the situation because i would be a guest i don t have any contact with people but if you spend days among some blue collar workers in such a way that they didn t know you were the first deputy chairman of the council of ministers you d hear something quite different i told him for example that i drew my conclusion when we left the military unit to look at our apartments they took us all in turns to pick things up since people had fled to the military unit they got on the bus just to save themselves as soon as possible how are the neighbors in the microdistrict how will they view us what do they think i thought maybe that in fact it wasn t something general of a mass nature some anti national something and when that bus took us to our building because it was the same bus while we were going up to our apartment an armed soldier accompanied us what does that say it speaks of the fact that if everything there were fine why do we need to have soldiers go there and come back with us going from apartment to apartment and in fact especially with the young people you could sense the delight at our misfortune the grins and they were making comments too and that was in the presence of troops when police detachments were in the microdistricts and armored personnel carriers and tanks were passing by and if people are taking such malicious delight when the situation is like that then what is it going to be like when they withdraw protection from the city altogether there will be more outrages of course perhaps not organized but in the alleys april yerevan reference the sumgait tragedy pogroms against armenians in soviet azerbaijan volume i eyewitness accounts edited by samuel shahmuradian forward by yelena bonner published by aristide d caratzas ny pages david davidian dbd urartu sdpa org how do we explain turkish troops on s d p a center for regional studies the armenian border when we can t p o box even explain cambridge ma turkish mp march
