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Time in Yerevan: 11:07,   28 March 2024

“Sumgait”: Ilham Aliyev insults his own nation: PART 1

“Sumgait”: Ilham Aliyev insults his own nation: PART 1

On November 21, speaking in Sumgait on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the city, Ilham Aliyev recalled what happened there at the end of February of 1988, as a result of which the name of the city became synonym and went down in history as a symbol of misanthropy and genocide. Only Aliyev’s “gesture” was far from feeling remorse for the crimes committed by his country.

He merely decided to make his personal contribution to the grossest falsifications of Azerbaijan’s recent history and the justification of the organizers and executioners of Sumgait. Recalling the case of the Budapest murderer Safarov, there shouldn’t be really anything strange in this at all.

There is no need to speak about the limits of moral decency and respect for the memory of innocent victims of Sumgait in Azerbaijan’s case - including its top officials.

  But there’s also one more factor. It seemed unacceptable to us that the President of Azerbaijan personally took part in discrediting his own people. And, yes, this is exactly what Aliyev did when confirming and repeating the tales of his own propaganda that the pogroms in Sumgait were organized by Armenians and lead by someone named Eduard Grigoryan. Thereby, he admitted that thousands of Azerbaijanis who participated in the pogroms blindly followed a single Armenian, like a bunch of sheep following the shepherd, and the law enforcement agencies of Azerbaijan could do nothing with him for three whole days.

  There’s nothing you won’t do for your own parent, right? It is our duty to remind that the hit of Aliyev’s speech was his statement that “If Heydar Aliyev had been in Azerbaijan at that time, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would’ve never had happened".

On the other hand, President Aliyev's speech became our motive to reiterate the main points in favor of the indisputable fact that the Armenian Genocide in Sumgait was organized by the State Security Committee of Azerbaijan with the tacit acceptance of Kremlin. Let’s not forget that President Aliyev’s father was a KGB general long before he was a politician.

The research article below in both Russian and English was published about 4.5 years ago, in May 2015. No need to hope for Baku’s adequate reaction to the presented facts. That’s the main reason why the article is aimed primarily at the formation of the international public opinion on this really important issue in terms of the history of the conflict.

In the end, we should, perhaps, thank Ilham Aliyev for the given opportunity to share the irrefutable facts against which Baku’s lies would sound ridiculous and sacrilegious once again.

Sumgait – a case of Azerbaijan’s KGB

Covering up a crime and criminals also constitutes a crime. One recalls this truth every time one familiarizes himself with the sophisticated tricks of Azerbaijan aimed at covering up their guilt for the monstrous acts of February27-29, 1988 in Sumgait. As new evidences about “Sumgait” emerge, namely – details, documents and facts –they take up greater and greater (and therefore more doomed) efforts in Baku to completely falsify and twist the historical realities. It is not by chance that these efforts have intensified relatively recently, after the Armenian side sharply increased and institutionalized operations in the fields of public outreach and information.

Prior to that in Baku they preferred to largely remain silent about “Sumgait”, following the saying “let sleeping dogs lie”. At the same time the Azerbaijanis knew very well what happened in Sumgait. For these reasons there was a silence of more than 20 years; but then there was a sudden revival of the issue after the Armenian side unveiled a great number of facts exposing the case. And the Armenian side presented documents of various formats and not empty propagandistic pieces, which the Azeris usually present as counterarguments. When all the facts, sources, documents, witnesses, video and photo materials speak against you, you have no choice but to resort to unfounded statements and long-abused clichés.

First comes the conclusion; the investigation will follow.

We deliberately waited for a couple of months, not responding to the messages of Baku mass media of the end of February and beginning of March. And now when the combustion of lies has subsided, until the next February, it is worth examining the publications which come to prove that in Baku they have been so concerned about recent revelations that they have taken up more active actions. While last year the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan announced that “the causes, the context and the overall reality of Sumgait events was quite different”, this year they decided to describe exactly what is “different” in detail.

According to Baku mass media, Deputy Chairman of Azerbaijani State Television Ibrahim Mamedov wrote a book titled The Sumgait Provocation against Azerbaijan: The Grigoryan Case, the presentation of which took place at the end of February during the conference at the Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan devoted to the 27th anniversary of “Sumgait”. The venue of the event itself indicates that the program of criminal falsification of Sumgait events is being carried out under the control of the President of Azerbaijan personally. This is not surprising given that last year this project was supervised by the Chief of Staff of President’s Administration Ramiz Mehtiyev, who was infamous for a number of statements on the same “Grigoryan case”.

