accounts of anti armenian human right violations in azerbaijan a accounts of anti armenian human right violations in azerbaijan part a prelude to current events in nagorno karabakh part a of oh yes i just remembered while they were raping me they repeated quite frequently let the armenian women have babies for us muslim babies let them bear azerbaijanis for the struggle against the armenians then they said those muslims can carry on our holy cause heroes they repeated it very often deposition of lyudmila grigorevna m born teacher sumgait secondary school no secretary of the komsomol organization at school no member of the sumgait city komsomol committee office resident at building b apartment microdistrict no sumgait azerbaijan note the events in kafan used as a pretext to attack armenians in azerbaijan are false as verified by independent international human rights organizations dd i m thinking about the price the sumgait armenians paid to be living in armenia now we paid for it in human casualties and crippled fates the price was too great now after the sumgait tragedy we the victims divide our lives into before and after we talk like that that was before the war like the people who went through world war ii and considered it a whole epoch a fate no matter how many years go by no matter how long we live it will never be forgotten on the contrary some of the moments become even sharper in our rage in our sorrow we saw everything differently but now they say that you can see more with distance and we can see those inhuman events with more clarity now we more acutely perceive our losses and everything that happened nineteen eighty eight was a leap year everyone fears a leap year and wants it to pass as quickly as possible yet we never thought that that leap year would be such a black one for every sumgait armenian those who lost someone and those who didn t that second to last day of winter was ordinary for our family although you could already smell danger in the air but we didn t think that the danger was near and possible so we didn t take any steps to save ourselves at least as my parents say at least we should have done something to save the children my parents themselves are not that old and years but then they thought that they had already lived enough and did everything they could to save us in our apartment the tragedy started on february around five in the afternoon i call it a tragedy and i repeat it was a tragedy even though all our family survived when i recall how they broke down our door my skin crawls even now among armenians among people who wish me only well i feel like it s all starting over again i remember how that mob broke into our apartment my parents were standing in the hall my father had an axe in his hands and had immediately locked both of the doors our door was rarely locked since friends and neighbors often dropped by we re known as a hospitable family and we just never really thought about whether the people who were coming to see us were azerbaijanis jews or russians we had friends of many nationalities even a turkmen woman my parents were in the hall my father with an axe i remember him telling my mother run to the kitchen for a knife but mother was detached pale as though she had decided to sell her life a bit dearer to be honest i never expected it of her she s afraid of getting shot and afraid of the dark a girlfriend was at the house that day a russian girl lyuda and mamma said no matter what happens no matter what they do to us you re not to come out of the bedroom we re going to tell them that we re alone in the apartment we went into the bedroom there were four of us marina and the russian girl crawled under the bed and we covered them up with a rug boxes of dishes and karina and i are standing there and looking at one another the idea that perhaps we were seeing each other for the last time flashed somewhere inside me i m an emotional person and i express my emotions immediately i wanted to embrace her and kiss her as though it were the last second and maybe karina was thinking the same thing but she s quite reserved we didn t have time to say anything to each other because we immediately heard mamma raise a shout there was so much noise from the tramping of feet from the shouting and from excited voices i couldn t figure what was going on out there because the door to the bedroom was only open a crack but when mamma shouted the second time karina ran out of the bedroom i ran after her i had wanted to hold her back but when she opened the door and ran out into the hall they saw us immediately the only thing i managed to do was close the door behind me at least so as to save marina and her friend the mob was shouting all of their eyes were shining all red like from insomnia at first about people burst in but later i was standing with my back to the door and couldn t see they came into the hall into the kitchen and dragged my father into the other room he didn t utter a word he just raised the axe to hit them but mamma snatched the axe from behind and said tell them not to touch the children tell them they can do as they want with us but not to harm the children she said this to father in armenian there were azerbaijanis from armenia among the mob who broke in they understood armenian perfectly the local azerbaijanis don t know armenian they don t need to speak it and one of them responded in armenian you and your children both we re going to do the same thing to you and your children that you armenians did in kafan they killed our women our girls our mothers they cut their breasts off and burned our houses and so on and so forth and we came to do the same thing to you this whole time some of them are destroying the house and the others are shouting at us they were mostly young people under at first there weren t any older people among them and all of their faces were unfamiliar sumgait is a small town all the same and we know a lot of people by their faces especially me i m a teacher so they dragged my father into the other room they twisted his arms