Перейти к публикации

Pogroms against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan


arthur

Рекомендованные сообщения

■ VANYA BAGRATOVICH BAZIAN

Born 1940

Foreman

Baku Spetsmontazh Administration (UMSMR-1)

Resident at Building 36/7, Apartment 9

Block 14

Sumgait

During the first couple of days of the events, February 27-28th, I was away on a business trip. On the 10th I had got my crew, finished the paper¬work, and left for the Zhdanov District. That's in Azerbaijan, near the Nagorno Karabagh region.

After the 14th, rumors began circulating that in Karabagh, specifically in Stepanakert, an uprising had taken place. They said "uprising" in Azerbaijani, but I don't think it was really an uprising, just a peaceful demonstration. After that the unrests began. Several Armenians living in the Zhdanov District were assaulted and injured. How exactly were they injured? They were beaten severely, even wom¬en; they were accused of participating in the demonstrations, but they live here, and went all the way to Karabagh to demonstrate? After that I started feeling uneasy. Here and there one could overhear conversations of the local folks discussing us: the Armenians had done this, the Armenians had done that. I was attacked a couple of times by school kids. Thanks to the guys from my crew who wouldn't let them come at me with cables and knives. After that I began feeling really scared. I didn't know where to go, what to do. I called home and my chil¬dren told me, "There's violence everywhere, be careful." Well I had a project going on. I told the Second Secretary of the District Party Committee about things that were going on and said I wanted to take my crew off the site. They wouldn't allow it, they said, "Nothing's going to happen to you, we've entrusted this matter to the police, we've warned everyone in the district, nothing will happen to you." Well, in fact they did assign a policeman to look after me as he knew all the locals and would protect me if something were to happen. This man wouldn’t leave me alone for five minutes: he was at work with us the whole time and afterwards he would spend the nights with us, too.

Still, the sense of the impending doom would not leave me and I phoned my wife who told me, "The situation is very tense, be extra careful."

We finished the job at the site, and I left for Sumgait first thing on the morning of the 29th. Before we left the guys warned me that I shouldn't tell anyone on the way that I was an Armenian. I took someone else's business travel documents, in the name of Zardali, and hid my own. I hid my passport in my socks. We boarded a bus leaving for Baku. The guys were on the sat behind, and I took the front seat. In Baku they approached me and said they had to collect all of our travel documents just in case. As it turns out they knew exactly what was happening in Sumgait. I arrived at the bus station as there they told me that the city of Sumgait is closed, and that there is no way to get there. The entire city is closed off and the buses aren't running. Usually, the buses would run between Baku and Sumgait every few minutes. And all of a sudden – no buses at all! Well, we tried to get there by a private vehicle. One man, an Azerbaijani, said, "Let's go find some other way to get to Sumgait." They found a car and arranged for the driver to take us to Sumgait.

He was the only one who agreed to take us there. The other drivers would say, "I wouldn't set my foot in Sumgait now even if you paid me a thousand rubles." "Why?", we asked. "Because they're setting the city on fire and murdering the Armenians. There isn't a single Armenian left." Needless to say I was shocked and nearly fainted but somehow I pulled myself together so I could remain standing. So the deal was done, the four of us got in the car, and we set off for Sumgait. On the way the driver told us, "In fact there aren't any Armenians left. They burned them all, beat them all, and stabbed them." I remained silent. The whole way—20-odd miles—I remained silent. The driver asked me, "How old are you, old man?" He was suspicious of me being that quiet, not saying anything. Perhaps, he thought, it means I'm an Armenian. "How old are you?" he asked me again. "I'm 47", I replied. He goes, "I'm 47 too, but I call you 'old man'." I said, "It’s all in God’s hands, each person's life in this world is different." I do look much older than my years, and that's why he called me an old man. Well after that he was silent, too and did not ask any more questions.

We were approaching the city as I looked around and saw military tanks, and a cordon. Before we reached the “Kavkaz” store, the driver started waving his hand. In fact, we all started waving our hands. Suddenly, I realized that this was a sign indicating there were no Armenians with us in the car.

I could not recognize the city. There were crowds of angry people walking down the middle of the street, you know, and there was no traffic, almost no cars. They signaled to the driver to stop the car. People were standing along the sidewalk. They were carrying arma¬ture shafts, and stones.

Along the way the driver told us how they would find out who's an Armenian and who's not. For example, I'm an Armenian, and I speak their language very well. Well Armenians usually pronounce the Azeri word for "nut," or "little nut," as "pundukh," but the correct version is actually "fundukh". The pronunciations are different. Anyone who says "pundukh," even if they're not Armenian, get taken out and beaten. Another one said, "There was a car there, with five people inside it. They started smashing the side of it with an axe and set it on fire. And they wouldn’t let the people out," he said, "they wouldn't let them get out of the car." I only saw the vandalized car, but the driver says that he witnessed the entire thing. Well he often drives from Baku to Sumgait and back.

When they stopped us we all got out of the car. I looked and there was a short guy, his eyes gleaming, he had an armature shaft in one hand and a stone in the other and asked us what nationality we were one-by-one. "We're Azerbaijani," we told him, "no Armenians here." He did come up to me when we were pulling our things out and says, "Perhaps you're an Armenian, old man?" But I replied in Azerbaijani, I say, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" And then he left. Turned around and left. That was all that happened. What was I to do? I realized the city was on fire, but I had to somehow get my children out of my own home.

They stopped us at the entrance to Mir Street, that's where the Kavkaz store and three large, 12-story buildings are. That's the beginning of down¬town. I saw that burned vehicle there, completely burned, with only the metal frame remaining. I couldn't figure out if it was a Zhiguli or a Zaporozhets. Later I was told it was a Zhiguli. And the passengers of that car were completely inciner¬ated. Nothing was left of them, not even any traces. That driver had told me about it, and now I saw the car myself. The metallic carcass of the car was right in front of my eyes, about 30 to 40 yards from the Kavkaz store.

Then I saw a military transport, an armored personnel carrier. The hatches were closed. And people were throwing armature shafts and pieces of iron at it, the crowd is. And I several heard shots, not machine gun fire, but pistol shots. There were Azerbaijanis gathered around that personnel carri¬er. Someone in the crowd was shooting. Apparently they either wanted to kill the soldiers or get a machine gun or something. At that point there was only one armored personnel carrier. And all the tanks were outside the city, cordoning off Sumgait.

I walked on. I saw two Azerbaijanis going home from the plant. I could tell by their gait that they were not bandits; they're just ordinary people, walking home. I joined them so in case something happened, in case someone came up to us and asked questions, either of us would be in a position to answer, you see. But I avoided the large groups because I'm a local and might be quickly rec¬ognized. I tried to keep at a distance, and walked where there were fewer people. So I walked into Microdistrict 2, which is across from our block. I couldn't get into our block, but I walked where there were fewer people, so as to get around. Well there I saw a tall guy and 25 to 30 people were walk¬ing behind him. And he was shouting into a megaphone: "Comrades, the Armenian-Azerbaijani war has begun!"

The police have megaphones like that. So they were walking around the second microdistrict and shouting. I saw that they were coming my way, and turned off behind a building. I noticed that they walked around the build¬ings; there were also about 5 or 6 people standing on every corner, and at the middles of the buildings. I couldn’t see what exactly they were doing, because I couldn't get up close to them. I was too scared. But the most important thing was to get away from there, to get home, and at least try to find out if my children were alive or not...

April 20,1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 4 недели спустя...
  • Ответы 40
  • Создано
  • Последний ответ

Лучшие авторы в этой теме

- ROMAN ALEKSANDROVICH GAMBARIAN

Born 1954

Senior Engineer

Sumgait Automotive Transport Production Association

Resident at Building 17/33B, Apartment 40

Micro district No. 3

Sumgait

What happened in Sumgait was a great tragedy, an awful tragedy for us, the Armenian people, and for all of mankind. A genocide of Armenians took place during peacetime.

And it was a great tragedy for me personally, because I lost my father in those days. He was still young. Born in 1926.

On that day, February 28, we were at home. Of course we had heard that there was unrest in town, my younger brother Aleksander had told us about it. But we didn't think ... we thought that everything would happen out¬doors, that they wouldn't go into people's apartments. About five o'clock we saw a large crowd near the Kosmos movie theater in our micro district. We were sitting at home watching television. We go out on the balcony and see the crowd pour into Mir Street. This is right near downtown, next to the air¬line ticket office, our house is right nearby. That day there was a group of policeman with shields there. They threw rocks at those policemen. Then they moved off in the direction of our building. They burned a motorcycle in our courtyard and started shouting for Armenians to come out of the build¬ing. We switched off the light. As it turns out, their signal was just the oppo¬site: to turn on the light. That meant that it was an Azerbaijani home. We, of course, didn't know and thought that if they saw lights on they would come to our apartment.

Suddenly there's pounding on the door. We go to the door, all four of us: there were four of us in the apartment. Father, Mother, my younger brother Aleksandr, and I. He was born in 1959. My father was a veteran of World War II and had fought in China and in the Soviet Far East; he was a pilot.

We went to the door and they started pounding on it harder, breaking it down with axes. We start to talk to them in Azerbaijani, "What's going on? What's happened?" They say, "Armenians, get out of here!" We don't open the door, we say, "If we have to leave, we'll leave, we'll leave tomorrow." They say, "No, leave now, get out of here, Armenian dogs, get out of here!" By now they've broken the door both on the lock and the hinge sides. We hold them off as best we can, my father and I on one side, and my mother and brother on the other. We had prepared ourselves: we had several ham¬mers and an axe in the apartment, and grabbed what we could find to defend ourselves. They broke in the door and when the door gave way, we held it for another half-hour. No neighbors, no police, and no one from the city government came to our aid the whole time. We held the door. They started to smash the door on the lock side, first with an axe, and then with a crowbar.

When the door gave way—they tore it off its hinges—Sasha hit one of them with the axe. The axe flew out of his hands. They also had axes, crow¬bars, pipes, and special rods made from armature shafts. One of them hit my father in the head. The pressure from the mob was immense. When we retreated into the room, one of them hit my mother, too, in the left part of her face. My brother Sasha and I fought back, of course. Sasha is quite strong and hot-tempered, he was the judo champion of Sumgait. We had hammers in our hands, and we injured several of the bandits—in the heads and in the eyes, all that went on. But they, the injured ones, fell back, and others came to take their places, there were many of them.

The door fell down at an angle. The mob tried to remove the door, so as to go into the second room and to continue ... to finish us off. Father brought skewers and gave them to Sasha and me—we flew at them when we saw Father bleeding: his face was covered with blood, he had been wounded in the head, and his whole face was bloody. We just threw our¬selves on them when we saw that. We threw ourselves at the mob and drove back the ones in the hall, drove them down to the third floor. We came out on the landing, but a group of the bandits remained in one of the rooms, they were smashing all the furniture in there, having closed the door behind them. We started tearing the door off to chase away the remaining ones or finish them. Then a man, an imposing man of about 40, an Azerbaijani, came in. When he was coming in, Father fell down and Mother flew to him, and started to cry out. I jumped out onto the balcony and started calling an ambulance, but then the mob started throwing stones through the windows of our veranda and kitchen. We live on the fourth floor. And no one came. I went into the room. It seemed to me that this man was the leader of the group. He was respectably dressed in a hat and a trench coat with a fur col¬lar. And he addressed my mother in Azerbaijani: "What's with you, woman, why are you shouting? What happened? Why are you shouting like that?" She says, "What do you mean, what happened? You killed somebody!" My father was a musician, he played the clarinet, he played at many weddings, Armenian and Azerbaijani, he played for many years. Everyone knew him. Mother says, "The person who you killed played at thousands of Azerbaijani weddings, he brought so much joy to people, and you killed that person." He says, "You don't need to shout, stop shouting." And when they heard the voice of this man, the 15 to 18 people who were in the other room opened the door and started running out. We chased after them, but they ran away-That man left, too. As we were later told, downstairs one of them told the others, I don't know if it was from fright or what, told them that we had firearms, even though we only fought with hammers and an axe.

We raced to Father and started to massage his heart, but it was already too late. We asked the neighbors to call an ambulance. The ambulance never came, although we waited for it all evening and all through the night. Somewhere around midnight about 15 policemen came. They informed us they were from Khachmas. They said, "We heard that a group was here at your place, you have our condolences." They told us not to touch anything and left. Father lay in the room.

So we stayed home. Each of us took a hammer and a knife. We sat at home. Well, we say, if they descend on us again we'll defend ourselves. Somewhere around one o'clock in the morning two people came from the Sumgait Procuracy, investigators. They say, "Leave everything just how it is, we're coming back here soon and will bring an expert who will record and photograph everything." Then people came from the Republic Procuracy too, but no one helped us take Father away. The morning came and the neighbors arrived. We wanted to take Father away somehow. We called the Procuracy and the police a couple of times, but no one came. We called an ambulance, and nobody came. Then one of the neighbors said that the ban¬dits were coming to our place again and we should hide. We secured the door somehow or other. We left Father in the room and went up to the neighbor's.

The excesses began again in the morning. The bandits came in several vehicles, ZIL panel trucks, and threw themselves out of the vehicles like . . . a landing force near the center of town. Our building was located right there. A crowd formed. Then they started fighting with the soldiers. Then, in Buildings 19 and 20, that's next to the airline ticket office, they started break¬ing into Armenian apartments, destroying property, and stealing. The Armenians weren't at home, they had managed to flee and hide somewhere. And again they poured in the direction of our building. They were shouting that there were some Armenians left on the fourth floor, meaning us. "They're up there, still, up there. Let's go kill them!" They broke up all the furniture remaining in the two rooms, threw it outside, and burned it in large fires. We were hiding one floor up. Something heavy fell. Sasha threw himself toward the door shouting that it was probably Father, they had thrown Father, were defiling the corpse, probably throwing it in the fire, going to burn it. I heard it, and the sound was kind of hollow, and I said, No, that's from some of the furniture." Mother and I pounced on Sasha and stopped him somehow, and calmed him down.

The mob left somewhere around eight o'clock. They smashed open the door and went into the apartment of the neighbors across from us. They were also Armenians, they had left for another city.

The father of the neighbor who was concealing us came and said, "Are you crazy? Why are you hiding Armenians? Don't you now they're checking all the apartments? They could kill you and them!" And to us :".. . Come on, leave this apartment!" We went down to the third floor, to some other neigh¬bors'. At first the man didn't want to let us in, but then one of his sons asked him and he relented. We stayed there until eleven o'clock at night. We heard the sound of motors. The neighbors said that it was armored personnel car¬riers. We went downstairs. There was a light on in the room where we left Father. In the other rooms, as we found out later, all the chandeliers had been torn down. They left only one bulb. The bulb was burning, which probably was a signal they had agreed on because there was a light burning in every apartment in our Micro district 3 where there had been a pogrom.

With the help of the soldiers we made it to the City Party Committee and were saved. Our salvation—my mother's, my brother's, and mine,—was purely accidental, because, as we later found out from the neighbors, some-one in the crowd shouted that we had firearms up there. Well, we fought but we were only able to save Mother. We couldn't save Father. We inflicted many injuries on the bandits, some of them serious. But others came to take their places. We were also wounded, there was blood, and we were scratched all over—we got our share. It was a miracle we survived. We were saved by a miracle and the troops. And if troops hadn't come to Sumgait, the slaughter would have been even greater: probably all the Armenians would have been victims of the genocide.

Through an acquaintance at the City Party Committee I was able to con¬tact the leadership of the military unit that was brought into the city, and at their orders we were assigned special people to accompany us, experts. We went to pick up Father's corpse. We took it to the morgue. This was about two o'clock in the morning, it was already March 1, it was raining very hard and it was quite cold, and we were wearing only our suits. When my broth¬er and I carried Father into the morgue we saw the burned and disfigured corpses. There were about six burned people in there, and the small corpse of a burned child. It was gruesome. I suffered a tremendous shock. There were about ten people there, but the doctor on duty said that because of the numbers they were being taken to Baku. There was a woman's corpse there too, she had been . . . well, there was part of a body there ... a hacked-off part of a woman's body. It was something terrible. The morgue was guarded by the landing force . . . The child that had been killed was only ten or twelve years old. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl because the corpse was burned. There was a man there, too, several men. You couldn’t tell anything because their faces were disfigured, they were in such awful condition ...

Now two and a half months have passed. Every day I recall with horror what happened in the city of Sumgait. Every day: my father, and the death of my father, and how we fought, and the people's sorrow, and especially the morgue.

I still want to say that 70 years have passed since Soviet power was estab¬lished, and up to the very last minute we could not conceive of what happened in Sumgait. It will go down in history.

I'm particularly surprised that the mob wasn't even afraid of the troops. They even fought the soldiers. Many soldiers were wounded. The mob threw fuel mixtures onto the armored personnel carriers, setting them on fire. They weren't afraid. They were so sure of their impunity that they attacked our troops. I saw the clashes on February 29 near the airline ticket office, right across from our building. And that mob was fighting with the soldiers. The inhabitants of some of the buildings, also Azerbaijanis, threw rocks at the soldiers from windows and balconies, even cinder blocks and glass tanks. They weren't afraid of them. I say they were sure of their impunity. When we were at the neighbors' and when they were robbing homes near the airline ticket office I called the police at number 3-20-02 and said that they were robbing Armenian apartments and burning homes. And they told me that they knew that they were being burned. During those days no one from the police department came to anyone's aid. No one came to help us, either, to our home, even though perhaps they could have come and saved us.

As we later found out the mob was given free vodka and drugs, near the bus station. Rocks were distributed in all parts of town to be thrown and used in fighting. So I think all of it was arranged in advance. They even knew in which buildings and apartments the Armenians lived, on which floors—they had lists, the bandits. You can tell that the "operation" was planned in advance.

Thanks, of course, to our troops, to the country's leadership, and to the leadership of the Ministry of Defense for helping us, thanks to the Russian people, because the majority of the troops were Russians, and the troops suf¬fered losses, too. I want to express this gratitude in the name of my family and in the name of all Armenians, and in the name of all Sumgait Armenians. For coming in time and averting terrible things: worse would have happened if that mob had not been stopped on time.

At present an investigation is being conducted on the part of the USSR Procuracy. I want to say that those bandits should receive the severest possi¬ble punishment, because if they don't, the tragedy, the genocide, could hap¬pen again. Everyone should see that the most severe punishment is meted out for such deeds.

Very many bandits and hardened hooligans took part in the unrest, in the mass disturbances. The mobs were huge. At present not all of them have been caught, very few of them have been, I think, judging by the newspaper reports. There were around 80 people near our building alone, that's how many people took part in the pogrom of our building all in all.

They should all receive the most severe punishment so that others see hat retribution awaits those who perform such acts.

May 18,1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 2 недели спустя...

