treatment of armenians in azerbaijan deposition of vitaly nikolayevich danielian born attended th grade middle school no resident at building apartment microdistrict no sumgait azerbaijan really people in town didn t know what was happening on february i came home from school at o clock being excused to leave before the last period in order to go to baku when we left everything in town was fine life was the same as usual a few groups of people were discussing things soccer and other things then we got on the sumgait bus bound for baku for my first cousin s birthday my father my mother and i we spent the day in baku and on the th somewhere around p m we got on the bus for home figuring that i d have enough time to do my homework for the next day when we were entering town near the story high rises our bus was stopped by a very large crowd the crowd demanded that the armenians get off the bus the driver says that there are no armenians on board then everyone on the bus begins to shout that there are no armenians on board the group comes up to the doors of the bus and has people get out one by one not checking passports just going by the way people look we get off the bus but are not taken for armenians we set out in the direction of home at first we were going to go into an old building where we knew there d be a place to hide but the whole road was packed with groups of people all the way from block to the th microdistrict these groups were emptying people s pockets and checking passports people who didn t have passports with them were beaten as well then we decided to go home instead near the story high rises i saw burning cars and a great many people standing around the driveways yelling death to the armenians was written on the cars when we came into the courtyard we live in an l shaped building it was still quiet we went on upstairs but didn t turn on any lights we tried to call baku to warn our relatives who were due to arrive on wednesday not to come then there was a knock at the door it was our neighbors who advised us to come down to stay at their place we went down to their place and they led us to the basement they live on the first floor and have a basement which you enter across the balcony we sat in the basement while an armenian woman was beaten she ran away naked our neighbors daughter said that that s right that s what the armenians deserve because in stepanakert allegedly people were being killed girls from agdam had been raped we didn t stay very long in the basement we tried to support one another as best we could looking out the small window with the iron grating papa watched and said things now and then he said that there was a fire near building probably a car on fire then one of the groups approached our driveway and demanded that they be shown the apartments where armenians lived the neighbors said that there weren t any armenians here and the group set out for the other wing of the building they appeared from the side of the building where i later found out a woman had been murdered the woman who ran away naked died yuri avakian was killed too when the crowd left the neighbors said that it was all over and we could go home we went back up to our place and again didn t turn on the light we started to gather up our things in order to leave sumgait for a while we tried to call a relative who lived in sumgait but there was no answer we decided she had already left we sat at home the phone rang and the caller asked to speak with my father i called him to the phone it was jeykhun mamedov from my father s work brigade he said he was disgusted by what was happening in our town he asked for our address and promised to get a car and help us get out of the city to be quite honest papa didn t want to give him our address but my mother got on the phone and told him some minutes after the call a crowd ran into our entryway bursting into the building they broke down the door and came into the apartment they came straight to our apartment they knew exactly where the armenians were they came into our place we tried to resist but there was nothing we could do one of them took my parents passports and began to read them he read the surname danielian turned the page read armenian and that alone was enough to doom us he said that we should be moved quickly out into the courtyard where they would have done with us another standing next to him pushed some of the keys on the piano and said your death has tolled they had knives and steel truncheons i had a knife in my hand unfortunately i didn t use it i just knew that if i didn t give up the knife things would be much worse they struck my parents and said that i should put the knife on the piano then one of them commanded that we be taken outside one person was giving orders when we were taken outdoors i went in the middle and my mother was behind me someone started to push her so she d walk faster i let her go ahead of me and fell in behind her when he tried to push me i hit him and at that moment they began beating my parents i realized that resistance was completely useless we are taken out into the courtyard and the neighbors are standing on their balconies to see what will happen next the crowd surrounds us at first they strike me and i m knocked out when i come to they beat me again i lose consciousness often i don t see or hear my parents since i was the first one hit and was out cold when i come to i try to pick them up they are lying next to me the crowd is gone the only people around are watching from their balconies that s it i try to pick them up but can t my left arm is broken i start toward the drive wanting to tell the neighbors to call an ambulance the bodies of my parents are still warm we were attacked at around o clock i regain consciousness at about and try to make it up the stairs home when i knock at the neighbors door they push me back and tell me to go away i go up to the third floor our neighbor puts a damp cloth on my head and says she will call an ambulance she sends her son off for one and takes me to our apartment i often look out the window to see if the ambulance has arrived but i can t