and took him in there no they didn t take him in there they dragged him in there because he was already unable to walk they closed the door to that room all but a crack we couldn t see what was happening to father what they were doing to him then a young man about years old started to tear off mamma s sarafan and mamma shouted at him in azerbaijani i m old enough to be your mother what are you doing he struck her now he s being held mamma identified him i hope he s convicted then they went after karina who s been talking to them like a komsomol leader as though she were trying to lead them down a different path as they say to influence their consciousness she told them that what they were doing was wrong that they mustn t do it she said come on let s straighten this out without emotions what do you want who are you why did you come here what did we ever do to you someone tried to explain who they were and why they had come into our home but then the ones in the back more of them kept coming and coming said what are you talking to them for you should kill them we came here to kill them they pushed karina struck her and she fell down they beat her but she didn t cry out even when they tore her clothes off she kept repeating what did we do to you what did we do to you and even later when she came to she said mamma what did we do to them why did they do that to us that group was prepared i know this because i noticed that some of them only broke up furniture and others only dealt with us i remember that when they were beating me when they were tearing my clothes off i felt neither pain nor shame because my entire attention was riveted to karina all i could do was watch how much they beat her and how painful it was for her and what they did to her that s why i felt no pain later when they carried karina off they beat her savagely it s really amazing that she not only lived but didn t lose her mind she is very beautiful and they did everything they could to destroy her beauty mostly they beat her face with their fists kicking her using anything they could find mamma karina and i were all in one room and again i didn t feel any pain just didn t feel any no matter how much they beat me no matter what they did then one of those creeps said that there wasn t enough room in the apartment they broke up the beds and the desk and moved everything into the corners so there would be more room then someone suggested let s take her outside those beasts were in heaven they did what they would do every day if they weren t afraid of the authorities those were their true colors at the time i thought that in fact they would always behave that way if they weren t afraid of what would happen to them when they carried karina out and beat mamma her face was completely covered with blood that s when i started to feel the pain i blacked out several times from the pain but each moment that i had my eyes open it was as though i were recording it all on film i think i m a kind person by nature but i m vengeful especially if someone is mean to me and i don t deserve it i hold a grudge a long time if someone intentionally causes me pain and every time i would come to and see one of those animals on top of me i d remember them and i ll remember them for the rest of my life even though people tell me forget you have to forget you have to go on living at some point i remember that they stood me up and told me something and despite the fact that i hurt all over i had been beaten terribly i found the strength in myself to interfere with their tortures i realized that i had to do something resist them or just let them kill me to bring my suffering to an end i pushed one of them away he was a real horse i remember now that he s being held too as though they were all waiting for it they seized me and took me out onto the balcony i had long hair and it was stuck all over me one of the veranda shutters to the balcony was open and i realized that they planned to throw me out the window because they had already picked me up with their hands i was up in the air as though for the last time i took a really deep breath and closed my eyes and somehow braced myself inside i suddenly became cold as though my heart had sunk into my feet and suddenly i felt myself flying i couldn t figure out if i was really flying or if i just imagined it when i came to i thought now i m going to smash on the ground and when it didn t happen i opened my eyes and realized that i was still lying on the floor and since i didn t scream didn t beg them at all they became all the more wild like wolves they started to trample me with their feet shoes with heels on them and iron horseshoes like they had spe cially put them on then i lost consciousness i came to a couple of times and waited for death summoned it beseeched it some people ask for good health life happiness but at that moment i didn t need any of those things i was sure that none of us would survive and i had even forgotten about marina and if none of us was alive it wasn t worth living there was a moment when the pain was especially great i withstood inhuman pain and realized that they were going to torment me for a long time to come because i had showed myself to be so tenacious i started to strangle myself and when i started to wheeze they realized that with my death i was going to put an end to their pleasures and they pulled my hands from my throat the person who injured and insulted me most painfully i remember him very well because he was the oldest in the group he looked around i know that he has four children and that he considers himself an ideal father and person one who would never do such a thing something came over him then you see even during the investigation he almost called me daughter he apologized although of course he knew that i d never forgive him something like that i can never forgive i have never injured anyone with my behavior with my words or with my deeds i have always put myself in the other person s shoes but then in a matter of hours they trampled me entirely i shall