■ VANYA BAGRATOVICH BAZIAN

Born 1940

Foreman

Baku Spetsmontazh Administration (UMSMR-1)

Resident at Building 36/7, Apartment 9

Block 14

Sumgait

During the first days of the events, the 27th and the 28th [of February], I was away on a business trip. On the 10th I had got my crew, done the paper¬work, and left for the Zhdanov District. That's in Azerbaijan, near the Nagorno Karabagh region.

After the 14th, rumors started to the effect that in Karabagh, specifically in Stepanakert, an uprising had taken place. They said "uprising" in Azerbaijani, but I don't think it was really an uprising, just a demonstration. After that the unrest started. Several Armenians living in the Zhdanov District were injured. How were they injured? They were beaten, even wom¬en; it was said that they were at the demonstrations, but they live here, and went from here to Karabagh to demonstrate. After that I felt uneasy. There were some conversations about Armenians among the local population: the Armenians had done this, the Armenians had done that. Right there at the site. I was attacked a couple of times by kids. Well true, the guys from my crew wouldn't let them come at me with cables and knives. After that I felt really bad. I didn't know where to go. I up and called home. And my chil¬dren tell me, "There's unrest everywhere, be careful." Well I had a project going on. I told the Second Secretary of the District Party Committee what had been going on and said I wanted to take my crew off the site. They wouldn't allow it, they said, "Nothing's going to happen to you, we've entrusted the matter to the police, we've warned everyone in the district, nothing will happen to you." Well, in fact they did especially detail us a policeman to look after me, he knows all the local people and would protect me if something happened. This man didn't leave me alone for five minutes: he was at work the whole time and afterward he spent the night with us, too.

I sense some disquiet and call home; my wife also tells me, "The situation is very tense, be careful."

We finished the job at the site, and I left for Sumgait first thing on the morning of the 29th. When we left the guys warned me, they told me that I shouldn't tell anyone on the way that I was an Armenian. I took someone else's business travel documents, in the name of Zardali, and hid my own. I hid it and my passport in my socks. We set out for Baku. Our guys were on the bus, they sat behind, and I sat up front. In Baku they had come to me and said that they had to collect all of our travel documents just in case. As it turns out they knew what was happening in Sumgait. I arrive at the bus station and there they tell me that the city of Sumgait is closed, there is no way to get there. That the city is closed off and the buses aren't running. Buses normally leave Baku for Sumgait almost every two minutes. And suddenly—no buses. Well, we tried to get there via private drivers. One man, an Azerbaijani, said, "Let's go find some other way to get there." They found a light transport vehicle and arranged for the driver to take us to Sumgait.

He took us there. But the others had said, "I wouldn't go if you gave me a thousand rubles." "Why?" "Because they're burning the city and killing the Armenians. There isn't an Armenian left." Well I got hold of myself so I could still stand up. So we squared it away, the four of us got in the car, and we set off for Sumgait. On the way the driver says, "In fact there aren't any Armenians left. They burned them all, beat them all, and stabbed them." Well I was silent. The whole way—20-odd miles—I was silent. The driver asks me, "How old are you, old man?" He wants to know: if I'm being that quiet, not saying anything, maybe it means I'm an Armenian. "How old are you?" he asks me. I say, "I'm 47." "I'm 47 too, but I call you 'old man'." I say, "It depends on God, each person's life in this world is different." I look much older than my years, that's why he called me old man. Well after that he was silent, too.

We're approaching the city, I look and see tanks all around, and a cordon. Before we get to the Kavkaz store the driver starts to wave his hand. Well, he was waving his hand, we all start waving our hands. I'm sitting there with them, I start waving my hand, too. I realized that this was a sign that meant there were no Armenians with us.

I look at the city—there is a crowd of people walking down the middle of the street, you know, and there's no traffic. Well probably I was scared. They stopped our car. People were standing on the sidewalks. They have arma¬ture shafts, and stones .. . And they stopped us ...

Along the way the driver tells us how they know who's an Armenian and who's not. The Armenians usually . . . For example, I'm an Armenian, but I speak their language very well. Well Armenians usually pronounce the Azeri word for "nut," or "little nut," as "pundukh," but "fundukh" is actually correct. The pronunciations are different. Anyone who says "pundukh," even if they're not Armenian, they immediately take out and start to slash. Another one says, "There was a car there, with five people inside it," he says. "They started hitting the side of it with an axe and lit it on fire. And they didn't let the people out," he says, "they wouldn't let them get out of the car." I only saw the car, but the driver says that he saw everything. Well he often drives from Baku to Sumgait and back . . .

When they stop us we all get out of the car. I look and there's a short guy, his eyes are gleaming, he has an armature shaft in one hand and a stone in the other and asks the guys what nationality they are one by one. "We're Azerbaijani," they tell him, "no Armenians here." He did come up to me when we were pulling our things out and says, "Maybe you're an Armenian, old man?" But in Azerbaijani I say, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" And ... he left. Turned and left. That was all that happened. What was I to do? I had to ... the city was on fire, but I had to steal my children out of my own home.

They stopped us at the entrance to Mir Street, that's where the Kavkaz store and three large, 12-story buildings are. That's the beginning of down¬town. I saw that burned automobile there, completely burned, only metal remained. I couldn't figure out if it was a Zhiguli or a Zaporozhets. Later I was told it was a Zhiguli. And the people in there were completely inciner¬ated. Nothing remained of them, not even any traces. That driver had told me about it, and I saw the car myself. The car was there. The skeleton, a metallic carcass. About 30 to 40 yards from the Kavkaz store.

I see a military transport, an armored personnel carrier. The hatches are closed. And people are throwing armature shafts and pieces of iron at it, the crowd is. And I hear shots, not automatic fire, it's true, but pistol shots. Several shots. There were Azerbaijanis crowded around that personnel carri¬er. Someone in the crowd was shooting. Apparently they either wanted to kill the soldiers or get a machine gun or something. At that point there was only one armored personnel carrier. And all the tanks were outside the city, cordoning off Sumgait.

I walked on. I see two Azerbaijanis going home from the plant. I can tell by their gait that they're not bandits, they're just people, walking home. I joined them so in case something happened, in case someone came up to us and asked questions, either of us would be in a position to answer, you see. But I avoided the large groups because I'm a local and might be quickly rec¬ognized. I tried to keep at a distance, and walked where there were fewer people. Well so I walked into Microdistrict 2, which is across from our block. I can't get into our block, but I walked where there were fewer people, so as to get around. Well there I see a tall guy and 25 to 30 people are walk¬ing behind him. And he's shouting into a megaphone: "Comrades, the Armenian-Azerbaijani war has begun!"

The police have megaphones like that. So they're talking and walking around the second microdistrict. I see that they're coming my way, and turn off behind a building. I noticed that they walked around the outside build¬ings, and inside the microdistricts there were about 5 or 6 people standing on every corner, and at the middles of the buildings, and at the edges. What they were doing I can't say, because I couldn't get up close to them, I was afraid. But the most important thing was to get away from there, to get home, and at least find out if my children were alive or not...

April 20,1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 4 недели спустя...

- YURI VAGARSHAKOVICH MUSAELIAN

Born 1953

Line Electrician

Sumgait Streetcar and Trolleybus Administration

Resident at Building 4/21, Apartment 29 Block 14,

Narimanov Street Sumgait

I spent almost all of February doing overhaul. The 27th was a short day at work, we worked until eleven or eleven-thirty and left for home. I decided to go for a short walk. I went to Primorsky Park. I walked past the Eternal Flame and saw a group of about 8 to 10 people standing there. When I had walked another 15 to 20 yards I heard the screech of automobile brakes behind me. I turned my head toward the sound. It was a light blue GAZ-24 Volga. I see that the people who were standing there have gone over to the car. A man and a woman get out. The man is expensively dressed, in a suit, and the woman has a raincoat on. She doesn't have anything on her head, and her hair is let down, slightly reddish hair, a heavy-set woman. They're 40 to 45 years old. They get something out of the trunk. The people start to help them. I become curious: just what are they pulling out of there?

When I got up close I heard them turn something on. I didn't see what it was, but it was probably a tape recorder. They put it on the ground near the Eternal Flame honoring the 26 Baku Commissars and formed a tight circle around it. I ask, "What's going on?" Someone tells me, "Come listen." Well they were Azerbaijanis, I had asked in Azerbaijani. I hear appeals: "Brother Muslims, our time has come ..." and something else along that line. I didn't understand what it was all about. I walked around the group trying to get a look at the owner of the tape recorder. But the circle drew in tighter. New people started coming from various directions, five here, seven there. And the comments started: "Right, we should slaughter the Armenians!" and "There's no need to be afraid, all of Moscow is behind us." I even heard that: All Moscow is behind us." Well I watched and listened in and realized that this was no joke. I quietly left and went home.

Now before that at work I had heard that something was going on in Karabagh, that there were demonstrations there. Well, people were saying all kinds of things, but I didn't have any idea what was really going on.

My wife and son were at home, but my daughter was at my aunt's house in Baku. I didn't say anything to my wife. We sat and drank tea. Sometime around two o'clock right behind our house suddenly there is noise, whistling, and shouting. I looked out the window and saw a crowd. The crowd is moving slowly, like they show on TV when blacks in South Africa are striking or having a demonstration and move slowly.

My wife asks what's going on out there. I say I don't know. I put on some outdoor clothes and went out to find out what it was all about. In the crowd people are shouting "Down with the Armenians!" and "Death to the Armenians!" I waited for the entire crowd to pass. At first they went down Narimanov Street on the side with the SK club and the City Party Committee; then they turned and went against the traffic—it's one way there—down the Street of the 26 Baku Commissars toward the streetcar line. I went home and told my wife there was a demonstration going on. In fact I thought that we were having the same kind of demonstrations that they had had in Yerevan and in Karabagh. Aside from the things they were shouting, I was surprised that there were only young people in the crowd. And they were minors, under draft age.

My wife and son wanted to go upstairs to visit a friend, but I was kind of uneasy and said, "No, let's stay at home instead." An hour went by, or maybe an hour and a half. Well, I wasn't keeping track of the time, I can't say exactly how long it was. I look and see another crowd on Narimanov, but now on the side with the microdistricts, the bazaar, and the Rossiya movie theater.

I put outside clothes on and went out again. There's noise, an uproar out¬side, and the crowd has grown. There are more people. And whereas the first time there were individual shouts, this time they are more focused, more aggressive. No, I think, something's wrong here, this isn't any demon¬stration. They would run, stop, then walk quickly and make sharp dashes, and then run again. I was walking along the sidewalk and they were in the street. I followed them. I was thinking I'd just watch and see. Who knew where this was leading? We came out on Lenin Square. At the square the SK club is on one side, and the City Party Committee is on the other. I went toward the square and heard noise and shouting, as though the whole town had turned out. There was some sort of a rally going on. I go closer and hear exclamations, appeals. I heard both anti-Armenian and anti-Soviet appeals. "We don't need perestroika, we want to go on living like we have been." Now what did they mean by "living like we have been?" The Azerbaijanis work like everyone else. But too many people live at the expense of the gov¬ernment and at the expense of others. Speculation, theft, and cheating go on all the time. And not just in Azerbaijan, everywhere, in all the republics, but I've never seen it anywhere else like I have in Azerbaijan.

Now at this rally someone says that they should go around to the Armenians' apartments and drive them out, beat them and drive them out-True, I didn't hear them say "kill them" over the microphone, I only heard "beat them and drive them out." I stayed at the square a few minutes longer First one, then another are going up onto the stage, and no one tries to stop the crowd. Off to the side of the crowd there were small groups of three or four people, and I think they were MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] or State Security KGB. There were also uniformed policemen there, but I didn't see any of them try to pacify the crowd. New people kept coming up onto the stage.

Well I had finally decided that this could end badly: This was no demon¬stration, and I had to protect my family.

I left the Square to return home and suddenly noticed a truck. It was next to the City Party Committee, on Narimanov Street, it stood next to the tai¬lor's shop there, a low truck, and it had low, wooden panels. I see that some¬thing is being unloaded, crates of some sort. I decided to go look because after all those appeals I was apprehensive and thought there might be weapons in there. They pulled the crates out onto the square, not toward the City Party Committee, but toward the SK club. And when I went right up to them I saw that they were cases of vodka. There were two people handing down the cases from the bed of the truck, and on the ground there were many people, 15 to 20. They were handing them down from the truck and each case was carried off by two people. Two people, one case of vodka. And there was a man standing right next to the truck and he was handing out round black lumps, maybe about the size of a fist, maybe a little big¬ger or smaller. It was anasha. When I passed next to that person, he stood with his side to me. There was about a yard and a half between us, and two people were standing near him. He has a package in his hand, and he's pulling out anasha and handing it out. I have never smoked it myself. Once I tried it for fun, but I've seen a lot of people smoke it, I've seen it many times, and I know what it is. I strolled around and no one asked me who I was or what I was doing there.

Before I got to the Glass Bazaar I heard more howling, more warlike shouting. I turned around and saw them running. Well I'll just keep on going like I am, I thought. When they caught up with me I saw that they were carrying flags. And I recognized the person who was carrying the flag on my side of the street. He's a young guy, 21 or 22 years old. He was carry¬ing a red flag, which had "Ermeni oryum" written on it in Azerbaijani, that means "Death to Armenians!" That guy used to live off the same courtyard as us. I don't really know what his name is, but I know his father very well. His father's name is Rafik; he used to be a cook, and then became head chef. He used to have a dark blue Zhiguli van, then he sold it and now he has a white Zhiguli 06. His family, as I said, lived on the same courtyard as we did. Our building was on Narimanov Street, and theirs was on the Street of the 26 Baku Commissars; their apartment was in the far entryway, on the fifth floor, the door on the left. Now Rafik's little brother lives there, and he, Rafik, I heard, got a new apartment either in the forth or eighth microdistrict. In a word, his son was carrying a flag that said "Death to Armenians!" I was surprised because before this I had gotten the impression that all of this nonsense was being done not by people from Sumgait, but by Azerbaijanis from Agdam and Kafan.

Well anyway I went home. My wife was upset. I told her, "It's OK, it'll pass, they're young kids, they've just gotten all whooped up." Naturally I didn't want her to get overly upset. After a while a new surge of crowd went by. And this time they were breaking glass. I could hear it breaking, but I couldn't see where. Well I think, here we go, the machine's in motion. They weren't handing out that vodka and anasha for nothing. I didn't see people drinking and smoking on the spot, but they certainly hadn't unloaded the vodka and hashish to put in a store window! So the thought flashed through my head that the machine was running, no one would stop them now, they weren't even trying, although, I'll say it again, the police were there, I saw them. And it's not just that the police weren't breaking them up, they were joking with them, they were having a good time. True, at the time I couldn't even imagine that under our govern¬ment, our much-vaunted leadership—and I'm not afraid to say these words: so many people died, so many women were abused, and how many abomi¬nations there were!—I couldn't imagine that under our much-vaunted authorities, and if I were to be specific, I would say under the much-touted authorities in our city of Sumgait, I couldn't imagine that such things could take place.

When they started breaking glass I told my wife and son: "Let's go upstairs." We went to our neighbors, the Grigorians, on the fourth floor. And in the evening, when those crowds started going past again, I went outside once more. I stopped at "The Corner," a place called that right next to the bazaar. I look and see a crowd on the run. And there, a few yards from the entrance to the bazaar, are three respectable-looking men of around, say, 50 years old. The crowd was running and one of the three waved with his arm and pointed toward the bazaar. And then the whole crowd, as though it were one person, wheeled and raced toward the bazaar. And not a soul went past those three, as though it were off limits! Well everything got all churned up, there was more noise, and the glass was flying again.

We spent the night at the neighbors'. My apartment was on the first floor, there was really no way to defend yourself there.

In the morning I went out to buy bread and to see what was happening in town. On the way I saw someone hunched up, still. I never found out who it was or what happened to him. There were 10 to 15 people standing near him. I got the bread and on my way back, they had gathered around the per¬son who was lying there hunched up, sort of enclosing him; because of the way they were standing you couldn't even see him.

That was on the morning of February 28. Everyone knows the rest.

May 17, 1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

- TATYANA MIKHAILOVNA ARUTUNIAN (NEZHINTSEVA)

Born 1932 Train Conductor Azerbaijani Railroad

Resident at Building 13/15, Apartment 27

Microdistrict No. 3

Sumgait

I hadn't lived very long in Sumgait, only eight years. I moved there from Novosibirsk. My son entered the Baku Nautical School, and so I transferred to Azerbaijan. Later I met someone and married him, and now my name is Arutunian, my husband's name . . .

That there would be a massacre was not discussed openly, but there were hints and gibes, so to speak, at the Armenian people, and they were mock¬ing the Russians, too. I was constantly aware of it at work, and not just this past year. I couldn't find a definite place for myself in the pool at work because I, I'll just say it, couldn't steal, couldn't deceive, and couldn't be involved in bribe-taking. And when I asked for decent working conditions they told me, "Leave, don't keep the others from working, you aren't cut out for this kind of work." And at work and around all the time I would hear gibes at the Armenians, like "The Turks had it right, they killed them all—the way they've multiplied here they're making it hard for us to live," and "Things will be just fine if we get rid of them all." "No problem, the Turks will help," they say, "if we ask them, they'll rid Armenia of Armenians in half an hour." Well that's the way it all was, but I never thought, of course, that it would spill over into a bloody tragedy, because you just couldn't imagine it. Here we've been living under the Soviet government for 70 years, and no one even considered such an idea possible.

But I had been forming my own opinions, and in the presence of authori¬tative people I would often ask, "Where is this all leading, do people really not see what kind of situation is emerging here. The Russians are fleeing Sumgait, there are very few of them left. Why is no one dealing with this, what's going on?" And when it all happened on the 27th and 28th, it became clear that everything had been arranged by someone, because what else are you to make of it if the First Secretary of the City Party Committee is marching ahead of the demonstration with an Azerbaijani flag? I wouldn't be saying this now if I hadn't received personal confirmation from him later. Because when we were under guard in the SK club on the 1st, he came to the club, that Muslimzade. The women told me, "There he is, there he is, that's Muslimzade." I didn't believe the rumors that he had carried an Azerbaijani flag. I thought that they were just false rumors. I went over to him and said, "Are you the First Secretary of our City Party Committee?" He answers me, "Yes." And I ask him, "Tell me, did you really inarch ahead of that gang car¬rying an Azerbaijani flag, and behind you they were carrying denigrating signs, I don't know exactly what they said, but there was mention of Armenian blood?" And he tells me, "Yes, I was there, but I tried to dissuade them from it." Then I asked him another question: "And where were you when they were burning and slaughtering us? And he said, "I ... We didn't know what to do, we didn't know, we didn't anticipate that that would hap¬pen in Sumgait."

Comrade Mamedov, the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijani SSR, answered the same question for me: "No, we actually didn't anticipate the slaughter in Sumgait. At that time we were trying to contain the crowd of 45,000 in Baku that was preparing for a mas¬sacre." Those are his exact words, the ones he said in the office of the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR.

