Epress.am News from Armenia
Azerbaijan today is home to 2,500 to 3,000 Armenians; however, out of fear, they don’t make their ethnicity known, said ethnographer Hranush Kharatyan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today.
Kharatyan mentioned that Azerbaijan’s official figures cite 120,000 Armenians living in Azerbaijan, adding that Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian population is included in this figure.
On the subject of refugees in both countries, the ethnographer said that the problems of these groups are ignored in both countries. She noted, however, that the situation is better in Armenia because a significant portion of the refugees in Azerbaijan are kept in the ghetto and cannot leave “to demonstrate their wretched state to the international community.”
Kharatyan then touched upon the 1988–1990 massacres of Armenians in Baku: “Developments reached their climax on Jan. 19, 1990, and it was no longer possible to be Armenian in Baku. On Jan. 20, considering the problem with Armenians finally solved, they barricaded… the Central Committee, the Supreme Council and even [Armenian National Hero Nikolai] Ryzhkov, who seems like a normal person, knew about these events. The man, who wrote about these events in condemning tone, says that there was a tragedy on the morning of Jan. 20, because the Popular Front barricaded the Supreme Council and Central Committee buildings. So there was no tragedy until then? Everything was normal? They were people, Armenians were killed — it was nothing, this whole turn of the month wasn’t a tragedy, and it was a tragedy [only] when the symbols of power were blocked?”
Today Azerbaijan, according to the ethnographer, celebrates those who carried out the massacres of Armenians in Baku, Sumgait and Kirovabad. Revered is Azerbaijani Lieutenant Ramil Safarov, who hacked to death with an axe a sleeping Armenian officer in Budapest in 2004.
“And it’s hard not to see here that a culture where an aggressor, a murderer becomes a hero cultivated,” she said.
Recall, today is Azerbaijan’s National Day of Mourning for Black January, which commemorates the night of Jan. 19–20, 1990, when Soviet troops entered Baku to suppress dissident rioters that ended in the deaths of over 100 people.
These events were preceded by the Jan. 13–16, 1990 pogroms of Armenians in Baku, which occurred as a result of the deliberate non-intervention of the USSR authorities.