never forget it i wanted to do myself in then because i had nothing to lose because no one could protect me my father who tried to do something against that hoard of beasts by himself could do nothing and wouldn t be able to do anything i knew that i was even sure that he was no longer alive and ira melkumian my acquaintance i knew her and had been to see her family a couple of times her brother tried to save her and couldn t so he tried to kill her his very own sister he threw an axe at her to kill her and put an end to her suffering when they stripped her clothes off and carried her into the other room her brother knew what awaited her i don t know which one it was edik or igor both of them were in the room from which the axe was thrown but the axe hit one of the people carrying her and so they killed her and made her death even more excruciating maybe the most excruciating of all the deaths of those days in sumgait i heard about it all from the neighbor from the melkumians landing his name is makhaddin he knows my family a little he came to see how we had gotten settled in the new apartment in baku how we were feeling and if we needed anything he s a good person he said you should praise god that you all survived but what i saw with my own eyes i a man who has seen so many people die who has lived a whole life i he says nearly lost my mind that day i had never seen the likes of it and think i never shall again the door to his apartment was open and he saw everything one of the brothers threw the axe because they had already taken the father and mother out of the apartment igor edik and ira remained he saw ira naked being carried into the other room in the hands of six or seven people he told us about it and said he would never forget it he heard the brothers shouting something inarticulate from pain rage and the fact that they were powerless to do anything but all the same they tried to do something the guy who got hit with the axe lived i i after i had been unsuccessful at killing myself i saw them taking marina and lyuda out of the bedroom i was in such a state that i couldn t even remember my sister s name i wanted to cry marina out to her but could not i looked at her and knew that it was a familiar dear face but couldn t for the life of me remember what her name was and who she was and thus i saved her because when they were taking her out she as it turns out had told them that she had just been visiting and that she and lyuda were both there by chance that they weren t armenians lyuda s a russian you can tell right away and marina speaks azerbaijani wonderfully and she told them that she was an azerbaijani and i almost gave her away and doomed her i m glad that at least marina came out of this all in good physical health although her spirit was murdered at some point i came to and saw igor igor agayev my acquaintance in that mob he lives in the neighboring building for some reason i remembered his name maybe i sensed my defense in him i called out to him in russian igor help but he turned away and went into the bedroom just then they were taking marina and lyuda out of the bedroom igor said he knew marina and lyuda that marina in fact was azerbaijani and he took both of them to the neighbors and the idea stole through me that maybe igor had led them to our apartment something like that but if he was my friend he was supposed to save me then they were striking me very hard we have an indian vase a metal one they were hitting me on the back with it and i blacked out they took me out onto the balcony a second time to throw me out the window they were already sure that i was dead because i didn t react at all to the new blows someone said she s already dead let s throw her out when they carried me out onto the balcony for the second time when i was about to die the second time i heard someone say in azerbaijani don t kill her i know her she s a teacher i can still hear that voice ringing in my ears but i can t remember whose voice it was it wasn t igor because he speaks azerbaijani with an accent his mother is russian and they speak russian at home he speaks azerbaijani worse than our marina does i remember when they carried me in and threw me on the bed he came up to me that person and i having opened my eyes saw and recognized that person but immediately passed out cold i had been beaten so much that i didn t have the strength to remember him i only remember that this person was older and he had a high position unfortunately i can t remember anything more what should i say about igor he didn t treat me badly i had heard a lot about him that he wasn t that good a person that he sometimes drank too much once he boasted to me that he had served in afghanistan he knew that women usually like bravery in a man especially if a man was in afghanistan if he was wounded then it s about eighty percent sure that he will be treated very sympathetically with respect later i found out that he had served in ufa and was injured but that s not in afghanistan of course i found that all out later among the people who were in our apartment my karina also saw the secretary of the party organization i don t know his last name his first name is najaf he is an armenian born azerbaijani but later karina wasn t so sure she was no longer a hundred percent sure that it was he she saw and she didn t want to endanger him she said he was there and a little while later maybe they beat me so much that i am confusing him with someone else no it seems like it was he i am sure it was he because when he came to see us the first time he said one thing and the next time he said something entirely different the investigators haven t summoned him yet he came to see us in the khimik boarding house where we were living at the time he brought groceries and flowers this was right before march th he almost started crying he was so upset to see our condition i don t know if he was putting us on or not but later after we had told the investigator and they summoned him to the procuracy he said that he had been in baku he wasn t in