And now, about the events themselves. Of course it's painful to discuss them, because it may seem that it's not true to someone else. Various rumors concerning what happened are making the rounds: some are true, others aren't. But unfortunately there are more true ones than false, because it was so horrible: in our age, here in the space age, the age of science, the age of progress, I don't know, if someone had told me this story, if I were living in or around Moscow, I wouldn't have believed it. Why not? Because it was really a genocide, it was a massacre. That's genuinely what it was.

For example, on that day, the 28th—I didn't know about the 27th because my husband and I were both sick, both of us had the flu, and we were in bed—on the 28th our neighbor comes to our place and says, "You're in bed? You don't know anything about it? There was a demonstration in town, and after it they were overturning Armenian cars and burning them. They were looking into cars and asking, 'Are you an Armenian?' If they answered in Armenian, then they turned the car over and burned it." This isn't made up, the wife of the Senior Investigator of the Baku Ministry of Internal Affairs told us. He was returning home from his dacha with his wife, Raisa Sevastyanova, she's my neighbor. She immediately came and told us that they had landed right in the middle of it, I don't know what to call it, the cavalcade of automobiles they were stopping. He answered in Azerbaijani, they let them go, but they made him honk the horn, they were kicking up a fracas. We didn't even believe it, and I said, "Certainly that didn't happen, how can that be?" And she said, "Muslimzade was leading the crowd, and the Sputnik store was completely smashed because most of the salespeople there are Armenians. And when he saw that they had started breaking the glass in that store, he said, "Don't break the shop windows, don't destroy state property, but do whatever else you want." I didn't hear this with my own two ears, but it is a fact that the store was torn up and the director of the store was beaten for employing Armenians although he's an Azerbaijani-While we were talking, all of a sudden right across from us . .. Sevastyanova is the first to look out the window and say, "Look, there's a crowd out there." And sure enough, when we looked out there we saw that the crowd had already started wrecking the neighboring building. There was an Armenian family there, a woman and two girls. They lived across from us. I'm sorry, I don't know the building number or the people's names, since we were in my husband's apartment, in Microdistrict 8, and I lived in Microdistrict No. 3. There was awful looting going on there at the time, the most hideous things were going on there then. One building there, ours, was Hacked twice, once wasn't enough for them. They returned to the places where they hadn't finished the Armenians off. If an Azerbaijani family dared to conceal Armenians, they beat the Azerbaijanis too. They also beat Russians, if it was Russians doing the hiding. Because there were Russians among them, they said so on television, there were people of various nation¬alities. But they didn't tell us why there were people of different nationali¬ties. Because they wouldn't have touched the Azerbaijanis if they hadn't dared to stick up for the Armenians and give them temporary shelter in their homes.

At the time I saw this from the window I was there, Sevastyanova was there, and so was my husband. We went out onto the balcony and saw a television fly off a balcony. All kinds of things, even a sofa. Then, when it was all down there, they burned it up. Then we saw the crowd, and they were all shouting. At first I couldn't figure out what was happening. And later I told my husband, "Lendrush, I think they're beating someone out there." And he answered, "I don't know, could be." Suddenly the crowd separated for a moment, and I saw it, and Raisa Sevastyanova saw it too. My husband had turned the other way, he didn't see it. I saw a naked girl with her hair down. They were dragging her. She kept falling because they were pushing her and kicking her. She fell down, it was muddy there, and later other wit¬nesses who saw it from their balconies told us, they seized her by the hair and dragged her a couple of blocks, as far as the mortgage bank, that's a good block and a half or two from here. I know this for sure because I saw it myself.

Then the crowd rushed toward our building. We were standing there, and you can of course imagine what we were feeling. Were they going to kill us or not? And I also had the awful thought that they might torment me the way they tormented that woman, because I had just seen that.

I asked my husband. I gave him an axe and said, "You kill me first, and then let them do what they want with the corpse." But our neighbors, it's true, defended us, they said, "There aren't any Armenians in our entryway, go away, only Muslims live here." Disaster missed us that time.

But at two o'clock in the morning a crowd of about 15 people, approxi¬mately, came back to our place. My husband was already asleep. He can sleep when he's upset about something, but I can't. I was standing, running from balcony to balcony. Our power was out, I don't remember for how long, but it was as though it had been deliberately turned off. There were no lights whatsoever, and I was glad, of course. I thought it was better that way. But then I look and the crowd is at our balcony. This was at 2:15 in the morning. The first time they were at our building it was 6:30, and now it was 2:15 in the morning. But I never thought that that old woman on the first floor, the Azerbaijani, was awake and watching out, there were human beings among them too. So she goes out with a pail of garbage, as though she need¬ed to be taking garbage out at two o'clock in the morning. She used it as a pretext and went toward those young people. They really were youngsters from my balcony you could see perfectly that they were young Azerbaijani boys. They spoke Azerbaijani. And when they came up to her she said "What do you want?" And they answered, "We want the Armenian family that lives here" [pointing toward the second floor with their hands]. She says, "I already told you, we don't have any Armenians here, now leave, do you hear, this is an old Muslim woman talking to you," and grabbed the hand of one boy who was trying to walk around her and enter the building anyway and started pushing him away. And so they seemed to listen to her. They were all very young, they started apologizing and left. That was the second time death was at our door.

I forgot to mention about one other apartment, a man named Rubik lives there, I don't know him really, I knew his daughter, I mean I saw her around, but we really didn't know them. But I do know that that guy who lives on the fourth floor across from our entryway went to Chernobyl and worked there for eight months, to earn money. Can you imagine what that means? He risked his life to earn X amount of money in order to better his family. He bought new furniture and was getting ready to give his daughter's hand in marriage, but, alas, everything was ruined by those creeps and scoundrels. They threw everything out the windows, and the rest we saw from our balcony: how the neighbors on the left and right ran into the apart¬ment and carried off everything that hadn't already been smashed or taken. What is one to think of that? It means that the parents in those families were in on it too. Unfortunately I came to be of the opinion that it was all orga¬nized and that everything had been foreseen in advance: both the beating of the Armenians and the stripping of apartments. Something on the order of "We'll move the Armenians out and take over their apartments."

I have worked honestly my whole life, you can check everything about me. I came as a patriot from China, waited for nights on end in front of the Consulate General of the USSR, I came to my homeland as a patriot because I knew that the Party and the Komsomol were holy things. But when I saw in Sumgait that there wasn't anything holy about them, that Party member¬ship was bought, that Komsomol members joined only for personal gain, that there were no ideals, no ideas, God save me, everything was being bought and sold, I saw all of it and understood how they could allow that crap to go on like it did.

I can't talk any more about it ... the image of that beating . . . When I went out of my own apartment—they picked us up under Soviet Army guard, they had arrived from all over to suppress that gang—not only Armenians, but some Russian families and their children, too, came out of their apartments and joined us, because no normal person who had seen that could stay there with the situation the way it was. And what's interesting is that when we left on the buses I rode and thought that at least one group of people, for sure people would basically rise to the situation, would have some compassion for the Armenians, would somehow understand the injustice of what was done. But having analyzed and weighed the whole thing, once I calmed down, having thought it all through, I came to a conclusion that is shared by many people. If a lot of Azerbaijanis didn't want their Armenian neighbors to be killed, and that basically depended on that Muslimzade—he said that he had wanted to calm them down—then is it possible that he didn't have people at hand to whom he could whisper at the last minute, "Go and announce it on television: Citizens of Sumgait! Take what you can into your hands, let's protect our neighbors from this mas¬sacre?" Those crowds weren't such that there was no controlling them. Basically they were unarmed. They didn't have firearms, mostly they had knives, they had all kinds of metal parts, like armature shafts, sharpened at the ends, special rocks, different to a degree that we noticed them: there aren't rocks like those in Sumgait soils, they were brought from somewhere, as though it were all specially planned. So as I was saying, I weighed it all out and if any of our neighbors had wanted to defend us, why wasn't it arranged? It means that the government didn't want to do it. When the crowd was moving from the City Party Committee to the Sputnik, what, there was no way of informing Baku? No, there was no way, it turns out! The crowd was doing violence in our microdistrict. I won't mention the things I didn't see myself, I'll only talk about the things I myself witnessed. They were in Microdistrict 8 beginning at 6 o'clock in the evening, when I saw them from the other building, and they were somewhere else until mid¬night or one o'clock in the morning, because at 2:15 they came back to our building. They hadn't completely finished making their predatory rounds of Microdistrict 8. When they returned to our building I told my husband, "Lendrush, now the police are probably going to come, my God, now the authorities are probably going to find out and come to our aid." Well, alas, no, there were to be no authorities, not a single policeman, not a single fire¬man, not a single ambulance came while they were raging, as it turns out, as we later found out, beginning on the night of the 27th. There were dead people, ruined apartments, and burned autos: one car near the bus station, it was burned and overturned, it was probably there about four days, every¬one saw it and what went on in Block 45! Those who live there know, they saw from their balconies how they attacked the soldiers in the buses, how they beat those poor, unarmed soldiers, and how on that square, I can't remember the name of it, where there is that fork coming from the bus station, that intersection, now I'm upset and I can't think of the name . . . there's a tall building there, a 9-story, and from the balconies there people saw that butchery, when the poor soldiers, wearing only helmets, with shields and those unfortunate clubs, moved against that mob. And when they fell, those 12-to 14-year-old boys ran up and using stones, big heavy stones, beat them to death on their heads. Who could have guessed that something like that could happen in the Soviet Union and under the Soviet government? The upshot is that this republic has not been under Soviet control for a long time, but no one wanted to pay any attention or get involved.

If you were to go and ask at my work many people would confirm that I tell the truth, I've been struggling for truth for five years there already, the five years that I worked at the Azerbaijani railroad. Some people there con¬sidered me a demagogue, others who knows what; some think I'm an adventure seeker, and some, a prankster. But I wanted everything to be right, I would become outraged: how can this be, why is it people treat one another this way on a Soviet railroad, as though the Azerbaijani railroad were Azerbaijani property, or the property of some magnate, or some "mafia": If I want to, I'll get you out of here; If I want to, I'll get rid of you; If I want to, I'll do something else? And there's a black market price for every¬thing, in the most brazen way: a coach to Moscow costs so much, a coach on a local train costs so much. Once when I was complaining to the head of the conductor's pool, he had the nerve to tell me, maybe you won't even believe this, but this, I'm afraid, I heard with my own ears: "Tatyana, just how long can you fight for something that you know will never have any effect? You're alone against everyone, so instead why don't you give more money to the chief conductor, and everything will go fine for you." I started to cry, turned, and left. What else could I do, where else could I go to complain? I realized that everything was useless. And the root of the whole thing is that it all goes on and no one wants to see it. I filed a written complaint, and they ground it into dust, they destroyed it, I still have a copy, but what's the use? When the General Procuracy got involved with the investigation of the bloody Sumgait affair, in addition to the information about what I saw, what I was a witness to, I gave testimony about the mafia at the railroad. They accepted my petition, but I don't know if they're going to pursue it or not. Because, you'll excuse me, I no longer believe in the things I aspired to, the things I believed in before: It's all dead. They just spit on my soul, stomped on everything, physically, and most important, spiritually, because you can lose belongings, that's nonsense, that all comes with time, but when your soul is spit upon and when the best in you—your beliefs—are destroyed, it can be very difficult to restore them .. .

I want to tell of one incident. I just don't know, at the time I was in such a state that I didn't even take minor things into account. Here is an example. Of course, it's not a minor one. My neighbor, Raisa Sevastyanova, she has a son, Valery, who is in the 9th grade in a school in Microdistrict 8. A boy, Vitaly [Danielian], I don't know his last name, goes to school with him, or rather, went to school with him. I was just sitting in an apartment trying to make a phone call to Moscow . . . Oh yes, and there's one important detail: When the massacre began, for two to three hours the phones weren't work¬ing in Armenian apartments, and later, in several Russian and Azerbaijani apartments. But the fact of the matter is that service was shut off, you could not call anywhere. Why? Again, it means it was all planned. How come ser¬vice is cut off for no reason? And the lights went off. And those brats were raging as they liked. They weren't afraid, they ran about freely, they knew that no one would slap their hands and no one would dare to stop them. They knew it.

Now I'm going to tell about the incident. So this little Vitaly, Vitalik, an Armenian boy, went to school with Valery; they were in the same class. According to what Valery and his neighbor pal said—at the time I was in the me apartment as they were, I sat at the phone waiting for the call to be put through—a mob attacked the building where Vitalik lived. So Valery ran to (us mother and said, "Mamma, please let me go to Vitalik's, what if they kill him? Maybe he's still alive, maybe we can bring him here and save him somehow . . . He's a nice guy, we all like him, he's a good person, he's smart." His mother wouldn't let him go. In tears, she says, "Valery, you can't go because I am afraid." He says, "Mamma, we can get around the crowd. We'll just watch, just have a look." They made it through. I don't know, I think Vitalik's parents lived in Microdistrict No. 1, and when they got there, they made a superficial deduction. Knowing that balconies and doors were being broken everywhere, that you could see from the street which were the Armenian apartments in the building, they went here and there and looked, and saw that the windows were intact, and so they calmed down. But even though the windows in that apartment were not broken, everything inside was totally smashed, and Vitalik lay there with a broken skull, and his moth¬er and father had already been murdered. Little Vitalik didn't even know they were dead. So two weeks ago, I don't know, he was in critical condition, no, maybe it was longer: we left Sumgait on March 20, spent some time in Moscow, and then we came to Yerevan. So it's been about a month already; it's so hard to keep all this straight. So Valery, the next day, when he found out that Vitalik's family has been killed and Vitalik was lying in the Semashko Hospital in Baku, Valery and his classmates got together and went to visit him. But they wouldn't admit them, telling them that he was in critical condition and that he was still in a coma. They cried and left, having also found out that the girl I saw being kicked and dragged was in that hos¬pital too. As it turns out she was brought there in serious condition, but at least she was alive at the time ...

When we got to the SK club we would see first one friend and then another, throw ourselves into their arms and kiss them, because you had Wondered if these friends were alive or not, if those friends were alive or not ...And when you saw them you were so glad to find out that the family had lived! When you saw people you heard things that made your hair stand on end.

If you publish everything that happened it will be a hideous book. A book of things it is even difficult to believe. And those two girls who were raped were entirely black and blue, the ones at the SK, they know I'm not lying, that girlfriend came up to one of them and said, "What happened?" and she bared her breasts, and they were completely covered in cigarette burns ... those rogues had put cigarettes out on her breasts. After something like that I don't know how you can live in a city and look at the people in it.

Now . . . When we stayed at the military unit for a while, they provided well, basic conditions for us there. The military unit is located in Nasosny some six miles from Sumgait. And living there we met with a larger group of people. There were about 1,600 people at the unit. You know, there was a point when I couldn't even go outside because if you went outside you saw so much heartbreak around you. And when you hear the false rumors . ..

Yes, by the way, false rumors were spread in Sumgait saying that the Armenians around Yerevan had destroyed Azerbaijani villages and razed them to the ground with bulldozers. I didn't know whether to believe it or not. And people who don't know any better get the idea that it was all done in revenge. But when I arrived in Armenia and was in Spitak, and in Spitak all those villages are not only intact, but at that time had even been protect¬ed just in case, they were guarded, they got better food than did the inhabi¬tants of Spitak. Not a single person there died, and no one is planning to harm them. Around Yerevan all the villages are safe and unharmed, and the Armenians didn't attack anyone. But actually, after an evil of the magnitude suffered in Sumgait there could have been a feeling of vengefulness, but no one acted on it. And I don't know why you sometimes hear accusations to the effect that the Armenians are guilty, that it is they who organized it. Rumors like that are being spread in Azerbaijan. And if one old person says it and ten young ones hear it, they not only perceive it with their minds, but with their hearts, too. To them it seems that the older person is telling the truth. For example, one says; "Did you know that out of 31 people killed (by the way, originally they said 31 people, but later they found a 32nd), 30 were Azerbaijani and one was an Armenian?"

Of course I'm upset, but it's utterly impossible to discuss such things and not become upset. Sometimes I forget things, but I know I want to return to the time when we were in the SK club across from the City Party Committee. When I saw Muslimzade in the SK club building I went to him to ask because I couldn't believe that he had marched in the front carrying a ban¬ner. I already mentioned this, and if I repeat anything, please excuse me. I asked him, "Why did you do that and why are you here now, why did you come here? To laugh at these women who are strewn about on the floor?" The overcrowding there was tremendous, it was completely unsanitary, and several of the children were already sick. It's true the troops tried to make it livable for us. They cooked for us on their field stoves and provided us with wonderful food, but the thing is that their main job was to ferret out the gang that was still at it everywhere, that was continuing its sordid affairs everywhere. Plus they were never given any direct orders, they didn't know what they were authorized to do and not to do. And it was only on March 8 at five o'clock in the evening that Krayev himself, the Lieutenant General the City Commandant of Sumgait, was given full authority and told every¬one over a microphone from an armored personnel carrier that now he could do what he wanted to do, as his heart advised him, and relocate people to the military unit.

But that's not what I want to talk about now. Muslimzade, characteristically, tried to get me out of the SK building and take me to the City Party Committee, which is across the square from the club. He took me by the hand and said, "Citizen, don't worry, we'll go and have a talk in my office." I told him, "No, after everything you've done, I don't believe one iota of what you say. If I go to the City Party Committee I'll disappear, and the traces of me will disappear too. Because you can't stand it when ..." Oh yes, and there was another interesting detail from that meeting. It was even very fun¬ny, although at the time I wasn't up to laughing. He was in a nice, expensive hat, and so as to put him to shame, so to speak, I said, "Oh, why did you come here all duded up like a London dandy, you smell of good perfume, you're in your starched shirt, and you have your expensive hat on. You came to ridicule the poor women and children who are lying on the floor, who are already getting sick, whose relatives have died. Did you come to laugh at them?" And the one who was accompanying him, an Azerbaijani, I don't know who he was or what his title was, he quickly snatched the hat off Muslimzade's head and hid it. Then I said, "My God! We're not marauders. We're not you! We didn't come to you with the intention of stealing!" "Well kill me, kill me!" Muslimzade says to me, "But I'm not guilty . . . kill me, kill me, but I'm not guilty." And I say, "OK, fine, you're not guilty, have it your way. But give us an answer, we're asking you: Where were you when they were torturing and raping those poor women, when they were killing the children, burning things, carrying on outrageously, and wrecking all those apartments? Where were you then?" "You know, we didn't expect it, we did not know what to do, we didn't anticipate that something like that would happen in Sumgait." I started laughing and said, "It's truly funny." He says, "What could I do? We didn't know what to do." And I say, "I'm sorry, but it'll be ridiculous if I tell you: The First Secretary of the City Party Committee shouldn't march out in front with a banner; he should fall down so that the gang would have to cross over his dead body. That's what you should have done. That's the way it was during the war. Not a single Party committee secretary compromised himself; either he died or he led people into battle. And what did you do? You ran away, you left, you hid, you marched with a flag, because you were afraid, excuse my language, you feared for your own damned hide. And when we ask you, you tell us that you got confused and you ask me what you could have done? That's right," I told him, "the City party committee got confused, all the party committees got confused, the police got confused, Baku got confused, they all lay in a faint for two weeks, and the gang ran the show with impunity. And if it weren't for the troops it wouldn't have been just two days, there wouldn't be a single Armenian left in Sumgait for sure, they would have finished their bloody affair, because 'hey brazenly went up to some Russians, too, the ones who tried to say something to them, and they told them, 'As soon as we finish with the Armenians we'll come after you, too.'"