The main idea of Mamedov’s book repeats an old tale according to which “the Sumgait events of 1988 were a pre-planned provocation against Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani people”. To support this version, he argues that “all the facts and documents prove that Eduard Grigoryan was taking part in the murder of six Armenians and that he personally confessed this”. “The investigation revealed that the Armenians and the intelligence services of the USSR had previously prepared for these events. The collected evidence comes to prove that Sumgait events constitute a preplanned provocation”, – announced Mamedov without demonstrating any of the “collected evidence”.

First Deputy Prosecutor General of Azerbaijan RustamYusubov (who had announced about the resumption of investigations on Sumgait events last year), said during the presentation the most crucial and “sensational” result of the investigation: in “Odnoklassniki” social network they found a photograph of a man who looks like Eduard Grigoryan.

Based on the examination of this photograph, the Baku-based detectives concluded that it is his photo and that he is currently residing in the Moscow Region. That was the final result of one year’s work of the First Deputy Prosecutor-General and his investigation team. One should think that during the next year they will be busy searching for Grigoryan in other social networks. Because based on Yusubov’s statements, the prosecutors have no other task except searching and “exposing” only one person among hundreds of the Sumgait killers and pogrom-makers. The reason for this is plain and simple – Eduard Grigoryan has an Armenian surname.

The goal of Baku investigators and propagandists however does not amount solely to searching for Grigoryan. In Azerbaijan a long time ago, almost immediately after the events, they announced their verdict, claiming that “the Sumgait events were organized by Grigoryan together with his brothers and other Armenian extremists who were carrying out orders of the USSR KGB”.

Besides, the very need to somehow back up this version made the “Baku Pinkertons” announce about the “resumption of the investigation”, although the legal practice in the whole world would follow the opposite approach – first they conduct investigation and then, based on the obtained data they make a conclusion and bring forth charges. The problem is that this commonly accepted way has brought to completely different, ruthlessly exposing conclusions for Baku.

The novelty of this season is the emergence of another non-Azerbaijani surname in the announcements made by Baku. It is Georgian Konstantin Phakadze, whose whole “guilt” was that his wife was an Armenian and also that he honestly told about everything he had seen in those days. His story, together with very valuable observations, is included in the book Sumgait Tragedy. Pogroms Against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan (Volume 1, Eyewitness Accounts) These two facts served as basis for the Azerbaijani investigators to announce that “provocations in Sumgait were done by Phakadze, who was an activist of separatist Karabakh Committee”. For this they are referring to “the archival materials of the KGB”, again without demonstrating any “materials” as a proof.

The legal aspects of the investigation

27 years have passed after Sumgait. Mass crime was going on unpunished and without any obstacles for three full days on February 27, 28 and 29 in the city located only 25-30 km away from Baku. The crime was committed openly, in broad daylight, in front of law enforcement bodies and thousands of citizens, and it involved hundreds of Azerbaijanis. It resulted in multiple murders, rapes, tortures, plunders, arsons as well as deportation of 18.000 civilian residents of that city.

Having resumed the investigation of those events more than 20 years later, in Baku they could only find, from among voluminous documents, one single Armenian surname among hundreds of criminals and started to search for this very man, accusing him of organizing the whole mass crime.

The database of facts at the same time is substituted by unfounded propagandistic statements and a couple of references to Azerbaijani sources. No argument of legal nature is brought in the resources that are made public.

During the above-mentioned meeting Yusubov made the following statement: “Appropriate work has been done for identifying the location of one of the main organizers of the Sumgait events -Eduard Grigoryan”. That the Baku investigators of the Sumgait case (who use social networks for searching criminals) have one single person as the target of their investigation among many perpetrators, is demonstrated also by the title of the book presented in Baku – The case of Eduard Grigoryan.

Thus, there is a clear attempt of bringing downgrade an ethnically motivated mass murder, which has all the elements of genocide within the meaning of the UN Genocide Convention, to a crime committed by one person. Otherwise, in Azerbaijan they would now be searching not for only one among hundreds of Sumgait executioners, but for all those who were never held responsible or punished for organizing and committing the crime. In that case the main criteria of the investigation would be not the ethnicity but completely different factors.