sumgait the fact that he changed his testimony leads me to believe that karina is right that in fact it was he who was in our apartment i don t know how the investigators are now treating him at one point i wondered and asked and was told that he had an alibi and was not in our apartment couldn t he have gone to baku and arranged an alibi i m not ruling out that possibility ill now return to our apartment mamma had come to you could say that she bought them off with the gold father gave her when they were married her wedding band and her watch were gold she bought her own and her husband s lives with them she gave the gold to a year old boy vadim vorobyev a russian boy he speaks azerbaijani perfectly he s an orphan who was raised by his grandfather and who lives in sumgait on nizami street he goes to a special school one for mentally handicapped children but i ll say this i m a teacher all the same and in a matter of minutes i can form an opinion that boy is not at all mentally handicapped he s healthy he can think just fine and analyze too policemen should be so lucky and he s cunning too after that he went home and tore all of the pictures out of his photo album he beat mamma and demanded gold saying lady if you give us all the gold and money in your apartment we ll let you live and mamma told them where the gold was he brought in the bag and opened it shook out the contents and everyone who was in the apartment jumped on it started knocking each other over and taking the gold from one another i m surprised they didn t kill one another right then mamma was still in control of herself she had been beaten up her face was black and blue from the blows and her eyes were filled with blood and she ran into the other room father was lying there tied up with a gag in his mouth and a pillow over his face there was a broken table on top of the pil low mamma grabbed father and he couldn t walk like me he was half dead halfway into the other world he couldn t comprehend anything couldn t see and was covered with black and blue mamma pulled the gag out of his mouth it was some sort of cloth i think it was a slipcover from an armchair the bandits were still in our apartment even in the room mamma pulled father out of led him out of carried him out of we had two armchairs in that room a small magazine table a couch a television and a screen three people were standing next to that screen and into their shirts their pants everywhere imaginable they were shoving shot glasses and cups from the coffee service mamma saw them out of the corner of her eye she said i was afraid to turn around i just seized father and started pulling him but at the threshold i couldn t hold him up he fell down and i picked him up again and dragged him down the stairs to the neighbors mamma remembered one of the criminals the one who had watched her with his face half turned toward her out of one eye she says i realized that my death would come from that person i looked him in the eyes and he recoiled from fear and went stealing later they caught that scoundrel meanwhile mamma grabbed father and left i was alone igor had taken marina away mamma and father were gone karina was already outside i didn t know what they were doing to her i was left all alone and at that moment i became someone else do you understand even though i knew that neither mother and father in the other room nor marina and lyuda under the bed could save me all the same i somehow managed to hold out i went on fighting them i bit someone i remember and i scratched another but when i was left alone i realized what kind of people they were the ones i had observed the ones who beat karina what kind of people they were the ones who beat me that it was all unnecessary that i was about to die and that all of that would die with me at some point i took heart when i saw the young man from the next building i didn t know his name but we would greet one another when we met we knew that we were from the same microdistrict when i saw him i said neighbor is that you in so doing i placed myself in great danger he realized that if i lived i would remember him that s when he grabbed the axe the axe that had been taken from my father i automatically fell to my knees and raised my hands to take the blow of the axe although at the time it would have been better if he had struck me in the head with the axe and put me out of my misery when he started getting ready to wind back for the blow someone came into the room the newcomer had such an impact on everyone that my neighbor s axe froze in the air everyone stood at attention for this guy like soldiers in the presence of a general everyone waited for his word continue the atrocities or not he said enough let s go to the third entryway in the third entryway they killed uncle shurik aleksandr gambarian this confirms once again that they had prepared in advance almost all of them left with him as they went picking up pillows blankets whatever they needed whatever they found all the way up to worn out slippers and one boot someone else had already taken the other four people remained in the room soldiers who didn t obey their general they had to have come recently because other faces had flashed in front of me over those to hours but i had never seen those three one of them kuliyev i identified him later a native of the sisian district of armenia an azerbaijani had moved to azerbaijan a year before he told me in armenian sister don t be afraid i ll drive those three azerbaijanis out of here that s just what he said those azerbaijanis as though he himself were not azerbaijani but some other nationality he said with such hatred i ll drive them out of here now and you put your clothes on and find a hammer and nails and nail the door shut because they ll be coming back from apartment that s when i found out that they had gone to apartment before that the person in the eskimo dogskin coat the one who came in and whom they listened to the general said that they were going to the third entryway kuliyev helped me get some clothes on because l