And by the way, there was a colonel, who took us to the military unit. He's the one with the light blue collar tabs who flew in and two hours later arrived on an armored personnel carrier when we were at the SK and took us to the military unit and who later started moving us from the military unit. We asked him, "What? How? What will come of us?" He openly said, "You know, for us the main thing now is to catch that gang. We'll finish that quickly. You'll stay at the military unit for the time being, and we'll decide later." The General Procuracy of the USSR arrived, it consists of investigators from all cities. There were some from Stavropol, from everywhere, just everywhere, because the affair was truly frightful. About this, by the way, Comrade Katusev spoke; as everyone knows, he's the First Deputy General Procurator of the USSR. When he gave us a speech from the armored per¬sonnel carrier at the military unit, by the way, he told us the honest truth, because he couldn't not say it, because he was still experiencing his first impressions of what he had seen, and he said, "There was Afghanistan, and it was bad, but Sumgait—it's horrible! And the people who dared to do such a thing will be severely punished, in accordance with our laws." And that's a quote. Then one mother throws herself at him—her two sons had died before her very eyes—and says, "Who will return my sons? Who is going to punish the [culprits]?" They tried to calm her down, and he said, "In order for us to conduct a proper investigation, in order that not a single scoundrel avoid responsibility, you must help us, because we don't know, maybe there was someone else in the gang who is now being concealed in homes, and maybe the neighbors know, maybe someone saw something. Don't be afraid, write about it in detail. So that you're not afraid . . . Everyone knows that many of you are afraid, having lived through such horrors, they think that if they write the whole truth about, let's say, their neighbor or someone else, that they will seek revenge later. We're going to do it like this: We're going to set up an urn and you can throw what you write in there. We don't need to know who wrote it. The names of the people who write won't be made pub¬lic, but we need all the information. Let each and every one not be afraid, let each write what is necessary, who they saw in that gang, who made threats or shouted threatening gibes about the Armenians .. . You must describe all of these people and put the information into the urn."

Two soldiers and a major guarded the urn. And, sure enough, many peo¬ple, people who didn't even want to write ... I know one woman who asked me, she came up and said, "You, as a Russian, the same thing won't happen to you as will happen to me. So please . . . I'll give you the information, and you please write it down for me." So she was afraid, and there were a lot like her . . . But later, after Katusev made his speech, she sat and wrote down everything she knew. And we threw it all into the urn. Now we don't know if it will be of any use. For a factual picture will emerge from all that infor¬mation. One person can lie, but thousands can't lie, thousands simply can't lie. You have to agree with that, a fact is a fact. Why, for example, should someone say that black is white if it is really black?

The First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijani SSR, Mamedov, as I said, was in Yerevan. My husband and I were at the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR and found out that Mamedov was present, the one who had come to convince the people of Sumgait to return to their previous dwellings, to their old apartments. We asked for a meeting with him, and it was granted. When we went to see him he tried to behave properly, very politely, delicately, but. . . when the truth was told right to his face and when I asked him some of the same questions I had asked Muslimzade, "Where were you personally when they were beating us? Now you're trying to convince us to return, why didn't you think at the time that they were slaughtering us where it was all leading?" he says, "You're telling the truth. Let's not mince words. You've told me right to my face, and I'll tell you straight. I'll tell you the pure truth. I was gotten out of bed in the evening, the whole government was up, including me, and we were restraining a crowd of about 45,000 in Baku. But we never expected that in a city like Sumgait, with its fine international record, such a thing could hap¬pen. We expected it in Baku." I say, "So that means you expected it all the same? Why were you expecting it?" And he says, "You know, it just hap¬pened that way. We were expecting it in Baku, we were trying to restrain it, but in Sumgait ..." I say, "Fine, you didn't know for the first three or four hours, but then you should have known. Why did no one help us?" And he says, "Well, OK, we didn't know what to do" and things like that. Basically it was the same story I got from Muslimzade. Later, when he said, "You go on back, the situation in Sumgait is favorable now, everything is fine, the Armenians are friendly with the Azerbaijanis ..." To this I answered, "You know what. .. I'm speaking with you as a neutral nation ... I have never argued with Armenians or with Azerbaijanis and I was an eye¬witness . . . You tell me, please, Comrade Mamedov, " I asked him, "What would you say about this honestly, if you were being completely frank with us?" Then he said, "Yes, I admit that I am honestly ashamed, shame on the entire Azerbaijani nation, we have disgraced ourselves not only before the entire Soviet Union, but before the whole world. Because now the Voice of America and all the other foreign radio stations of various hues are branding us with all kinds of rumors, too." And I say, "There's nothing to add to what really happened. I don't think it's possible to add anything more awful." He says, "Yes, I agree with you, I understand your pain, it is truly an unfortu¬nate occurrence." I repeat that he said "unfortunate occurrence." And then he suddenly remembered himself, what he was saying—he had a pen in his hands, he was fidgeting with it nervously—and said, "Oh, excuse me, a tragedy, really ..." I take this to mean that he really thinks it's an "unfortu¬nate occurrence." "And of course," he says, "I understand that having gone through all this you can't return to Sumgait, but it's necessary to cool down and realize that all those people are being tried." And he even gave a detail, which, I don't know if it matters or not, that 160 policemen were being tried. Specifically in relation to that bloody affair.

Yes, by the way, there is another good detail, how I was set up at work in Baku after the events. I went to an undergarment plant, there was an Azerbaijani working there, and suddenly she tells me, "What, they didn't nail your husband? They screwed up." I was floored, I hadn't imagined that anyone in Baku, too, could say something like that. Well after that I went up to see ... to my office, I needed to find out about those days, what was going to happen with them, how they were going to put down those days from February 29 to March 10 ... and the administrator told me, "I don't know, Tatyana, go to the head of the conductors' pool. Be grateful if they don't put it down as unexcused absence." I was really discouraged by this. They all know that we were but a hair away from death and barely sur¬vived, and here they're telling me that I was skipping work, as though I was off enjoying myself somewhere. I went to the office of the chief of the pool, his last name is Rasulov, and he's had that position for many years. Incidentally, he's a Party member, and is a big man in town. And suddenly, when I went to him and said, "Comrade Rasulov, this is the way it was ..." He looked at me askance and said, "And why are you"—he knows me by my previous last name—"why did you get wrapped up in this mess?" I say, "What do you mean, why did I get wrapped up in this mess? My husband's an Armenian," I tell him, "I have an Armenian last name." And he screwed up his face, made a kind of a grimace, as though he had eaten something sour, and said, "I didn't expect that you would ..." What did he mean by that? And "how" should he behave, the chief of the pool, a man who super¬vises 1,700 workers? Now, it's true, there was a reduction, but for sure there are still 1,200 conductors working for him. And if someone who supervises a staff that size says things like that, then what can you expect from a simple, uneducated, politically unsophisticated person?! He's going to believe any and all rumors, that the Armenians are like this, the Armenians are like that, and so on...

By the way, that Mamedov—now I'm going back to Mamedov's office—when I asked him "Are you really going to guarantee the safety of our lives if we return to Sumgait?" he answered, "Yes, you know, I would guarantee them ... I don't want to take on too much, I would guarantee them firmly for 50 years. But I won't guarantee them for longer than 50 years." I say, "So you've got another thing like that planned for 50 years from now? So they'll be quiet and then in another 50 years it'll happen again?!" I couldn't contain myself any more, and I also told him, "And how did it get to that point, certainly you knew about it, how they were treating the Russians, for example, in Baku and in Sumgait, how they were hounded from their jobs? Certainly you received complaints, I wrote some myself. Why did no one respond to them? Why did everyone ignore what was going on? Didn't you prepare people for this by the way you treated them? And he says, "You know, you're finally starting to insult me!" He threw his pen on the desk. "Maybe now you'll say I'm a scoundrel too?" I say, "You know, I'm not talking about you because I don't know. But about the ones who I do know I can say with conviction, yes, that comrade was involved in this, that, and that, because I know for certain." Well anyway he assured us that here, in Yerevan, there were false rumors, that 3,000 Sumgait Armenians were here, and 15,000 were in Sumgait and had gotten back to work. Everyone was working, he said, and life was very good. "We drove about town ourselves, Comrade Arutunian [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia SSR] came from the Council of Ministers of Armenian, he came and brought information showing that everything was fine in Sumgait." When I asked Mamedov how he had reached that conclusion he said, "Well, I walked down the street." And I said, "Walking down the street in any city, even if I were to go to New York, I would never understand the situation because I would be a guest, I don't have any contact with people, but if you spend 10 days among some blue-collar workers in such a way that they didn't know you were the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, you'd hear something quite different." I told him, for example, that I drew my conclusion when we left the military unit to look at our apartments. They took us all in turns to pick things up, since people had fled to the military unit; they got on the bus just to save themselves as soon as possible. How are the neighbors in the microdistrict, how will they view us, what do they think? I thought maybe that in fact it wasn't something gener¬al, of a mass nature, some anti-national something. And when that bus took us to our building, because it was the same bus, while we were going up to our apartment, an armed soldier accompanied us. What does that say? It speaks of the fact that if everything there were fine, why do we need to have soldiers go there and come back with us, going from apartment to apart¬ment? And in fact, especially with the young people, you could sense the delight at our misfortune, the grins, and they were making comments, too. And that was in the presence of troops, when police detachments were in the microdistricts and armored personnel carriers and tanks were passing by. And if people are taking such malicious delight when the situation is like that, then what is it going to be like when they withdraw protection from the city altogether? There will be more outrages, of course, perhaps not organized, but in the alleys ...

April 20, 1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ EMMA SETRAKOVNA SARGISIAN

Born 1933

Cook

Sumgait Emergency Hospital

Resident at Building 16/13, Apartment 14

Block 5, Sumgait

To this day I can't understand why my husband, an older man, was killed. What was he killed for. He hadn't hurt anyone, hadn't said any word he oughtn’t to have. Why did they kill him? I want to find out—from here, from there, from the government—why my husband was killed.

On the 27th, when I returned from work—it was a Saturday—my son was at home. He doesn't work. I went straight to the kitchen, and he called me, "Mamma, is there a soccer game?" There were shouts from Lenin Street. That's where we lived. I say, "I don't know, Igor, I haven't turned on the TV." He looked again and said, "Mamma, what's going on in the courtyard?!" I look and see so many people, it's awful, marching, marching, there are hun¬dreds, thousands, you can't even tell how many there are. They're shouting, "Down with the Armenians! Kill the Armenians! Tear the Armenians to pieces!" My God, why is that happening, what for? I had known nothing at that point. We lived together well, in friendship, and suddenly something like this. It was completely unexpected. And they were shouting, "Long live Turkey!" And they had flags, and they were shouting. There was a man walking in front, well dressed, he's around 40 or 45, in a gray raincoat. He is walking and saying something, I can't make it out through the vent window. He is walking and saying something, and the children behind him are shouting, "Tear the Armenians to pieces!" and "Down with the Armenians!" They shout it again, and then shout, "Hurrah!" The people streamed without end, they were walking in groups, and in the groups I saw that there were women, too. I say, "My God, there are women there too!" And my son says, "Those aren't women, Mamma, those are bad women." Well we didn't look a long time. They were walking and shouting and I was afraid, I simply couldn't sit still. I went out onto the balcony, and my Azerbaijani neighbor is on the other balcony, and I say, "Khalida, what's going on, what happened?" She says, "Emma, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what happened. Well she was quite frightened too. They had these white sticks, each second or third one had a white rod. They're waving the rods above their heads as they walk, and the one who's out front, like a leader, he has a white stick too. Well maybe it was an armature shaft, but what I saw was white, I don't know.

My husband got home 10 or 15 minutes later. He comes home and I say, "Oh dear, I'm frightened, they're going to kill us I bet." And he says, "What are you afraid of, they're just children." I say, "Everything that happens comes from children." There had been 15- and 16-year olds from the Technical and Vocational School. "Don't fear," he said, "it's nothing, nothing all that bad." He didn't even eat, he just lay on the sofa. And just then on television they broadcast that two Azerbaijanis had been killed in Karabagh, near Askeran. When I heard that I couldn't settle down at all, I kept walking here and there and I said, "They're going to kill us, the Azerbaijanis are going to kill us." And he says, "Don't be afraid." Then we heard—from the central square, there are women shouting near the stage, well, they're shout¬ing different things, and you couldn't hear very well. I say, "You speak Azerbaijani well, listen to what they're saying." He says, "Close the window and go to bed, there's nothing bad happening there." He listened a bit and then closed the window and went to bed, and told us, "Come on, go to sleep, it's nothing." Sleep, what did he mean sleep? My son and I stood at the win¬dow until two in the morning watching. Well he's sick, and all of this was affecting him. I say, "Igor, you go to bed, I'm going to go to bed in a minute too." He went and I sat at the window until three, and then went to bed. Things had calmed down slightly.

The 28th, Sunday, was my day off. My husband got up and said, "Come on, Emma, get up." I say, "Today's my day off, let me rest." He says, "Aren't you going to make me some tea?" Well I felt ashamed and got up, and said, "Where are you going?" He says, "I'm going out, I have to." I say, "Can you really go outside on a day like today? Don't go out, for God's sake. You nev¬er listen to me, I know, and you're not going to listen to me now, but at least don't take the car out of the garage, go without the car." And he says, "Come on, close the door!" And then on the staircase he muttered something, I couldn't make it out, he probably said "coward" or something.

I closed the door and he left. And I started cleaning... picking things up around the house . . . Everything seemed quiet until one o'clock in the after¬noon, but at the bus station, my neighbor told me, cars were burning. I said, "Khalida, was it our car?" She says, "No, no, Emma, don't be afraid, they were government cars and Zhigulis." Our car is a GAZ-21 Volga. And I wait¬ed, it was four o'clock, five o'clock . . . and when he wasn't home at seven I said, "Oh, they've killed Shagen!"

Tires are burning in town, there's black smoke in town, and I'm afraid, I'm standing on the balcony and I'm all ... my whole body is shaking. My God, they've probably killed him! So basically 1 waited like that until ten o'clock and he still hadn't come home. And I'm afraid to go out. At ten o'clock I look out: across from our building is a building with a bookstore, and from upstairs, from the second floor, everything is being thrown out¬side. I'm looking out of one window and Igor is looking out of the other, and I don't want him to see this, and he, as it turns out, doesn't want me to see it.

We wanted to hide it from one another. I joined him. "Mamma," he says, "look what they're doing over there!" They were burning everything, and there were police standing there, 10 or 15 of them, maybe twenty policemen standing on the side, and the crowd is on the other side, and two or three people are throwing everything down from the balcony. And one of the ones on the balcony is shouting, "What are you standing there for, burn it!" When they threw the television, wow, it was like a bomb! Our neighbor on the third floor came out on her balcony and shouted, "Why are you doing that, why are you burning those things, those people saved with such difficulty to buy those things for their home. Why are you burning them?" And from the courtyard they yell at her, "Go inside, go inside! Instead why don't you tell us if they are any of them in your building or not?" They meant Armenians, but they didn't say Armenians, they said, "of them." She says, "No, no, no, none!" Then she ran downstairs to our place, and says, "Emma, Emma, you have to leave!" I say, "They've killed Shagen anyway, what do we have to live for? It won't be living for me without Shagen. Let them kill us, too!" She insists, saying, "Emma, get out of here, go to Khalida's, and give me the key. When they come I'll say that it's my daughter's apartment, that they're off visiting someone." I gave her the key and went to the neigh¬bor's, but I couldn't endure it. I say, "Igor, you stay here, I'm going to go downstairs, and see, maybe Papa's ... Papa's there."

Meanwhile, they were killing the two brothers, Alik and Valery [Albert and Valery Avanesians; see the accounts of Rima Avanesian and Alvina Baluian], in the courtyard. There is a crowd near the building, they're shout¬ing, howling, and I didn't think that they were killing at the time. Alik and Valery lived in the corner house across from ours. When I went out into the courtyard I saw an Azerbaijani, our neighbor, a young man about 30 years old. I say, "Madar, Uncle Shagen's gone, let's go see, maybe he's dead in the garage or near the garage, let's at least bring the corpse into the house." He shouts, "Aunt Emma, where do you think you're going?! Go back into the house, I'll look for him." I say, "Something will happen to you, too, because of me, no, Madar, I'm coming too." Well he wouldn't let me go all the same, he says, "You stay here with us, I'll go look." He went and looked, and came back and said, "Aunt Emma, there's no one there, the garage is closed." Madar went off again and then returned and said, "Aunt Emma, they've already killed Alik, and Valery's there ... wheezing."

Madar wanted to go up to him, but those scoundrels said, "Don't go near him, or we'll put you next to him." He got scared—he's young—and came back and said, "I'm going to go call, maybe an ambulance will come, at least to take Alik, maybe he'll live ..." They grew up together in our courtyard, they knew each other well, they had always been on good terms. He went to call, but not a single telephone worked, they had all been shut off. He called, and called, and called, and called—nothing.

I went upstairs to the neighbor's. Igor says, "Two police cars drove up over there, their headlights are on, but they're not touching them, they are still lying where they were, they're still lying there ..." We watched out the window until four o'clock, and then went downstairs to our apartment, didn't take my clothes off. I lay on the couch so as not to go to bed, and at six o'clock in the morning I got up and said, "Igor, you stay here at home, don't go out, don't go anywhere, I'm going to look, I have to find Papa, dead or alive ... let me go ... I've got the keys from work."

At six o'clock I went to the Emergency Hospital. The head doctor and another doctor opened the door to the morgue. I run up to them and say, "Doctor, is Shagen there?" He says, "What do you mean? Why should Shagen be here?!" I wanted to go in, but he wouldn't let me. There were only four people in there, they said. Well, they must have been awful because they didn't let me in. They said, "Shagen's not here, he's alive somewhere, he'll come back."