A question arises: On what legal grounds is the Azerbaijani side searching specifically for Eduard Grigoryan? What new investigative materials and newly discovered facts dictate the necessity to identity his location and in the future to sue him again?

Let us now examine the facts.

 

  1. Grigoryan was detained on 1 March 1988 together with dozens of other suspects accused of committing the Sumgait crimes. According to the data demonstrated in a number of sources, there were altogether more than 90 people detained in the framework of the investigation, while hundreds took part in the pogrom. The Sumgait case was dispersed and presented as several separate criminal cases. Grigoryan is mentioned only in one of those cases. The original copy of prosecutor’s indictment , in which Grigoryan was among the six Azerbaijanis, is freely accessible online (in Russian).

The criminal case N18/55461-88 in question was investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR, the final indictment was signed by the Azerbaijani Prosecutor-General Ilyas Ismayilov and the trial was held in Sumgait. In December 1989 Grigoryan was sentenced to 12 years in prison and as a result, in the framework of similar cases in the entire Soviet Union, was conveyed to Armenia. In December 1992 he was subject to amnesty declared by the President of the newly independent Republic of Armenia, and released from prison. After that his traces have been lost, however it can be claimed convincingly that he left Armenia.

In any case, one thing is clear – Eduard Grigoryan was released according to a legitimate procedure and there are no grounds for double prosecution, unless new facts and circumstances have become known. The Azerbaijani side does not present such evidence and is making only statements that have nothing in common with jurisprudence.

In Baku, on the level of Azerbaijan’s Deputy Prosecutor-General, they are trying to explain their search for Grigoryan by referring to the old verdict about his role as the “organizer of pogroms”, without backing up this verdict with any legal fact or proof. It is beyond doubt that should Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor’s office have had at least one single new fact that could legally justify the search or could bring a new case against Grigoryan, this would have been immediately made public and widely spread.

Case N18/55461-88

Let us bring another quote fromYusubov’s speech. “The investigation of Sumgait events of 1988 was conducted in a biased way and was based on political order; the real criminals avoided punishment. The main prosecution cases were run by investigating officers who were invited by the USSR General Prosecutor’s office and from different regions of Russia. As a result of the investigation they came to a conclusion that the Sumgait events were organized by the Armenians and by the special services of foreign countries. Information about the Sumgait events being organized by the USSR was received during the investigation that was carried out early in 1989-1990s.”

Again, there is not a single reference to the original source, not a single document or piece of evidence.

At the same time there is a grain of truth in the statements made by Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor-General. The case was indeed heard in a biased way and the actual culprits – first of all the masterminds – were not brought to justice. This was best described by former Prosecutor of the Azerbaijani SSR Ilyas Ismayilov, who later became the Prosecutor-General of the Azerbaijani Republic and from 2006 till now has been a deputy of Milli Majlis and member of Parliamentarian Committee on Human Rights.

In 2003, still not a member of parliament, the same Ismayilov that had signed the indictments on Sumgait pogroms at the time, in an interview to Baku newspaper “Zerkalo” (as a result of mass repressions and persecution of journalists and human rights activists in Azerbaijan this newspaper was closed down in December 2014) said: “The perpetrators, who provoked people to commit pogroms in Sumgait, carry in their pockets mandates of deputies and are sitting today in Milli Mejlis”

As we know, in Azerbaijani Parliament had not a single member with an Armenian surname, either in 2003 or now. And that means Ismayilov did not mean Grigoryan.

The Armenian side would have completely supported the initiative of conducting a new investigation on the case of the Sumgait crimes, if only… if only it weren’t of propagandistic but of a legal nature and if it were dictated by a sincere strife to expose the perpetrators – the organizers and the executioners.

In that case the investigation should have examined the materials of not one but of all the criminal cases on Sumgait deeply hidden in Azerbaijani archives, to which the access of an independent investigator is strictly denied. However, in Baku they publish only one of these cases and they are looking only for one among many convicts.

However, it should be noted that Sumgait is the only crime which was committed in Azerbaijan against the Armenian people at the end of 1980s and beginning of 1990s, on which criminal proceedings were initiated, investigations were carried out and even sentences were issued to only some of the convicts. Even the more, given the fact the cases had been largely covered up by the law enforcement bodies, and that the judges and eyewitnesses had been following the orders from the Kremlin to prove the “hooligan” nature of the Sumgait crimes, still the materials of those criminal cases on their own right are highly valuable official and, first and foremost, legal source for any further investigation into the Sumgait events, shall it ever take place.