couldn t do it by myself marina s old fur coat was lying on the floor he threw it over my shoulders i was racked with shivers and he asked where he could find nails and a hammer he wanted to give them to me so that when he left i could nail the door shut but the door was lying on the floor in the hall i went out onto the balcony there were broken windows and flowers and dirt from flowerpots were scattered on the floor it was impossible to find anything he told me well fine i won t leave you here would any of the neighbors let you in they ll be back they won t calm down they know you re alive he told me all this in armenian then he returned to the others and said what are you waiting for leave they said ah you just want to chase us out of here and do it with her yourself no we want to do it to he urged them on but gently not coarsely because he was alone against them although they were still just boys not old enough to be drafted he led them out of the room and went down to the third floor with them himself and said leave what s the mat ter aren t you men go fight with the men what do you want of her and he came back upstairs they wanted to come up after him and he realized that he couldn t hold them off forever then he asked me where he could hide me i told him at the neighbors on the fourth floor apartment we were on really good terms with them we knocked on the door and he explained in azerbaijani the neighbor woman opened the door and immediately said i m an azerbaijani he said i know let her sit at your place a while don t open the door to anyone no one knows about this i won t tell anyone let her stay at your place she says fine have her come in i went in she cried a bit and gave me some stockings i had gone entirely numb and was racked with nervous shudders i burst into tears even though i was wearing marina s old fur coat it s a short one a half length i was cold all the same i asked do you know where my family is what happened to them she says no i don t know anything i m afraid to go out of the apartment now they re so wild that they don t look to see who s azerbaijani and who s armenian kuliyev left ten minutes later my neighbor says you know lyuda i don t want to lose my life because of you or my son and his wife go stay with someone else during the butchery in our apartment one of the scum a sadist took my earring in his mouth i had pearl earrings on and ripped it out tearing the earlobe the other earring was still there when i m nervous i fix my hair constantly and then when i touched my ear i noticed that i had one earring on i took it out and gave it to her she took the earring but she led me out of the apartment i went out and didn t know where to go i heard someone going upstairs i don t know who it was but assumed it was them with tremendous difficulty i end up to our apartment i wanted to die in my own home i go into the apartment and hear that they are coming up to our place to the fifth floor i had to do something i went into the bedroom where marina and lyuda had hidden and saw that the bed was overturned instead of hiding i squatted near some broken christmas ornaments found an unbroken one and started sobbing then they came in someone said that there were still some things to take i think that someone pushed me under the bed i lay on the floor and there were broken ornaments on it under my head and legs i got all cut up but i lay there without moving my heart was beating so hard it seemed the whole town could hear it there were no lights on maybe that s what saved me they were burning matches and toward the end they brought in a candle they started picking out the clothes that could still be worn they took father s sport jacket and a bedspread the end of which was under my head they pulled on the one end and it felt like they were pulling my hair out i almost cried out and again i realized i wasn t getting out of there alive and i started to strangle myself again i took my throat in one hand and pressed the other on my mouth so as not to wheeze so that i would die and they would only find me afterward they were throwing the burned matches under the bed and i got burned but i withstood it something inside of me held on someone s hand was protecting me to the end i knew that i was going to die but i didn t know how i knew that if i survived i would walk out of that apartment but if i found out that one of my family had died i would die for sure because i had never been so close to death and couldn t imagine how you could go on living without your mother or father or without your sister marina i thought was still alive she went to lyuda s place or someone is hiding her i tried to think that igor wouldn t let them be killed he served in afghanistan he should protect her while i was strangling myself i said my good byes to everyone and then i thought how could marina survive alone if they killed all of us how would she live all by herself there were six people in the room they talked among themselves and smoked one talked about his daughter saying that there was no children s footwear in our apartment that he could take for his daughter another said that he liked the apartment recently we had done a really good job fixing everything up and that he would live there after everything was all over they started to argue a third one says how come you get it i have four children and there are three rooms here that s just what i need all these years i ve been living in god awful places another one says neither of you gets it we ll set fire to it and leave then someone said that azerbaijanis live right next door the fire could move over to their place and they to my good fortune didn t set fire to the apartment and left oh yes i just remembered while they were raping me they repeated quite frequently let the armenian women have babies for us muslim babies let them bear azerbaijanis for the struggle against the armenians then they said those muslims can carry on our holy cause heroes they repeated it very often reference for 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