It's already seven o'clock in the morning. I look and there is a panel truck with three policemen. Some of our people from the hospital were there with them. I say, "Sara Baji ["Sister" Sara, term of endearment], go look, they've probably brought Shagen." I said it, shouted it, and she went and came back and says, "No, Emma, he has tan shoes on, it's a younger person." Now Shagen just happened to have tan shoes, light tan, they were already old. When they said it like that I guessed immediately. I went and said, "Doctor, they've brought Shagen in dead." He says, "Why are you carrying on like that, dead, dead . . . he's alive." But then he went all the same, and when he came back the look on his face was ... I could tell immediately that he was dead. They knew one another well, Shagen had worked for him a long time. I say, "Doctor, is it Shagen?" He says, "No, Emma, it's not he, it's somebody else entirely." I say, "Doctor, why are you deceiving me, I'll find out all the same anyway, if not today, then tomorrow." And he said ... I screamed, right there in the office. He says, "Emma, go, go calm down a little." Another one of our colleagues said that the doctor had said it was Shagen, but... in hideous condition. They tried to calm me down, saying it wasn't Shagen. A few minutes later another colleague comes in and says, "Oh, poor Emma!" When she said it like that there was no hope left.

That day was awful. They were endlessly bringing in dead and injured people. At night someone took me home. I said, "Igor, Papa's been killed." On the morning of the 1st I left Igor at home again and went to the hospi¬tal: I had to bury him somehow, do something. I look and see that the hospi¬tal is surrounded by soldiers. They are wearing dark clothes. "Hey, citizen, where are you going?" I say, "I work here," and from inside someone shouts, Yes, yes, that's our cook, let her in." I went right to the head doctor's office and there is a person from the City Health Department there, he used to work with us at the hospital. He says, "Emma, Shagen's been taken to Baku. In the night they took the wounded and the dead, all of them, to Baku." I say, "Doctor, how will I bury him?" He says, "We're taking care of all that don't you worry, we'll do everything, we'll tell you about it. Where did you spend the night?" I say, "I was at home." He says, "What do you mean you were at home?! You were at home alone?" I say, "No, Igor was there too." He says, "You can't stay home, we're getting an ambulance right now, wait just one second, the head doctor is coming, we're arranging an ambulance right now, you put on a lab coat and take one for Igor, you go and bring Igor here like a patient, and you'll stay here and we'll see later what to do next ..." His last name is Kagramanov. The head doctor's name is Izyat Jamalogli Sadukhov.

The "ambulance" arrived and I went home and got Igor. They admitted him as a patient, they gave us a private room, an isolation room. We stayed in the hospital until the 4th.

Some police car came and they said, "Emma, let's go." And the women, our colleagues, when they saw the police car, became anxious and said, "Where are you taking her?" I say, "They're going to kill me, too ..." And the investigator says, "Why are you saying that, we're going to make a positive identification." We went to Baku and they took me into the morgue ... I still can't remember what hospital it was . . . The investigator says, "Let's go, we need to be certain, maybe it's not Shagen." And when I saw the caskets, lying on top of one another, I went out of my mind. I say, "I can't look, no." The investigator says, "Are there any identifying marks?" I say, "Let me see the clothes, or the shoes, or even a sock, I'll recognize them." He says, "Isn't there anything on his body?" I say he has seven gold teeth and his finger, he only has half of one of his fingers. Shagen was a carpenter, he had been injured at work ...

They brought one of the sleeves of the shirt and sweater he was wearing, they brought them and they were all burned . . . When I saw them I shouted, "Oh, they burned him!" I shouted, I don't know, I fell down ... or maybe I sat down, I don't remember. And that investigator says, "Well fine, fine, since we've identified that these are his clothes, and since his teeth . . . since he has seven gold teeth ..."

On the 4th they told me: "Emma, it's time to bury Shagen now." I cried, "How, how can I bury Shagen when I have only one son and he's sick? I should inform his relatives, he has three sisters, I can't do it by myself." They say, "OK, you know the situation. How will they get here from Karabagh? How will they get here from Yerevan? There's no transportation, it's impos¬sible."

He was killed on February 28, and I buried him on March 7. We buried him in Sumgait. They asked me, "Where do you want to bury him?" I said, "I want to bury him in Karabagh, where we were born, let me bury him in Karabagh," I'm shouting, and the head of the burial office, I guess, says, "Do you know what it means, take him to Karabagh?! It means arson!" I say, "What do you mean, arson? Don't they know what's going on in Karabagh? The whole world knows that they killed them, and I want to take him to Karabagh, I don't have anyone here." I begged, I pleaded, I grieved, I even got down on my knees. He says, "Let's bury him here now, and in three months, in six months, a year, if it calms down, I'll help you move him to Karabagh..."

Our trial was the first in Sumgait. It was concluded on May 16. At the investigation the murderer, Tale Ismailov, told how it all happened, but then at the trial he ... tried to wriggle ... he tried to soften his crime. Then they brought a videotape recorder, I guess, and played it, and said, "Ismailov, look, is that you?" He says, "Yes." "Well look, here you're describing every-thing as it was on the scene of the crime, right?" He says, "Yes." "And now you're telling it differently?" He says, "Well maybe I forgot!" Like that.

The witnesses and that criminal creep himself said that when the car was going along Mir Street, there was a crowd of about 80 people . . . Shagen had a Volga GAZ-21. The 80 people surrounded his car, and all 80 of them were involved. One of them was this Ismailov guy, this Tale. They—it's unclear who - started pulling Shagen out of the car. Well, one says from the left side of the car, another says from the right side. They pulled off his sports jacket, He had a jacket on. Well they ask him, "What's your nationality?" He says, "Armenian." Well they say from the crowd they shouted, "If he's an Armenian, kill him, kill him!" They started beating him, they broke seven of his ribs, and his heart... I don't know, they did something there, too . . . it's too awful to tell about. Anyway, they say this Tale guy ... he had an arma¬ture shaft. He says, "I picked it up, it was lying near a bush, that's where I got it." He said he picked it up, but the witnesses say that he had already had it. He said, "I hit him twice," he said, "... once or twice on the head with that rod." And he said that when he started to beat him Shagen was sit¬ting on the ground, and when he hit him he fell over. He said, "I left, right nearby they were burning things or something in an apartment, killing someone," he says, "and I came back to look, is that Shagen alive or not?" I said, "You wanted to finish him, right, and if he was still alive, you came back to hit him again?" He went back and looked and he was already dead. "After that," that bastard Tale said, "after that I went home."

I said, "You . . . you . . . little snake," I said, "Are you a thief and a murder¬er?" Shagen had had money in his jacket, and a watch on his wrist. They were taken. He says he didn't take them.

When they overturned and burned the car, that Tale was no longer there, it was other people who did that. Who it was, who turned over the car and who burned it, that hasn't been clarified as yet. I told the investigator, "How can you have the trial when you don't know who burned the car?" He said something, but I didn't get what he was saying. But I said, "You still haven't straightened everything out, I think that's unjust."

When they burned the car he was lying next to it, and the fire spread to him. In the death certificate it says that he had third-degree burns over 80 Percent of his body...

And I ask again, why was he killed? My husband was a carpenter, he was a good craftsman, he knew how to do everything, he even fixed his own car, with his own hands. We have three children. Three sons. Only Igor was with me at the time. The older one was in Pyatigorsk, and the younger one is serving in the Army. And now they're fatherless . ..

I couldn't sit all the way through it. When the Procurator read up to 15 years' deprivation of freedom, I just ... I went out of my mind, I didn't know what to do with myself, I said, "How can that be? You," I said, "you are saying that it was intentional murder and the sentence is 15 years' deprivation of freedom?" I screamed, I had lost my mind! I said, "Let me at that creep, with my bare hands I'll ..." A relative restrained me, and there were all those military people there ... I left. I said, "This isn't a Soviet trial this unjust!" That's what I shouted, I said it and left...

I said that on February 27, when those people were streaming down our street, they were shouting, "Long live Turkey!" and "Glory to Turkey!" And during the trial I said to that Ismailov, "What does that mean, Glory to Turkey? I still don't understand what Turkey has to do with this, we live in the Soviet Union. That Turkey told you to or is going to help you kill Armenians? I still don't understand why "Glory to Turkey!" I asked that question twice and got no answer ... No one answered me...

May 19, 1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

- ZAVEN ARMENAKOVICH BADASIAN

Born 1942 Employed Sumgait Bulk Yarn Plant

Resident at Building 34, Apartment 33

Microdistrict No. 12

Sumgait

On February 27 my wife and I went to Baku to go shopping and returned to Sumgait at around five in the evening. We ran into one of my relatives at the bus station and got to talking. A lot of people had gathered not far away, near the store. Well at first we didn't know what was happening, and then a fellow I know comes up to me, an Azerbaijani guy, and says, "What are you standing here for? Go home immediately!" I asked, "What's going on?" He says, "What's the matter, can't you see, they've overturned a car and they're killing Armenians!" He helped me catch a cab and we got home safely.

We sat at home for two days. During that time a gang of bandits came into our courtyard. But the neighbors wouldn't let them in the building. There were about 80 of them. They had sticks and pieces of armatures in their hands. They were shouting something, but you couldn't understand it. It wasn't one voice or two, all of them were shouting in a chorus. They turned toward Building 35. They went up to the third floor, and we see that they're breaking glass and throwing things out the window. After a while they come out the entryway: one has a pair of jeans in his hands, another has a tape recorder, and a third a guitar. They went on toward the auto parts store.

We had to save ourselves. After midnight on March 1 we went to hide at School No. 33, which is in Microdistrict 13. There were two other Armenian families there with us. There were 13 of us altogether. Out of all of them I had only known Ernest before, he had moved to Sumgait from Kirovabad. The Azerbaijani guard at the school let us in. At first he didn't want to, but there was nowhere else for us to go. We had to plead with him and talk him into it. We were told that on that day, the 1st, there would be an attack on our microdistrict.

We went upstairs to a classroom on the second floor. On the city radio station they announced three telephone numbers that could be used to summon assistance or communicate anything important. I called one of them and the First Secretary of the Sumgait City Party Committee answered. I asked him for assistance. 1 say, "We're in School No. 33, we need to be evacuated." Well he says, "Got it, wait there, I'm sending out help now."

I know his voice. The First Secretary had been to our plant, 1 had spoken with him personally. When I called he said, "Muslimzade here."

About two hours after the call we heard shouts near the school. We looked out the window and about 100 to 120 people were outside saying, "Armenians, come out, we're here to get you." They have clubs, axes, and armature shafts in their hands. The guard sat there with us, and asked, "Where should I go?" I say, "If your life is of any value to you you'll go down there and say that the Armenians were here and that they left." That's what he did. He went down there and said, "The Armenians were here," he said, "I let them out the back door, they went that way." And pointed with his hand. And with shouts and noise the mob set off in the direction he had pointed.

So the assistance we had been promised did come. They sent us help, all right! Instead of sending real soldiers he had sent his own. I am positive that Muslimzade did that. No one had seen us entering the school, no one knew that we were there. In any case, we stayed at the school until seven in the morning, and no soldiers of any sort came to our aid.

In the morning we went to my relative's in Microdistrict 1, and the sol¬diers took us to the SK club from there. The club was jammed with people, and there were lots of people ahead of us—there was no space available. One small boy, about three months old, died right in my arms. There wasn't a single doctor, nothing. The boy was uninjured, there were no wounds or bruises on him. He was just very ill. They gave him mouth-to-mouth resus¬citation, they did everything they could under the circumstances, but were unable to save him. And his mother and father, a young Armenian couple, were right there, on the floor ...

I searched for a spot for us in the SK, we have a small child of our own, I wanted to find a room or something to put my family in. I went up to the third floor, there were a lot of soldiers up there, bandaged, with canes, limp¬ing, with their heads broken open. They were a terrible sight. Young guys, all of them.

There were a lot of bandaged Armenians, too. Everyone had been beaten, everyone was crying, wailing, and calling for help. I think that the City Party Committee ignored us completely. True, there was a snack bar: a sausage was 30 kopeks or 40 kopeks, a package of cookies that cost 26 kopeks was being sold for 50, a bottled soft drink cost a ruble . . . But there was no way to get the things any cheaper.

I met my old uncle, Aram Mikhailovich, there. He saw me and tears welled up in his eyes. My whole life he had told me that we were friendly peoples, that we worked together, he always had Azerbaijanis over at his house. And now he saw me and there was nothing he could say, he just cried. You can understand his feelings, of course.

April 8,1988

Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 4 недели спустя...

- ZINAIDA POGOSOVNA AKOPIAN

Born 1937

Dispatcher

Kavkazenergoremont Electric Booster Station

Her daughters

- GAYANE (GAYA) VAZGENOVNA AKOPIAN

Born 1970

Orderly

Sumgait Municipal Hospital No. 1

- DIANA VAZGENOVNA AKOPIAN

Born 1978

Second-Year Student

Sumgait Secondary School No. 13

Residents at Building 21/31, Apartment 47

Microdistrict No. 3

Sumgait

-Zinaida: On March 20 we arrived in Yerevan, and the next day they reg¬istered us at the train station and took us to the boarding house. The condi¬tions were wonderful, thanks to our Armenians, who received us. But it's not relaxing all the same. I don't know how everyone else feels about it, but for me it's torture. We don't have a place to call our own. I had a two-bed¬room apartment in Sumgait, my children went to school and we lived well, in friendship. It's painful that in our times, in 1988, in the Soviet period, peo¬ple can break into our apartment and try to kill me and my children, in whom I've put all my efforts and my whole youth. Everything was going well for us: my older daughter was studying at the Institute, the middle one was preparing to enter medical school and was interning as an orderly, and my youngest had been sick for a long time, but had returned to health. I have been though a lot in my life: it's been seven years since I lost my hus¬band, I raised my children by myself. Lots of women have similar fates, but there's nothing to be done about it. But I can't control myself when I remem¬ber what happened in Sumgait on February 27, 28, and 29, it was just a horror, it's indescribable.

On February 27 our relative, Ira, came to visit us. She's better friends with my oldest daughter, and so right away she asked, "Where's Vika?" I say, "Vika's off in Pirkuli on a trip for three days, she's supposed to come back tomorrow." My middle daughter, Gaya, had baked a cake and we sat there talking and laughing, drinking tea. Then Gaya and Diana went to walk Ira home.

They left and a few minutes went by; suddenly I hear noise. I raced out to the balcony—our balcony is right across from the bus station, we live at the corner of Mir and Druzhba Streets—I look and see that there are hoards of people near the bus station and they're all shouting something. What they're shouting I can't understand. Our neighbor is standing on his balcony, too. I ask, "Nufar, what's happened?" He says, "I don't know, I can't figure it out either." I got scared—the kids had gone outside, and I wanted to run after them, but then there was a knock at the door. I open the door and it's the kids. "Mamma," says Gayane, "you'll never believe what's going on out there! It's awful!" Ira says, "Aunt Zina, they're shouting, 'Karabagh! Karabagh! Karabagh is ours!' We didn't know what was going on. They're threatening to drive out the Armenians and slaughter them."

I called my brother, and his wife answered the phone. I said, "Aunt Tamara, don't worry, Ira is staying here with us, and we'll see her home lat¬er." I couldn't shut my eyes all night long, even until morning. I was worried about Vika. My God, what was going on, what had happened?!

-Gayane: That day, on the 27th, we stood on the balcony and observed what was happening, although Mamma wouldn't allow us to watch all of it. There weren't 50 yards between our building and the bus station. We could see and hear everything perfectly. They were stopping buses, dragging peo¬ple out, leading all the passengers out, looking for Armenians. If they found an Armenian on the bus, then it started ... I don't know what to call it...

-Zinaida: It's called slaughter.

-Gayane: The mob would descend on people and beat them. I don't know if they were killing them or not, but when they left them, they lay still, not moving, as though nothing was left of them. One person was lying there and they started dragging him. The police were standing right there, to the side, not doing anything, they didn't take any steps to calm that mob.

It was awful to stand there and watch it all from the balcony. And you couldn't go anywhere, somehow . . . you wanted to be able to see everything so as to tell of it later. We wanted to leave Sumgait that day. What kept us was the idea that we live in the Soviet Union, and that something would be done about it. Where in the world was our government?!

-Zinaida: We couldn't leave town, of course, because our older daughter wasn't home. And at the same time I was terrified for Gaya and Diana. On Sunday morning when I went to see Ira home, our neighbor said, "Zin', you know they went into Valodya's house and smashed everything he had. They murdered his father and two sons." Valodya is our neighbor, he's an Armenian, he lives on the first floor. I think, my God, what is happening?! And in broad daylight!

I saw Ira home and when on the way back I came across a mob shouting "Slay the Armenians! Karabagh is ours!" This was at 12 o'clock in the after¬noon. On the way I stopped into a bread store and the saleswoman says. "They beat our store manager, they thought he was an Armenian and they beat him, but he was an Azerbaijani." And I asked, "Did they kill him?" She says, "No, he's in serious condition." I left there and started to walk home on that same street, but the mob started moving in my direction. I turned off the street and went down the little way that goes toward the Sputnik store. There I met another crowd, but these weren't bandits, these were our people from Sumgait. I was so frightened that I walked without knowing where I as going, I couldn't feel my legs or the ground under my feet. I was walking and there was a boy standing before my eyes. This was on the 27th, around evening time. He ran under our balcony, and the mob surged toward him shouting, "He's an Armenian, get him!" He wore a black coat. They grabbed him, that boy, near the bus stop, I saw it. They grabbed him by the legs and struck his head on the asphalt.

I made it home but I just couldn't calm down. My oldest daughter was in my thoughts. I was thinking, my daughter's coming home now, they'll stop her bus and she'll be gone. There's no police, no protection, nothing. It's like they had all died, there's no one, nothing, no authorities whatsoever. I can't even find the words for it! I look and see an Ikarus arriving. Before going to the bus station they stop near our place, across from the Kosmos movie the¬ater. So this Ikarus stops there and the gang is yelling, the Azerbaijanis are running toward it yelling, "Armenians, out!" And I see them take the Armenians and beat them, killing them. I can't watch it any more. It was a nightmare. I just couldn't watch it. But Gaya was standing there watching it, and I scolded her. She says, "Mamma, I have to see it, I have to know what's happening, I have to see it with my own eyes so I can tell our people of it later. So our children will know."

-Gayane: We saw a great deal on the 27th. They caught no less than 20 people before my eyes. I can't say for sure if they killed them or not...

-Zinaida: There were too many people there, the mob was too big. You couldn't make anything out. But I saw that boy in the black coat with my own eyes. He was 18 or 19 years old.

-Gayane: I think he was older, probably, about 22. A tall fellow, a big guy, in a coat. He was walking quickly, but when they shouted that he was an Armenian, he tore off running. And the mob went after him. They caught him right under our balcony. I don't know. I don't think there could have been much left of him after that. You can imagine what happens when a crowd attacks one person. It was a mob, big, angry, and featureless. You know, there was a similarity in the way they were dressed, mostly they were wearing long black coats. You couldn't even tell them apart, they were all wearing black and they all looked alike.

-Zinaida: When they picked up that boy and struck him against the asphalt and he cried "Mamma!" 1 ran into the room. I couldn't watch any longer. An awful lot was going on right then, in various places, it wasn't only that boy, several people were being beaten up. You couldn't see all of it at once, but when that boy cried "Mamma!" I immediately started watching only him.