Let us add that with the exception of one case (heard in the Supreme Court of USSR in Moscow), all the other cases were heard in the courts of Sumgait and Baku, even though the cases were transferred to regional courts of the Russian Federation.

Court proceedings took place under unprecedented pressure, even threats against lawyers and the Armenian witnesses (this is proven by multiple facts including audio-recordings).

As a result, those witnesses, including Azerbaijanis among them, and lawyers from Armenia, who initially hoped that justice will be served and were ready to give truthful testimony, at the end of the day refused to take part in the proceedings. However, even under these circumstances very valuable testimonies were recorded, including those given by Azerbaijanis, and indisputable facts were revealed, which give special importance to legal materials and especially to the court proceedings.

From the very outset the chances of the Armenian side to influence the cases or the proceedings had been minimal or non-existent at all. The investigation was carried out by the group from the USSR General–Prosecutor’s office, in which about 20 Azerbaijani investigators were included. The cases were heard in Azerbaijan, the indictments were signed by Prosecutor of the Azerbaijani SSR Ilyas Ismayilov – all this indicated that it was the Azerbaijani side which directly controlled and influenced the judicial procedures and the investigation as a whole. However, in Azerbaijan they don’t trust the investigation that was carried out in the Soviet courts and now they have decided to resume the investigation on a single case that has an Armenian surname in it.

By the way, there are many sources to claim – and that has been done by various authors before – that Grigoryan had quite weak, if any, connections to Armenian community in Azerbaijan or elsewhere. As such, there is the testimony given by a classmate of Eduard’s sister Aida Grigoryan. This woman, who is currently residing in Germany, recalls: “Once in the class the pupils were asked to tell their nationalities. When it was Aida Grigoryan’s turn she said that she considered herself to be Russian. We of course rebutted telling her that she has an Armenian surname. She answered that this was just a surname and that she did not consider herself to be an Armenian.”

Let us also add that prior to the Sumgait events Grigoryan had a number of convictions and prison sentences.

At the end of February and the beginning of March 1988 he happened to be among 94 convicts who were arrested on the Sumgait case –he was the only Armenian among them; there was also one Russian. All the others were Azerbaijanis. About 80 of them were sentenced to various terms in prison, while one of them, A. Ahmedov, was sentenced by the USSR Supreme Court to capital punishment – death penalty. There is massive non-official evidence (eyewitness accounts, newspaper publications, etc) showing that most of those convicted served only several months and even several weeks in prison and were released shortly. Up until now it is not known (at least for Armenian researchers) whether Ahmedov’s capital punishment was carried out.

The indictment of the case N18/55461-88, as it was mentioned earlier, is available online and anyone can make up their own opinion about how serious today’s charges against Grigoryan are. The case describes in detail unimaginably cruel atrocities committed by seven jerks (how many of them escaped a trial is a different question) against defenceless Armenians, however in the document there is not even a slightest hint on that Grigoryan was the “organizer” of these atrocities – either of the given episode, or of the Sumgait case as a whole.

The charges brought against him on a number of articles of the Criminal Code of the Azerbaijani SSR are not much different from the analogous charges brought against his accomplices, and he has been found guilty according to fewer articles than the others, such as Nizami Safarov or Galib Mamedov. There is no mention of the Grigoryan brothers in the case, together with whom, according to Yusubov, Eduard organized the pogroms.

The crazy version devised by Baku out of helplessness alleging that Grigoryan on the days of the pogrom was “taking revenge from those Sumgait Armenians who refused to pay membership fees to Armenian extremist organizations” gets absolutely no support either, as within the case there is not even a single mention or a hint of any such organization. None of the victims or witnesses mentions him as the organizer or the leader of the gang. To the contrary, all the materials of the case testify that Grigoryan was a common pogrom-maker and rapist, who acted the same way as multiple others with Azeri surnames.

At the same time there is no mention in the case of the involvement of Grigoryan in murders per se. This, however, does not prevent the Azeri propaganda from ascribing to him murders of Armenians, moreover – the number of victims “killed” by Grigoryan extends each year according to the Azeri propaganda. So, if two or three years ago in Baku they spoke of 5-6 people killed by Grigoryan, now this number has grown to 8-10. One may assume that after one or two years Grigoryan will be charged with all the murders carried out in Sumgait.

For the final part of this article look here








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