On a previous visit to Azerbaijan in 2014, I had travelled from Baku north-westwards to Sheki, and from there on to Tbilisi in Georgia (see entry of 24 March 2015). Along the way I visited towns and villages that illustrated the diversity of the country’s history and heritage, the remnants of peoples and civilisations that had been swept away by the moving sands of history, the migrations of peoples, by conquest or assimilation. A notable recent example had been the abrupt obliteration of the Armenian presence in Azerbaijan amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conflict between the nascent post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. On this occasion, in February 2020, I travelled to Sumgait, a short distance up the coast from Baku. The town had become notorious for the “Sumgait pogrom” in February1988, when a rampaging Azeri mob had hunted down Armenian residents, murdered them and raped them, forcing the rest of the Armenian community to flee.
The Lonely Planet guide had a very brief entry for Sumgait, describing the city as a “dystopian nightmare”, referring to its Soviet-era chemical industry. Perhaps the most uncomplimentary entry in a guidebook I had ever seen. Sumgait is indeed rather a drab city, but its depiction by the Lonely Planet seems harsh. Long, broad avenues lined with apartment buildings, typical of many Soviet towns, do little to inspire. Perhaps it was even more grim in the Soviet period. But there is a park, and monuments have been erected to give the town a civic identity. There is a long sandy beach that could indeed have been much better framed by more imaginative town planners than the architects of Soviet Sumgait. We found nice places to eat. Notably a restaurant overlooking the beach, where we ate qutab, a speciality of Sumgait, delicious pastries served with a variety of fillings, including meat, herbs, cheese and pumpkin.
The city’s most famous monument, dating from Soviet times, is the Peace Dove sculpture, a swirling abstract representation of a dove that is the symbol of the town. Given the 1988 events for which Sumgait is famous, the monument seems grimly ironic. In the late 1980s, Sumgait had a population of over 220,000, of whom around 17,000 were ethnic-Armenians. The backdrop of the tragedy of the Armenians of Sumgait was the escalating conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians had long been aggrieved at the inclusion of the Armenian-majority province of Karabakh in Azerbaijan. As the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, loosened the Soviet regime, Armenians were emboldened to push for its transfer to Armenia. That February 1988, Armenians began demonstrating in Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert, for their province to be joined with Armenia, and the province’s Supreme Soviet voted to that effect.
Disquiet among Azeris in Sumgait was aggravated by inflammatory statements by some Azerbaijani officials as well as stories told by Azeris from Armenia who claimed they had been beaten and forced out. As demonstrations erupted in Sumgait, some prominent local Azerbaijanis tried to calm the crowds, telling them that the rumours were false. But this message did not go down well. Others called for Armenians to be expelled or killed. Speeches ended with the cry “Death to Armenians.” Violence broke out on 27 February, as Azeri mobs entered apartment buildings seeking out Armenians. Unspeakable acts of savagery were carried out, including gang rapes. Some bodies were so mutilated as to be unrecognisable. Thousands of Armenians were given refuge by Azeri or Russian neighbours, but notably, the local police did nothing. Interior ministry troops tried to restore order on 28 February, but were attacked by the mobs. Some of their armoured personnel carriers were turned over or put out of action with Molotov cocktails. Finally, on the 29th, armed forces with tanks entered the city, imposed martial law and escorted surviving Armenian residents to safety. The official tally of victims released by the Soviet Prosecutor’s office counted 32 dead, of whom 26 were Armenians and six Azeris. Armenian sources claimed numbers in the hundreds.
Trials were held in Moscow. While some of the perpetrators received heavy sentences, many were treated lightly, being sentenced for mere hooliganism. While Armenians were dissatisfied that the main instigators had not been punished, many Azeris felt the punishments were too severe, and even campaigned for the release of the “heroes of Sumgait.” For Armenians the pogrom was quickly linked to the 1915 genocide, and a cross stone commemorating the violence was placed at the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. But among Azeris a conspiracy theory gained currency that the pogrom had in fact been contrived by Armenians in order to discredit Azerbaijan. In Azerbaijan the pogrom is euphemistically referred to as the “Sumgait events.” There is something particularly distasteful about blaming the atrocities dealt upon the Armenian population of Sumgait on the victims themselves, and the failure of Azerbaijan to face up to this dark moment in its recent history is as shaming as the event itself. The massacre in Sumgait was followed by pogroms against the Armenians in other Azerbaijani cities, in Kirovabad (today known as Ganza), Azerbaijan’s second city, in November 1988, and in Baku in January 1990.
For most Azeris, the narrative is about the heroism and sacrifices of their own people, the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding districts captured by the Armenians in the war of the early 1990s. Outside a school in Sumgait I saw a memorial to eight former pupils, young men who had been killed in the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, “our martyrs” my guide told me, a young woman who had not yet been born in 1988.
On a hill overlooking the city and the Caspian Sea in Baku, the Martyr’s Alley commemorates the Azeri dead of the fist Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s, as well as the victims of the “Black January” crackdown by Soviet forces which followed the pogrom against the city’s Armenian population in January 1990 and mounting disorder in the city amid demonstrations against communist rule. More than 130 people were killed during the Soviet crackdown, which succeeded in largely uniting Azerbaijanis against communist rule and strengthening demands for independence. The Martyr’s Alley had first been established as a cemetery for Muslim victims of the so-called March Events of 1918, during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, when thousands were killed. Upon coming to power, the Bolsheviks destroyed the cemetery and replaced it with an amusement park, but after the end of the Soviet Union the site was reinstated as a burial site for national heroes. Lines of graves under the trees, many with fresh flowers, and pictures of the young men they contain, mostly casualties of the Karabakh war. At one end of the Alley, overlooking the sea, is the tall domed eternal flame memorial.
The Martyr’s Alley reminds us of the thousands of Azeri casualties of the conflicts with Armenia, not just the young soldiers killed in the war, but the hundreds of thousands of Azeris driven out of Nagorno-Karabakh and the territory surrounding it that was seized by the Armenians. Atrocities had also been carried out against Azeris, notably the massacre by Armenian troops of civilians fleeing the village on Khojaly during the first Karabakh war, in February 1992. Both sides focus on the sufferings and tragedies of their own people, and the crimes committed against them, often barely even recognising that people on the other side were also wronged. What hope that one day Azerbaijan might acknowledge the massacres of Armenians in Sumgait, Baku and Kirovabad, and that Armenia might acknowledge that there was no possible justification for the killing of civilians fleeing Khojaly? More than a hundred years after the Armenian genocide in 1915, such a prospect unfortunately looks far off, and the wounds of conflict look likely to remain open.
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