—Gayane: On that first day it went on from about six in the morning until twelve at night. At midnight they dispersed and the police took their place They were scattered about in all districts. But how can you explain the fact that by morning, when it had already started getting light, around seven o'clock, our police were gone? The police disappeared and yielded their positions to the bandits. In the morning they started gathering at our inter¬section again, at the bus station and at the entrance to downtown. From morning on all the roads and mass transit stops were covered, and by nine o'clock you couldn't even see the ground. There were thousands of people in the crowd. Again they began stopping vehicles and checking for Armenians.

-Zinaida: They had signals. I realized that when I noticed that they made a cross with their arms, they crossed their arms over their heads. The cross, evidently, meant that the vehicle had Armenians in it. They let the Azerbaijani cars through, and they stopped the Armenian ones and started their pogrom.

-Gayane: They stopped a white Zhiguli and asked the driver what his nationality was. He got out and said they were from Baku. "But what is your nationality?" He says Armenian. They immediately start shouting, "Ermeni, Ermeni!" And he says, "What's going on? I'm coming from Baku. I don't live in Sumgait." "Doesn't matter, who cares if you're from Baku or Sumgait." Anyway the crowd pounced on him and started beating him, and they dragged a woman—his wife, probably—out of the car. At this point the police came and took the two and led them away. Then the mob started smashing the car, and then burned it. The flames blazed ... it was a horrible fire! Then everyone ran away, they thought the car was going to explode. About 20 minutes later another car comes along, a green Moskvich. They ran up shouting "Ermeni! Ermeni!" But this time they didn't pull the people out of the car, they didn't beat them. Maybe they burned them along with the car, because no one emerged from the flames. The neighbor boy Vakhit was standing on the balcony too, acquaintances of his walked by below, and he asked them and they said, "Yes, they burned them along with the car." About two hours later a whole wedding procession came by, and there was a doll on the first car. We thought they were Armenians, but the cars started to honk loudly. They were Azerbaijanis, and they were immediately allowed through.

-Zinaida: The driver waved his hand as if to say 'get out of the way.' The whole crowd parted and the procession passed through freely.

-Gayane: By the way, at the marriage hall, which is right in the courtyard of our building, there was a wedding that day. The Azerbaijanis were cele¬brating and dancing. On the streets there was grief and death, people were being killed, and people were celebrating the whole time.

-Zinaida: Before the apartment itself was attacked I asked Gaya to call and find out when the tourist bus was supposed to arrive. She went to her girlfriend's in the building, she lives in the first entryway, on the third floor. Gaya came back and said, "Mamma, the bus is supposed to come around eight, after eight." You can imagine what I was feeling, how hard it was: Vika knew nothing about what was happening and was coming to meet her death. Then I heard shouting. I raced to the window and see that the belong¬ings of our neighbors from the second entryway are being thrown outdoors. They were thrashing about with the pillows and the feathers were flying like snow. I started to cry. I am walking around the room, crying, wailing: Vika's not here, what will come of her . . . Gaya, of course, was consoling me: "Mamma, nothing will happen to her, don't worry, calm down, she's in good company, they'll look out for her."

Diana: I saw the green car burn. The car was burning when we went out onto the balcony. Gaya pushed me away, telling me to get off the balcony. I left. Then they came up to the balcony and asked if there were any Armenians here.

-Zinaida: You're right, I forgot about that, that was on the 27th.

Diana: There's a small, grassy area in front of our balcony; there are trees planted there. The mob asked if there were any Armenians in the building. All the neighbors said, no, there are no Armenians here. There weren't a lot of Armenians in our building, but there weren't just a few Armenian fami¬lies, either.

-Gayane: They fell upon the apartments on the 28th. There were terribly many of them. Our courtyard is huge, and it was completely filled with them.

-Zinaida: Katusev had made an appearance on television earlier. He said that two people, Azerbaijanis, had been killed in Karabagh. And when he said that. . . you know how bees sound, have you heard how they buzz? It was like the buzzing of millions of bees . . . and with this buzzing they flew into our courtyard, howling and shouting. I don't know how to describe it. By this point we were afraid to watch from the balcony, but when I looked out of the bedroom window—the Znaniye Bookstore is down there, and Armenians live on the second and fourth floors—I saw their things being thrown out the windows. I realized that they would be upon us any minute. I shouted to Gayane, "Gaya, hide the gold." That's honestly what I told my child. I grabbed Diana. I didn't know what to do! Vika still wasn't home, and it was already getting dark. I was afraid to look at the time because I was already horrified as it was.

-Gayane: Just in case, we changed the television channel from the Moscow station to the Azerbaijani one.

-Zinaida: And turned it up loud.

-Gayane: We never listened to Azerbaijani music. It just didn't do much for us. In all those years we almost never listened to it. But sometimes we would watch some entertainment show or film on Azerbaijani television. And that was it. And here we had it turned up full blast. So they would think we were Azerbaijanis.

-Zinaida: Well you can imagine, they're slaughtering Armenians, robbing them, and we're listening to this concert music from Baku. Our Azerbaijani Neighbors suggested we do it, they knocked on the door and told Gaya to turn on Azerbaijani music. But we already had it on anyway. Turn on the lights, they told us, so they will think you're not Armenians. They're saying the Armenians are afraid to turn on their lights, they're hiding.

-Gayane: Apparently there was some kind of arrangement, because we noticed that the lights were off only in Armenian apartments, that is, the Azerbaijanis were warned, and every last one of them had their rights on. When we turned the lights off two of our neighbors came immediately, and later, another one. "Turn on the lights," they told us, "please. Nothing will happen. Be calm. Nothing will happen."

-Zinaida: "We won't allow them to come into your apartment."

-Gayane: We believed those people. We had never done anything bad to them.

-Zinaida: After the whole nightmare, about March 15, before we left for Armenia, when I was coming into the building they were all crying. The Azerbaijanis were crying, saying, "Can it be there is no God? How could they raise their hands against your family? You never did anyone any harm, you never refused anyone anything, not in hard times, or in time of fortune, or in time of mourning. How could they give you away? How could they sell you down the river?" They really had given us away. Some of them pro¬tected us, but others gave us away. They sold us down the river.

-Gayane: I was wearing slacks that day, and when it all began I became cautious for some reason and I changed my clothes. Azerbaijani women don't wear pants. Young Armenian and Russian girls in Sumgait wore pants, but the Azerbaijanis found that very strange. And I thought I better put on a skirt, otherwise they won't believe me if I told them we were Azerbaijanis. There was nothing else we could do. No other way out. I was forced to turn myself into God knows who. I let my hair down, tousled it, and threw a scarf over my head.

-Zinaida: And she told me, "Mamma, you hide. Take Diana and go into the other room. You two look more like Armenians. They'll figure out that we're Armenians right away." But how could I go away and leave her there?!

-Gayane: I went out onto the balcony. It worked out better that way. We were the only Armenian family in the fourth entryway. This gave us hope: we were the only ones, the neighbors wouldn't let them in. They, the Azerbaijanis, would fear for themselves and for their children. I looked and saw someone crawling up on the balcony from below, it was easy to get up onto our balcony. When we would lose the keys the neighbors would let us into their places and we would crawl across onto our balcony and get in that way. So I turned around and saw a guy with a knife on our balcony. He looks at me and shouts, "What nationality are you here?"

-Zinaida: At the same time they were knocking on the door.

-Gayane: "What nationality are you?" he's shouting. Well at first I was frightened, but then I got control of myself and answered in perfect Azerbaijani, "You should be ashamed of yourself, asking a question like that. Can't you see I'm an Azerbaijani? If I were an Armenian would I come out to meet you face to face and look you in the eyes?" He looks at me and tells the people with him, "Yes, Azerbaijanis live here." From below they tell him, "Check it out, it can't be, they have to be Armenians." And he asks me again, "What nationality are you?" I say, "Can't you see?" I started fuming. I could not say anything else. "You're blind, that's for sure! You can yell all you want, but that won't make us Armenians." I hear them breaking down our door, and Mamma went toward the door. I say, "I don't have time to deal with you, they're breaking down our door." I go to the door and ask, "Who is it?" They answer, "Open up!" I say, "Wait, why are you breaking the door? What's going on? I'm opening up." We never locked the lower lock, it was broken, but now they had locked it out of fear, and I couldn't get it open. I say wait, I'm looking for the key. I opened the door—it was almost broken down already. I opened the door and they burst in. I say, "What's going on? Why are you breaking down our door?"

-Zinaida: Then they started climbing in from the balcony. They're shout¬ing, "Why don't you open the door?" And I say, "Well you've already come in the balcony." Then Diana sees their knives, runs into the bathroom, and closes the door. Gaya cries out, "Mamma, Diana ran into the bathroom!" I ran to the door and forgot that we were pretending to be Azerbaijanis, and said in Armenian: "Diana, open the door!" Gaya tried to calm them down, and I'm shouting with tears in my eyes for Diana to open the door.

-Diana: I was sitting on the couch with my doll, Little Red Riding Hood. That guy climbed in from the balcony with a big knife with a yellow handle. They put it up to Mamma's stomach. I ran to the bathroom, opened the door, and slammed it behind me. I was frightened, and started to cry. I shouted, "Mamma, they want to kill you!" And then . . . then they started shouting, "Give us your passports." And Gaya says, "What do you need passports for, we're Azerbaijanis."

-Gayane; I tried to convince them that we were Azerbaijanis, I was trying everything I could. I could get on my knees and plead. I could humble myself, because at that moment I was worried about other lives than just my own. To be honest I didn't care about anything else, as long as my little sister would survive, her life and health had cost us so dearly! I tell them, "What, don't you understand anything?" They started shouting, they were tremen¬dously excited, shouting with terribly loud voices, saying that in Stepanakert their girls were being killed, raped, and tossed around with pitchforks. Why shouldn't they do the same to us? I said, "Who's doing all that? Who is doing it? Some Armenians! What does that have to do with us? Give me the knife, I'll cut my own face." "Now you calm down," they tell me.

-Zinaida: I told them, "Why didn't you deal with them there! There, in Karabagh? Nothing has happened here, no one has been fighting here, not we with the Armenians, nor they with us. Why didn't you give it right back to them there? What've we got to do with this?" I got confused. I had been saying that we were Azerbaijanis, but suddenly I started speaking as though I was an Armenian, but they didn't notice. One of them was next to me, with a knife at my breast. And he says to the others, "What pretty girls." He meant Gaya and my 10-year-old Diana. I was terrified. Gaya started assuring them that we were Azerbaijanis. One guy stood in the doorway and gave us bad looks.

-Gayane: He demanded the passports. I said, "Young man, I don't have my passport here." He says, "Let's have the passport, we won't believe you without your passport." And one of them started hurriedly searching for documents. They turned the wardrobe in the other room upside down, took the picture off the wall, and started pulling the clothes off their hooks, yelling and shouting, "Passport! Passport!" They all started yelling, there was so much noise in the apartment. They were all shouting. My hair stood on end. Suddenly I said, "Listen, my Papa died, 40 days haven't passed yet, we have a Muslim household, we're in mourning, you should be ashamed of yourselves, you've disgraced your honor." And then Mamma started to cry.

-Zinaida: I started crying: "My husband died, 40 days haven't yet passed, aren't you ashamed of yourselves!" In fact my husband had died seven years earlier, in 1981. "We're in mourning, and you burst in here demanding docu¬ments. The documents are at the housing office, I'm filing for my pension." Well it seemed like they believed us. Then one guy said, "They're Lezgins. Can't you see, there are no men here, only women. Leave." Another fellow in the group agreed with him, he also said that we were Lezgins. But a third said, "No, they're Armenians." Well the other two convinced him, I don't know how, and all the rest of them listened to them too. There were abort 50 of them, if not more, all in our three-room apartment, even the entryway was filled. They started leaving. Yes, we're Lezgins, we're Lezgins." They started leaving, and one of them took our tape recorder with him. And the one who had first called us Lezgins says, "Leave that, what are you doing?" They seemed to obey that guy.

-Gayane: He was tall, wearing baggy jeans and a coat.

-Zinaida: With a little moustache, I think.

-Gayane: No, he didn't have a moustache, he was tall with brown hair, he wasn't a bad-looking sort. He didn't have anything in his hands.

-Zinaida: He stood at the threshold.

-Gayane: Yes, he didn't look like a bad guy, and you know, his face seemed familiar to me. I had seen him somewhere. And more than once. But I can't remember where. When he came in I was stupefied, I had a premoni¬tion that he wouldn't be able to remain indifferent. When he said that we were Lezgins and that they should leave, such gladness started to glow inside of me. Hope. They continued to argue on their way out. Some said, "They're Armenians all the same." And that fellow answered, "Even if they are Armenians, it's shameful, the father died, they're mourning, there's noth¬ing but women in the house, there's no men. We should stay out of the apartment." "What do you mean, stay out? We can go in there!" And he said, "No, we should stay out, they're Lezgins, we're leaving here." The three of them protected us.

-Zinaida: No, the two of them. The one in the short coat and the one in the grey suit, who stood at the threshold, about 19 or 20 years old. Well they were all young really. The two of them defended us.

-Diana: Three, three!

-Zinaida: Do you remember the third one, Diana?

-Diana: Yes, he was wearing dark clothes.

-Gayane: The third one was the one who came back. He wore a long brown coat.

-Diana: He wore a long, darkish brown coat, and his hair was dark too. When they left, they told him downstairs that those women were Armenians, and ran back and said that they were going to kill us.

-Zinaida: They had all left, and we had started to calm down a little, and I closed the door. And then there is a knock. I told Gaya, "Take Diana and go into the other room." My daughters went into the dining room, and I opened the door. There was a guy there who said, "Run, hide! They're coming to kill you now!" We ran up to the third floor. We had some good neighbors up there, Azerbaijanis. I sent the kids and stood there alone, not knowing what to do. I was so far gone . . . Out of a whole room I couldn't even think of anything to take. I even forgot to take my work documents; at the time I had been preparing a report to send to Baku, and the documents were at home. I couldn't see anything ... I could only see Vika, my older daughter. I sent Gaya and Diana upstairs, and stood there asking that fellow, "Should I close the door and leave everything like this?" He says, "What do you mean, door? Get out of here, they're coming to kill you! What are you standing there for?" And I ran after the children.

-Gayane: We barely had time to get up to the third floor when they burst into our apartment and started shouting, "Where are the Armenians?" We were already at the neighbors'. They had an infant at the time, and the neighbor said, "Don't you worry, I'm not letting anyone in this apartment no matter what."

-Zinaida: On the third floor there I started asking the folks, our neighbors, to go meet Vika. The bus was due to arrive at eight o'clock. I dissolved in tears, Gaya was soothing me, Diana was next to us, she was crying too, and I'm already thinking that I've lost my older daughter, but deep in my heart I still believe she's alive . . . And my tears choked me. I was going out of my mind. But no one could leave the building, the courtyard was packed with people, swarming with them. From the balcony the neighbor in whose apartment we were hiding asked the bandits, "Where are those Armenians, the ones who were at home? Where did they make off to?" They told him they didn't know. They asked him where he lived. He answered, "Can't you see, on the third floor." He asked them specially to divert attention from his own apartment. We heard them taking free reign of our apartment, and they threw our color television off the balcony and it exploded.

-Gayane: Mamma was crying the whole time. She fell into a faint and we brought her around and held her back, because the whole time she kept making for the door to go outside, alternately raving and sobbing, shouting, and calling Vika. She didn't notice us, probably because we were next to her. Her thoughts were only on Vika. The neighbors who were hiding us were calming her too, offering tea.

-Zinaida: We are very grateful to them. Thanks to them my children and I are alive, well, and unharmed. When they were throwing our belongings out and burning them—the beds, the pillows, and the chairs—our neighbor came to us and said, "How lucky you are that it's not you standing there naked, but some other woman instead. You're from our part of the building, you lost your husband, you have children, thank God you're not in her posi¬tion, we wouldn't have been able to take it. I don't know what I would do." He of course wouldn't have done anything, he was just trying to calm us down. In the yard they were torturing our neighbors, fellow Armenians. They lived on the fifth floor, in the third entryway. A married couple, Vanya and Nina, and their three children. Their last name is V. They hid their two daughters, and stayed with their son to defend themselves, they even got boiling water ready, and an axe, and held them off for a long time, but then . . . They beat up the husband, dragged the wife outside, and stood her naked next to our burning things; her husband was lying at her feet on the ground. The crowd shouted, "Look at the naked Armenian!" They were going to throw the poor woman into the fire. The neighbors came out, an Azerbaijani woman threw her a scarf, and she covered herself with it, and the neighbors led her off to their apartment. All the neighbors saw and heard it...

-Gayane: Mamma wouldn't allow it but I went to the window and saw her standing there, and they took skewers that had been heated in the fire and stuck them into her body. Our neighbor, who lived in the same entry-way as Nina—she lives with us in the same boarding house now—saw what they had done, Nina showed her, from her knees up, almost up to her neck, her whole body was covered, riddled, with wounds.

-Zinaida: In the morning, during the night of the 29th, rather, after one o'clock, two buses approached the station. I wanted to run out. By then I didn't care any more if I lived or died, but Gayane wouldn't let me go, and the neighbors said that I would bring disaster to them and they would be slain along with their children. Gaya was crying and said that I forgot about them, my other children, but I could only think of Vika. I imagined her torn to pieces, I'm a mother, and they're just children, they don't understand. I would have jumped off the balcony and run to the soldiers for help. I was going to do it but Gayane wouldn't let me: "Mamma, please! Mamma, I beg of you!" The neighbors were sleeping and Gayane woke them with her cries. So we held on that way till morning.

On the morning of the 29th I told our neighbor I was going to go down¬stairs to our apartment, maybe Vika was lying there, murdered. He told me he would go himself. He was gone for about five minutes, but it seemed like an eternity to me. He returned and said there was no one there, nothing. I went down too, stole down like a mouse, and slipped in—everything was thrown all about. I didn't go to the soldiers because the armored personnel carriers were far away, farther than the bus station. I began looking for the briefcase with my work in it. I was miserable because of my daughter, and at the same time because of my work. My documents were there, my travel papers—I worked in the transport division—and my trip sheets.

-Gayane: Mamma is a very responsible person, she was always ready to work around the clock to do her job.

-Zinaida: I look around and I can't find the briefcase. I didn't care about the fact that everything had been stolen out of all three of my rooms, that everything was smashed, and the furniture was broken, I worried about that later, but at first I was concerned about the lost documents. I went into the kitchen. My daughter had hidden some valuables in the gas stove: my ring and my earrings. It was all there. Five minutes passed and Gayane ran in and said, "Mamma, hurry." And Diana came downstairs too. Gayane found her coat among the debris, and Diana found her track shoes, her coat, and some of her dresses.