see very far as a result of the blows and it seems that my parents have already been taken away then i calm down and try to convince myself that they have been taken away and everything will be ok but they were still there later at in the morning as i found out the ambulance picked them up but they were already dead if they received attention on time it is possible they would still be alive later around o clock on the th policemen in civilian clothing come to our house with some assistants they call an ambulance and minutes later it arrives and i am taken to the sumgait emergency hospital there they stitch the wounds on my head and rebind my arm at o clock i and the other armenians who are in the hospital are sent by ambulance to baku in my ward at the sumgait hospital there were five people all of them armenians the hospital was nearly overflowing with armenians the only azerbaijanis there were those whose car had flipped over before the events before the th then i was in the semashko hospital in baku i was there days when i was released on the th day i found out that my parents were dead at first they told me that they were in moscow being treated but later i found out that they were dead my father s older brother told me my father s name was nikolai artemovich danielian he was born in my mother born in was seda osipovna danielian papa worked at pmk the leader of the roofing brigade mamma was a compressor operator they were also beaten on the head the coroner s report stated that their heads were smashed open and bled profusely at the confrontation i met jeykhun mamedov who had called as it turned out later he had been the one who tipped the crowd off he had called specifically to find out if we were at home and to find out the exact address and dispatch the group he knew the phone number but didn t know the address before the events i had never seen him but had often spoken with him on the phone when he would ask to speak with my father i knew him by name he denies that i was the one who answered the phone saying that my father answered it he denies that he called from a public phone saying that he called from home which also isn t true i heard noise and the sounds of automobiles as i later found out earlier he had been convicted but had never served any time he had received a suspended sentence he was about years old i don t know if he has since confessed or not i am sure that he was the one who tipped the crowd off one hundred percent sure my parents were from karabagh father was from the village of badar and was two years old when his family moved to baku where his elder brothers were to go to school he was a student at the naval school but never graduated he went off to work on the virgin lands one of the gigantic agricultural projects instituted under khrushchev when he returned he lived in baku and later moved to sumgait helping with the town s construction mamma was from the village of dagdagan also from karabagh she worked in sumgait first in a bookstore and later on a construction site my sister is older than i she lives with her husband here in karabagh i always loved my parents that was why i went on to th grade because it was their dream that i would continue my studies i finished th grade and wanted to enter the baku nautical school and after that the military school but later i changed my mind or rather my parents got me to recon sider saying that it would be better to finish the th grade and then join the naval school i was planning to be in the navy almost my whole life long since childhood i had dreamed of being a sailor my father wanted it more than anything he always recollected his youth telling of the school and he always said that he had made a big mistake in leaving it now i live in karabagh and never plan to leave here i will stay at the home of my grandfather of my ancestors till the end of my days while in the hospital in baku i learned the fates of many others who had suffered as well like ishkhan trdatov he managed to hold them off at their residence in microdistrict building apartment for a long time lost his father gabriel and by some miracle managed to survive i also learned of uncle sasha from building whose daughter was raped besides them valery i forgot his last name was in the hospital too about a year younger than i he went to school no he was riding with his parents in the car people were throwing rocks at them he was hit and his parents brought him to the hospital and he was in our ward we even came to be friends before that we had just seen each other around town but in the hospital we got to know one another better i learned of the fates of others those who had died or who were befallen by misfortune today suren harutunian the first secretary of the communist party of armenia was shown on television to be honest i am glad that armenia agreed to recognize nagorno karabagh as part of the armenian soviet socialist republic i was repelled no revolted to hear the baku announcer who read the decision of the azerbaijani supreme soviet presidium against karabagh becoming part of armenia after the events in sumgait and those in baku the best solution is to give karabagh to armenia return it to armenia since the people want to live peacefully with the azerbaijanis but everything has to be right before they can do that i arrived in karabagh on april i felt very bad i had constant headaches after a while my strength returned my older sister suzanna took me in i think that justice should prevail the people are demanding their due you can t take away what is their due my parents and i often spoke of nagorno karabagh often visited here spent almost all of my vacations here we had even decided that if karabagh would be made part of armenia we would move here for sure we always said that the armenian people had suffered much and that what had been done in removing nagorno karabagh from armenia was wrong sooner or later mistakes should be corrected and in order to correct a mistake it must not be repeated and the fate of all nagorno karabagh lies in the hands of our government june stepanakert 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