-Diana: Immediately after we got back up to the neighbors they started throwing things around in the apartment under us. They threw a television onto the asphalt, it exploded so violently it sounded like a thunderclap. Then, when Vika wasn't there, I wouldn't eat, and they forced me, but I couldn't eat. Because I loved Vika terribly and she and I had always gone to the movies and gone for walks in the park. When we went into our apart¬ment the next day and everything was broken, right away I started looking for my dolls and my books, but I didn't see anything. When we went back upstairs I managed to take two cups from my tea service, and Gaya took Vika's suit and one of her own dresses. My Italian boots were gone, my brown coat, it was beautiful, there wasn't a one of my beautiful dolls, and my giant lion was gone too, the one that had been on top of the television. He was very large and very handsome. I had two satchels, one for first grade and the other for second grade, one was yellow-green with a boy and a girl on it, they're playing a drum and a violin, and there is a dog sitting there closing its ears, and on the other one were the letters A, B, C, D, E and the numbers 4+5, two girls and a boy with their mouths open like they are singing. They were beautiful satchels. They were gone too. I had many books, I collected them, they were in the bedside tables. And a boy had giv¬en me a little apron and a headband for my birthday, they weren't around either. And I had some big books, fat ones, and they disappeared, only one was left, The Malachite Box. The Adventures of Karlson, Pippi Longstocking, and Fairy Tales of the World were left. All the other books were gone.

-Zinaida: I continued searching for my briefcase, and then my supervisor arrived. He had waited for me until nine o'clock, but I didn't appear, and he thought something must have happened, so he came. He's a Russian, Aleksei Semyonovich Lomakin. Alik Aliyev, the mechanic, came with him. When they saw my wrecked apartment they were just petrified, they could not say a thing. When I saw them I started crying. My Azerbaijani neighbors came in. Some of them were crying, others were helping me pick up. I go on looking for my documents and at the same time put things into the wardrobe. Now that I remember it it's both funny and painful: How could I have thought that I had returned to my apartment and that everything had gone back to normal? Incidentally, later, when I went back to the apartment again, those things were gone too. And the door was gone. After my super¬visor left, in the afternoon, the neighbor said that we should leave, find another refuge. "I'm afraid," he said, "that someone saw you come to my apartment, and that they could kill you and us too." My God, where could I go, it was daytime and those ... I don't even know what to call them, the bandits, those marauders, those jackals, I don't know what to call them, I can't find the words, they were everywhere. Where should 1 go with two girls? When 1 opened the door I had tears in my eyes, and I was terrified . . . And he said, "Go to Alik's, he's an Azerbaijani, too." And I say, "You should have said that earlier, when my supervisor was here with the car, he could have taken us with him." Everyone feared for their own lives. What could I do? I went out into the entryway and stood. And he says, "Any other time I would keep you here a year, or two. But right now, I'm sorry ..." Then another door opened, also on the third floor. I ask the neighbor, "Tayara, can we hide at your place?" She's an Azerbaijani too. She says, "What kind of question is that? Come in!" She hid us. There were many people in the court¬yard, and Gaya and I hid in the wardrobe, and they put Diana under a mat¬tress, leaving a small opening so the child could breathe. Tayara said that when the bandits left she would let us out, and when they came back she would hide us again.

We sat in the wardrobe for about a half hour. Gaya became ill, and I allowed her to get out. My legs fell asleep and felt like cannons. We hadn't eaten or drunk anything for so long, since the 27th, when we saw that hor¬ror—and all of it just snapped in me. Tayara's husband went outside, even though I begged him to stay, saying there should be a man in the house. He said that he'd be in the courtyard, and if anything happened his wife would signal him. She put her passport and all of their documents on the table so if they suddenly came in she could show them that they were an Azerbaijani family. My girls went to the window—and what was going on out there! I feared for my children, that someone would recognize them from the street. Gaya let her hair down and put on a scarf so she would resemble an Azerbaijani, but directly across there was a 9-story building, their windows were right across from us, and I shouted that someone would see her and give us away on the spot. But she kept on looking.

-Diana: I watched too.

-Zinaida: Downstairs the bandits were fighting with the soldiers. The sol¬diers didn't shoot, they didn't have orders to. I saw them throwing rocks at the soldiers, they were young boys, 18- and 19-year olds, and they defended themselves . . . I'm a mother after all, and they were no different from my children. When one of the soldiers fell and his head started bleeding I had to stop looking, I couldn't watch anymore ... I imagined my children in their shoes ...

-Gayane: The troops had assumed their defense that morning and had cordoned off the buildings, and some of the soldiers surrounded the bus sta¬tion, Block 36, and our Microdistrict 3. But they only cordoned them off from the outside. The mob fell upon the soldiers, who started to protect themselves, and the mob surged into the courtyard with the soldiers after it. They caught several Azerbaijanis and started beating them with their clubs. One fell down and they cracked open another's head...

-Zinaida: They show Lebanon on television, and the war in Afghanistan—that's just what it was like. Like in America, how they attack demonstrations with shields and clubs—that's just how it was in our court¬yard.

-Gayane: Don't compare it with America, those were peaceful demonstra¬tions, but these?!

-Zinaida: But how could it happen here and not off somewhere in America! They attacked the soldiers, hurled stones at them . . . Then I thought, where's the tear gas that the Americans use to disperse demonstra¬tors? If they had used gas on those jackals they all would have scattered.

-Gayane: They would not have scattered. The soldiers had been there since morning, they didn't bring in fresh troops. They hadn't eaten, they were fine standing there for about three hours, but then they got tired. They weren't even allowed to sit down ... At noon they, the soldiers, attacked them, and then the tables were turned. The mob went after the soldiers, the guys were bunched into a group in the center street and covered themselves with their shields, and the Azerbaijanis surrounded them and threw paving stones at them. And those guys sat there covering themselves with their shields. And meanwhile tanks with machine guns were cruising the streets . . . They always say, "Our children have never seen war." I never even dreamed about it, there was no need to. But then I thought about those peo¬ple who had lived through a war. It was truly horrible . . . The guys were tired, exhausted, some had had their clubs taken away, others, their shields, they had been beaten, they were covered in blood ... So many died! They beat the soldiers with their own clubs and shields. And those guys stood there and couldn't defend themselves, they couldn't open fire. They couldn't even defend themselves, let alone us. It's comical...

-Zinaida: What are you saying? How can it be funny?

-Gayane: No, I didn't mean that: How could something like that happen during our Soviet period? It's painfully embarrassing! And they burned the armored personnel carriers, too. Someone shouted, "Get away, it's going to blow!" Everyone scattered away, and the armored personnel carrier explod¬ed. The soldiers lost their senses. And when they drove the personnel carrier and the bus at the mob out of rage and fury, they drove right up on the side¬walk.

-Zinaida: The bus that had brought the troops. Only the driver was in it. The bus ran over three people straight off, I saw it. And two armored per¬sonnel carriers ran over four more. All in one or two minutes. The bus ran over three, one of the carriers ran over two, and the second, two more. Right on our street there's a dry cleaners and appliance and watch repair places; one of the armored personnel carriers went that way, and they say it ran over several over there, too. But they ran over seven before our eyes. Then the bus ploughed into a book kiosk.

-Gayane: No, that was a flower place. It was a new booth. He drove straight into it.

-Zinaida: The driver jumped out and they dragged the vehicle out to the middle of the road and set it on fire.

-Gayane: And I also saw the troops put a bunch of Azerbaijanis in a bus and take them in a convoy to Baku. There were many arrests.

-Zinaida: Our neighbor, the one who hid us, couldn't take it, and he told his wife that we should leave. They were running around in the courtyard looking for the Armenians. They knew that they were hiding with Azerbaijanis, and they were saying that they were going to check the Azerbaijani families. Poor Tayara got scared too, and started to cry; I plead¬ed with her, I said that I would remember forever how she saved my chil¬dren and me, but where could we go?

-Gayane: She didn't make us leave, she said that she would do anything, but she was afraid.

-Zinaida: I told Tayara that we would just stay a little longer and that at night we would return to our apartment. Then her husband came back and said that a curfew had been imposed. He says, "Zina, you owe us a drink. Gorbachev announced a curfew." And Bagirov [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan SSR] was on television, he said that two people had been killed in Karabagh, but nothing was wrong, automobile windows had been broken, but there hadn't been any killings. He kept mak¬ing statements, and there were Azerbaijani songs and dances. Tayara turned the TV all the way up. When we learned of the curfew we calmed down, but then a crowd ran into the courtyard again, a large one. Our neighbor told them that there had been only one Armenian family here, but they had already killed them all, there was no one left. We hid in the wardrobe again, and they stuck Diana back under the bed.

-Gayane: Tayara went down to our apartment to see what was happening there, and found two bandits. They asked her, "What are you doing here?" Tayara answered, "I came to take something for myself." "Take all you want, they're gone now."

-Zinaida: Yes, she had wanted to get something for us, at least some bed¬ding. She said, "What are you going to do, empty handed, naked, with three children, nothing remains of your entire apartment." In short, we calmed down, and the crowd raced off to the other building, the one across from us. I don't know what went on there.

-Gayane: The curfew had its effect on the gangs, many started to disperse: they were warned that they would open fire on them. The soldiers didn't know the city, they couldn't get oriented, they drove up and down the main streets, but didn't go into the courtyards. When we were at the City Party Committee they asked people from Sumgait to go with them and show them the way.

-Zinaida: The tanks entered the city on the night of the 29th.

-Gayane: No, Mamma, the tanks had been there earlier, but were near the City Party Committee, where the Armenians were . . . After midnight, on March 1, when I had finally gotten to sleep after two sleepless nights, Mamma said, "Get your things together, they have sent buses for us." As it was we had been dressed the entire time. Mamma went to check it out . . . and came back for us.

-Zinaida: When I came back for the children Tayara said that Vika was alive and well, some guys had come and told her that they had hidden her in a safe place. I both believed it and didn't believe it. We ran out to the tanks. The Gambarians were there, Roman and Sasha; their father, Shurik, the clarinetist, was killed, and their mother was there. Sasha came over and asked about the girls. I was surprised, how did he know my girls? He said that he knew me and the girls. Our neighbor himself went for Gaya and Diana and it seemed like he was taking forever so I went after him. Another neighbor came out, Anna Vasilyevna, a Russian: "Zinochka, my dear, good¬bye and good luck." She kissed Diana. They put us in the bus and the cap¬tain gave the order for us to be taken to the City Party Committee. The bus wouldn't start, so they put us on another one. It was pouring rain.

-Diana: When they imposed the curfew there were many soldiers on the streets, and they all had clubs and shields. And when the Azerbaijanis attacked them, many of the soldiers died. They threw paving stones—huge rocks—at the soldiers. I saw this myself. The soldiers ran over those Azerbaijanis with the tanks. The soldiers saw that the Azerbaijanis were doing violence to people and they ran over them out of rage. We got scared and they hid me under a mattress and a blanket, and Gaya and Mamma crawled into the wardrobe. And they were fighting right down there on the street. . . Near the building they were blowing up buses and tanks, and cars were burning, and there were many dead in the courtyard. They drove with¬out looking to see if it was a sidewalk or a street, they just drove, and the ones who didn't manage to get out of the way were run over by the tanks. And when we left—it was evening, it was already dark—there were three buses, and one of them had soldiers in it. Mamma ran up and said, "Get your clothes on, let's go." Gaya was wearing slippers, and I had on my blue dress, but it was an old one. I was wearing my old jacket, my old dress, and slippers. And nothing else. Gaya had on a skirt, her Angora sweater, and slippers. It was raining hard, and there were puddles on the street. They gave Mamma an old coat because she was wearing a short-sleeved dress; she put it on and we ran out. We got onto the bus and I was hungry, one of the soldiers from Yerevan gave me rations and carried me from one bus to the other in his arms. I gave him the little glass that remained from Vika's trousseau, and he gave me his telephone number.

-Gayane: In the bus there was a soldier with a shield sitting at every win¬dow. We had to be ready for anything. They took us to the City Party Committee, let us out, and then took us into the City Party Committee building under armed guard. It was jammed with people and you couldn't breathe. We asked, "Are these all us? Armenians?" They answered yes. We were surprised that there were so many Armenians in Sumgait. All those years we lived there and didn't know there were so many Armenians, 18,000. We were struck by that, we had never noticed. Going downstairs the next day I ran into the Secretary of the Komsomol from Vika's plant, the Khimprom. He said that Vika was alive and well. When I told Mamma she of course calmed down some more. But you know, after all that it was hard to believe anything, our faith in everything was just gone. She didn't believe it completely.

-Zinaida: I didn't believe it because I had heard all kinds of things. When we arrived at the City Party Committee we heard everything imaginable! It was the fear of God. I saw many of our acquaintances, they were kissing each other and asking how their children and homes were. Many people already knew that there had been a pogrom of our apartment. They had seen the broken windows. I cried, saying that I didn't know where Vika was. One woman said that they had taken two of her daughters and that she couldn't find one of them; the other had been slashed all over. A second said that her husband and her son had been murdered. That was Nelli Aramian. She lived in Building 6 in our microdistrict. They killed her husband, Armo, and her son Artur. I heard so many things like that that I was already start¬ing to lose touch; my patience had run dry waiting for my daughter. Later an Azerbaijani fellow came to me and said, Aunt Zina, Vika sent me, she's alive and well and hidden in a safe place; if you want I'll call her there and you can speak with her. We went downstairs to the first floor and he called Vika. I spoke with her, heard the voice of my child. She had managed to sur¬vive in that hell. Then I started begging that Azerbaijani to bring her to the City Party Committee. He tried to talk me out of it: "I'll bring her wherever you go, don't worry, I've looked after her better than a brother does a sister." All the same I asked him to get her. He brought her and I calmed down. On the second day there was a meeting with Demichev and people started shouting. One shouted, "Give me my son back!", another yelled, "Where is my daughter?!", a third wanted her husband . . . Bagirov was there too, and he stood there blinking, not saying anything.

-Gayane: When Demichev asked where we wanted to go, everyone shout¬ed, "To Russia!" To be honest we were all frightened of Armenia, there were such wild rumors it was as though we were in a terrible dream, and no one wanted to go to Armenia. But he said that he couldn't evacuate 18,000 peo¬ple to Russia and that he would meet with everyone individually the next day and speak with them. And he also said that today he was going to go look at all of our apartments. On March 3 we went to the military barracks in the village of Nasosny. We were taken care of marvelously by the military. They sent special flights of children right from there to Minvody, Yerevan, and Moscow. One woman left for Moscow with a letter for Gorbachev and Gromyko.

-Zinaida: The worst was truly behind us by then. Everything had passed, but the pain will remain for our whole lives. It cannot be forgotten. Under no circumstances should we, our children, or our grandchildren forget. Who will answer for those who died? For our mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters? Who will bear the responsibility? Who will wash away their blood? Someone should be made to answer, and severely, so it has an effect on the people that did with us as they pleased ... It isn't over yet, now we live here, in Armenia, protected, but the issue isn't resolved. We would like to stay in Armenia, in our homeland, so that all the Armenian people will be united. Then we will be invincible. Armenians won't be scattered through¬out the Soviet Union, about the world, and if we're all together this won't happen again. As a mother of three children, as a woman, as a sister, I ask Armenians to be united so that what happened in Sumgait will never hap¬pen again. Our homeland . .. The only request we have is that we be helped in obtaining an apartment and getting jobs. So that our children can work for the good of Armenia. If we aren't able to, then let our children do it. And if it's possible, we'll work for the good of Armenia too. This is the land of our forefathers. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived here too, it was only later that people dispersed all over. Like a mother, the land here bore and reared us. It is our wife, and will protect us, too. I want but one thing, that our people never see the hardship that our children saw, that your children here, in Armenia, never see anything like it.

May 28, 1988

Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 2 месяца спустя...

■ VIKTORIA (VIKA) VAZGENOVNA AKOPIAN

Born 1966

Computer Operator

Sumgait Khimprom Production Association

Third-Year Student

Department of Automation and Computer Hardware

Baku Polytechnic Institute

Resident at Building 21/31, Apartment 47

Microdistrict No. 3

Sumgait

The KVN [Kommanda veselykh i nakhodchivykh, a television game show that tests wit and ingenuity] team at our Production Association had been awarded a trip. We played KVN, and we were pretty good, and the Association decided to give an award. The trip was to Pirkuli, a mountain ski resort not far from the city of Shemakhi, 4 or 5 hours' drive from Sumgait.

We left on February 26, and there were 25 people in the bus, all young men and women from our Association. There were six of us from the team. I was in good spirits and I didn't want to think about anything bad. Despite the fact that since the middle of February, when the unrest started in Nagorno Karabagh, the tension in Sumgait had been growing constantly. At the bus stops, in the lines, everywhere people spoke only of Karabagh and the Armenians. The Azerbaijanis were outraged that the Karabagh Armenians would dare to raise the issue of reunification with Armenia. How dare they? They have said that there are Azerbaijani villages that are poorer than Karabagh. They were simply arguing then, that if there were Azerbaijanis who were living in poor conditions, Armenians had to live in worse conditions. The situation became acute when the first so-called refugees appeared in Sumgait. These were Azerbaijanis from Armenia, largely from Kafan, and they went about town shouting that the Armenians were killing, slaughtering them. They were telling stories that would literal¬ly make your hair stand on end. I said, no, it's impossible that Armenians would do things like that, it's unimaginable . . . Our lives changed drastical¬ly. Until then we had felt free, if the Azerbaijanis insulted us we answered them right back, bravely, and would call them piglets and Turks. If someone was bothering us on the street we'd say, "OK, piglet, get lost." But to be hon¬est, in more recent days I wouldn't have risked talking to them like that. We were all under intense pressure. In our Production Association, for example there were a lot of Armenian employees, engineers and blue-collar workers, and if anyone said anything they would be immediately cut off: "What, are you giving a speech? Go off to your Armenia, give your speech there. You have no business here." Things like that. We felt alien. Imagine a stream of electrons, and we were like the spaces in between. We felt as though we were surrounded by a shell. The way it is when society doesn't accept a per-son, considers him unnecessary, an outsider. Suddenly we were surrounded by an atmosphere of hostility. But who would have thought what it would come to?

Before we departed some of the guys from the Association came by to get me. I was dressed and ready. One of the girls, Irada—she worked in our department—says, "Aren't you afraid to go with us?" I say, "Why should I be afraid?" "Well," she says, "there's those events in Karabagh, all the same, and all that . . . Only Azerbaijanis are going." "So what," I say, "they're all our guys from the Association, nothing's going to happen." We set off. We arrived and got set up just fine. That evening, when we all got together, we got some wine and some soft drinks, and I said, "You guys, if we're such good friends that I wasn't afraid to come on this trip with you, let no one accuse me of those events in Karabagh or reproach me for being an Armenian." They went crazy, and started to shout: "How could you?! We're friends!" I said, "I'm just letting you know so that nothing will happen." Anyway, we had a wonderful time. The only oppressive thing was the radio in the room, which was on constantly and talked about Karabagh incessant¬ly. And when our so-called comrade, Deputy General Procurator Katusev, came on television and announced that two Azerbaijanis had been killed in Karabagh, everyone immediately decided that if he said two, it must mean that in fact it was two hundred.

Our trip was three days long: we left on Friday and we were coming back on Sunday, February 28. Nothing had really happened on the way, if you don't count the fact that Irada got sick. She has high blood pressure. We stopped at the State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate [traffic police] station, they have a doctor on duty there, and he gave Irada a shot. And the policeman at the station said that the situation in Sumgait wasn't all that great because there had been a worker demonstration on account of Karabagh. "Well we got the report this morning," he said, "and it may have calmed down by now." We reached Baku, and still nothing, and it was calm in the village of Akhmedly. We drove through the village of Jeiranbatan—it's ten minutes' drive from Sumgait—and still all was well. Finally we were coming into Sumgait. Right there, at the entrance to town, there is a large sign with a portrait of Lenin, and it says: "Sumgait is the living embodiment of the ideas of V.I. Lenin." How ironic! It's true, however, that when I went there on busi¬ness in the fall, the sign was no longer there. So when we came into town everything was quiet. We passed the tube-rolling plant and it was fine there, too.

It was seven o'clock in the evening. I had calmed down and then . . . You know how when you stop a horse from a full gallop and it rears up on its hind legs? That's how sharply and unexpectedly our bus stopped. We were thrown forward against the backs of the seats. We were a little rattled, but really didn't think anything of it. Then . . . then we heard a roar, it was awful, it was loud and it came from all directions. It was so strange, like we suddenly found ourselves in the woods, in a jungle: the river is rushing, tigers are growling, elephants are trumpeting, wolves are howling, the mon¬keys are shrieking . . . All mixed together, and nothing was distinct or human in the noise, and at first we didn't realize that it was people talking and shouting. I couldn't figure it out at all, not at all. I thought there must have been an accident or something. I opened the curtain on the window. It was dark outside, it was February, it was very dark, and surrounding the bus was an even darker human mass, a black mass of people, darker than the night. And there were bright orange reflections flickering on the win¬dows. I look and see something burning, some sort of giant torch, and it's giving off a whitish smoke. This was all in the first few seconds, and I could not figure out what was happening. Then they started pounding on the door and shouting "Ermeni, Ermeni!"—"Armenians, Armenians!" Everyone is shouting angrily: "Slash, kill the Armenians!" And suddenly I understood everything. It all became clear. I understood because I had read a lot about the history of Armenia. The events in Nagorno Karabagh, the accounts of the alleged eyewitnesses in Kafan, the hatred and malice toward the Armenians that had existed previously, and the mean conversations of recent days in Sumgait—it all suddenly snapped into place with the events in our history, all the individual links formed into a chain, one after the oth¬er, and the circle closed. I realized it was all anti-Armenian, that the torch was really a burning car, and that the people our family had lived with in Sumgait for 17 years and to whom we had never done anything, those peo¬ple might now very easily just kill me simply because I was an Armenian. I became very frightened, I just went dumb. I was overcome with some sort of paralysis, and I couldn't move my arms or legs. To be sure, everyone in the bus was afraid. The people gathered in that huge crowd were in such an epileptic fit that—and I realize this only now—they were capable of beating and killing anyone they did not like and anyone they labeled as Armenian.

The oldest person in our group was the Secretary of the Komsomol orga¬nization of our Association, Elshad Akhmedov, a fine, upstanding man about 28 years old. As soon as the bus stopped he went up to the driver to find out what was going on. The crowd shouted, "Open the door!" Elshad told the driver, "Don't open it." From the mob: "Are there any Armenians in there?" The driver said, "I'll find out." He got the list and muttered, "Yes, there is one Armenian." Elshad said, "Hide that thing, if you tell them I don't know what I will do with you!" The driver shouts, "No, I don't have any Armenians on board." But they don't believe it: "Open up, open the door!" And they started breaking the door. The driver's hands were shaking, he couldn't even push the button to open the door. And then the bus started to rock. Imagine tossing at sea in a storm—that's exactly what it was like. The bus was in a sea of people, they clung to the bus on all sides, and were try¬ing to turn it over. The bus rocked back and forth, throwing us from one side to the other. They started breaking the windows with some sort of crowbars. It was good that the curtains were tightly drawn so the shards fell outside.

Elshad tells the driver: "Open the door, or they'll turn us over." And the door opened ... or maybe they broke it open? Elshad jumped toward them: "What do you want?" They shout, "You have Armenians in here, we know it!" He says, "We haven't got any Armenians in here!" "You're lying! We know you do!" And one of them put a knife to Elshad's chest. "Show us or we'll kill you instead." Elshad is almost crying, "You guys, I give you my word as a man that we don't have any Armenians here, believe me. I hate those Armenians myself, I can't stand them, I would kill any Armenian myself ...

Let us go." They say, "If there aren't any Armenians here, then get off the bus one by one, you can walk from here, and we'll check each one and let you go." Elshad doesn't agree to this: "What do you mean, get off the bus? We have our bags and our tents and things, and if this is what's going on we won't be able to walk through town. Let us go through, guys!"

All of our people were thinking how to save me from them. When they were pounding on the door and shouting, "Slaughter the Armenians!" Dima, a Russian fellow, pulled out a knife and dashed forward: "I won't let them have Vika, I won't let them!" Dima Vladimirov, we went to school together. The guys took the knife from him immediately and sat him down. "Listen," they tell him, "we don't have any Vika here, sit quietly, you're not helping things, you're making it worse." I am in some sort of trance, I can't even move, I have no strength, I have no control of myself. They started to shake me, "Get up, you can't sit like that, they'll figure out that you're an Armenian." I was dressed in a way that would be unusual for an Azerbaijani: I had on slacks and a long, baggy sweater. Moreover, Armenian women have different faces: Armenian women have softer features, the Azerbaijanis themselves are always saying that. And another thing, I have a graying lock of hair, and Azerbaijani women never gray young. But none of that mattered, anyway: all someone would have to do was start talking to me and it would all be out the window, because when I speak Azerbaijani you can tell right away I'm an Armenian . . . Anyway, they tell me, "Don't sit there, do something." They shoved my purse with my passport in it some¬where and put a hat on me and a man's sheepskin coat. Giulaga, an engineer from our Association, tells me, "If anything happens, you're my wife. Your name is Sevda. You're my wife, don't be afraid, no one will dare to touch you."

And then they shoved Elshad away from the door and came onto the bus. There were three of them. Irada became ill, the girls surrounded her and Wed to bring her around. I started slapping her cheeks. Really I was striking her quite hard, giving her real slaps in the face, because I was so terrified I didn't know my own strength and didn't know what to do to vent the terror, And the three of them, like dogs, sniffed all around and stared into each per¬son's face. I was imagining vividly what could happen to me if they found me, and I thought, "God, if I only had a knife, I don't want anything else, or if I had a poison tablet." So I could defend my honor. Better to kill myself than to have them violate me, and then cut me into pieces or burn me alive. I thought that they might burn me with the flaming car. And those three moved slowly down the aisle between the seats. They were 20 to 25 years old. One was wearing a black fur cap, one had a week's stubble, with a small drooping black moustache and dark eyes, and the third was behind them, I didn't notice anything about him. They were walking behind one another, the aisle was narrow, and I bent over Irada, slapping her on the cheeks, only lifting my head for a moment to look at them from their feet up to their heads and then let my head back down. My God, to be a mouse and run into a crack away from them! They were picking on one of our girls, Aida, the wife of Vagif, who was the head of our KVN team. They had the scent: Aida is an Azerbaijani, but her mother is an Armenian, and she resembles an Armenian. Vagif shouted, "She's an Azerbaijani, she's my wife!" And they said, "No way, she's an Armenian who just married you." Our people started making noise and saying that she was an Azerbaijani, and they left her alone. They started throwing things around and checking people's faces again. They started pestering another girl, Leila. Leila is an Azerbaijani: she is a wonderful person, she's a very brave woman, she helped me with every¬thing and hid with me later. They pulled her toward the exit but she didn't lose control, she started cursing them with such words, such foul words, I've never heard words like those in my life. They realized they had made a mis¬take, and let her go. "Well, if you can swear like that ..." Leila, who was nearly at the door, looked at the crowd and recognized one of them. He worked at our Association. Later she went to the authorities, and troops from the internal forces came right into his shop at the plant during work and took him away. Those three looked at Irada, who was still sick, and announced, "Everyone get your things and get off the bus." Our people said, "Hey, let us go, let's go ..." Elshad shouted, "What do you need this smashed up bus for? Where are we going to be able to go on foot, how are we going to carry all of our things? We'll be stopped every step of the way ..." Then someone in the mob shouted: "I know them, they're ours, there are no Armenians there, let them go."

And they let us go. The door of the bus wouldn't close. The driver's hands were trembling again, he couldn't turn the ignition key. We were shaking ourselves and were all shouting: "Start the bus, fast!" We started rolling and drove out of the mob. Of all the stories I later heard here, from Sumgait refugees, and in Sumgait itself, I never heard that they just let a vehicle go like that. Perhaps our bus was the only one that was able to break away whole from that hell. It was a real hell, worse than Dante's. And the mob was a mob of demons, of monsters . . . what else can you call them? They didn't have human appearance, nor did they have human hearts. Even their speech resembled the roaring of animals. Animals are more noble than they are. Even snakes don't bite for no reason at all, and they killed people, just like that!

We decided that the safest thing would be to go to the plant. We drove there and went upstairs to the Komsomol Committee office. Elshad called the City Komsomol Committee right away: "Explain to me just what is hap¬pening in this city?" They told him that the situation was bad, Armenians were being attacked, and that they themselves didn't know what was going on, they didn't have a clear picture of the situation. They also told Elshad that he was to come to the City Party Committee immediately. He left, but before that they hid me in one of the Committee rooms, there's a safe in there, with documents—a room with an iron grate over the door. Leila, Irada, and two of the guys stayed with me. True, one of them, Ismail, left shortly: "I've had a bit to drink," he said, "and if they get in here I won't be able to control myself, I'll start cursing and it'll be bad. They'll kill me, too."

My thoughts were on my mother and sisters. We didn't have a telephone at our apartment. I wanted to call my aunt but I couldn't remember the number. Aunt Tamara, the person closest to us in Sumgait, I called her sever¬al times a day, and now I couldn't remember her number. With difficulty I was able to concentrate and recall the number. Aunt Tamara was crying: "Vika, we're leaving the house, they're killing all the Armenians, we're leav¬ing ..." I say, "How's Mamma, how are Gaya and Diana?" "Mamma was here this afternoon," she says, "they're alive." My God, how everything can change in just half an hour, this afternoon they were alive, but now? My skin started to crawl. I loved my Mamma and my sisters immensely, I adored them, I couldn't imagine living without them. I thought, "My God, if I sur¬vive I can't live without them."

I asked several of the guys to go to my house and see what had happened to them. I gave them a detailed description of the building, the entryway, and the apartment. I asked them, I begged them to go, and they said, "What are you talking about? We'll go and rescue them, get them out of there." They left and then returned and told us everything. Somehow they had managed to get up to our building, the building was surrounded by a huge, dense crowd. A pile of things were burning in front of the building. They asked what was burning. "They're Armenian things, they belong to those infidels. They're killing the Armenians." They saw a family defending them¬selves on the fifth floor. They poured hot water on their attackers and threw heavy things at them. It was our neighbors, Aunt Vanya and Aunt Nina, and their son and daughter. I learned their story later. They hid their daughter and the three of them defended themselves. There were three of them and the whole entryway was filled with those beasts. They live on the top floor. They were going to go up to the roof and close the trap door after them, but they didn't have enough time. They seized them. How they tormented them! Mamma told me about it later...

My friends squeezed in closer and saw the pogrom going on in our apart¬ment, things flying off the balcony, and being burned down below. "There was nothing we could do," they said, "it was impossible . . . We wouldn't have gotten out of there ourselves ..." When they told me this I pounded my head against the wall, thinking my Mamma and sisters were no longer in this world. I would have been the happiest person in the world if some-one could have told me the truth, told me that the three of them were alive and well, and it was just our apartment that was destroyed. In August, when Mamma and I went to Sumgait to get our documents, she showed me a large black spot on the pavement in our courtyard and said, "Look at this and remember, this is where they burned our things." Then she added, "And they burned everything good along with them." In fact it wasn't our things they burned in the fire, but 17 years of life with them, they burned every¬thing good we had thought of them, the years of my childhood, my school¬ing . . . they burned it all...

Now I don't even want to remember how hard that night was for me in the Komsomol Committee office. I didn't dare hope that Mamma, Gaya, and Diana were alive. True, Irada and Leila tried to reassure me, saying that nothing was yet known, maybe they had hidden in someone's apartment. The next morning they came and said that it would be better if I hid some¬where else: too many people knew where I was. Giulaga, whom I men¬tioned, the engineer, took me by the arm and led me out of the Association building. There were troops in the city, and our Khimprom Association was cordoned off. Giulaga and I got into a van. The passengers were talking about nothing other than Armenians being beaten and killed. One fellow said, "How can people do things like that?!" They told him, "They killed our people in Kafan." And he said, "They killed men, not women, how come ours are killing women and children?" Giulaga took me home with him. He's clever that way: he told everyone he was taking me to the dormitory, including our guys, he didn't even trust them anymore. He had gotten a new apartment, he had just finished renovating and furnishing it, no one lived there yet. He said, "I'm sending Inna to stay with you." Inna is a Russian woman, she graduated from the Institute in Odessa, and she was assigned to our Association. As soon as Giulaga left I went into the kitchen and found a knife there. It wasn't very long, but it was sharp. I went and sat down next to the door to the balcony. I thought that if they found me I would throw myself off the balcony or take the knife to myself. . . Maybe I wouldn't have tried it with the knife, I was afraid, but I could have thrown myself off the balcony for sure. I sat and sat, and then I fell asleep. Giulaga and Inna came and I woke up to see Inna crying: "God, what has it come to .,, you're sitting there with a knife ..." Anyway, she stayed the night with me. She had brought something to eat with her, and a bottle of champagne. "Let's get drunk," she said, "I don't have the strength to face all this." I said that I wouldn't touch a drop. She drank that champagne by herself, got drunk and sat there and cried. Then an armored personnel carrier with a loudspeaker drove down the street: they announced that a curfew had been imposed in the city. They made the announcement in Russian, Azerbaijani, and Armenian: the curfew would be enforced with firearms. I thought, my God, what have we come to. And you know what's ironic? On the wall of that building where I hid, in Microdistrict 11, covering the entire wall of a 12-story building was a gigantic mosaic portrait of our dear Vladimir Lenin. Full length. With his hand extended. Even though Lenin had warned that the nationalities question had to be taken seriously, we had only seen to the creation of a multinational state, which we were proud of, but no one did anything to make it a truly international state. I turned on the television and cried: they're massacring people here, I don't know what has become of my Mamma, Gayane, and little Diana, I don't know if they're alive or dead, and Baku television is broadcasting concerts and cartoons. And they're slaugh¬tering us, they're killing us!

What else can I say? . . . Well Elshad found my Mother and sisters at the City Party Committee, alive and unharmed. Giulaga and Inna went and called me from there. We had a signal: four rings and hang up; four rings and hang up; and only after that would I pick up the receiver. They called from the City Party Committee: "Now you can talk to your Mamma." My God, I just, I just couldn't believe it! ... My Mamma's voice had changed completely, she was shouting and crying. "My little Vika, it's I, my dear Vika! Diana is here ..." As soon as she said "Diana" I started to sob and choked for breath, and the operator said, "Please hang up the phone." I hung up the receiver immediately. All the lines were being monitored.

Mamma insisted to Giulaga: "Bring Vika here!" He told her the situation was really bad here, you're sleeping on the floor, and she has an entire apart¬ment . . . Mamma cut him off: "Bring her here immediately!" And they brought me to the City Party Committee. They checked our passports three times, we went into the building, and my legs gave way under me, I could not walk. I became terrified. Could it really be that I was going to see them? Now Gaya often tells me, "I saw it all." And I say, "Gaya, you had Mamma and Diana with you the whole time, you knew that you had someone. And I spent so long thinking I was the only one alive in the world ... I had to face the three of you being dead." God grant that others not have to go through that.

So I was going up the stairs and my legs were failing me. And I see—Mamma. She's somehow a different person, she's wrinkled, she has a scarf on her head, Diana is next to her in a summer sarafan, wearing socks ... I became so ill that I simply collapsed to the floor. I come to and Mamma is holding my head in her hands, there's water on me, I'm wet, and women have gathered around us and they are crying.

October 5, 1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ IVAN (VANIK) YENOKOVICH VANIAN

Born in 1940

Plumber

Sumgait City Administration Committee

■ YELIZAVETA (NINA) KONSTANTINOVNA VANIAN

His wife

Born in 1940

Elevator Operator

Zh.E.K. No. 8 in Sumgait

■ VLADIMIR IVANOVICH VANIAN

Their son

Born in 1940

Employed

Synthetic Rubber Production Unit

Residents at Building 21/31, Apartment 42

Microdistrict No.3

Sumgait

-Ivan: I am very glad that I am living in Armenia now. I've had many hard times in my life, and now this last misfortune—the Azerbaijanis' attack on the Armenians. We lived in Sumgait thirty years and we never anticipat¬ed that they would commit such atrocities against us. It was very unexpect¬ed.

On February 28, from morning to evening, the whole family stood on the balcony and watched what was happening on the street, in the courtyard: everything that they were doing to our people, to Armenians. It was unlike anything ever seen or heard of before. Our house was in the center, right across from the bus station, and we had a good view from our balcony of the road from Baku to Sumgait. It was about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. We saw that crowds were coming from all sides; they met at the Sputnik store on the intersection of Friendship and Peace streets. There were several hundred people there, and they were all stirred up, furious. Behind our house on both sides of the road, the Azerbaijani militia was standing, as if to keep the crowd from coming into the microdistrict. These crowds met, united, and were silent for about five minutes. After five minutes, policemen with their caps in their hands ran up to the Caucasus store, went into it, and hid while the crowd flung themselves after them with sticks, stones, and pieces of armatube, as if they wanted to beat them up. At the same time, a green Moskvich 412 appeared on the road from Baku; the car belonged to Armenians. The crowd ran up to the car and turned it over so that its wheels were in the air. Policemen came out from somewhere and righted the car, but when they went away, the crowd overturned it again, doused it with gasoline and set fire to it.

-Yelizaveta: I saw that there were people in the car when they poured gasoline over it and set it on fire. I think there were three people in the car: a man at the wheel and a woman with a child. I can't say how old the child was—it was impossible to tell from the balcony. After the crowd burned the car, our Azerbaijani neighbors said to me, "Don't watch. Everyone knows that you're Armenians, and you're standing out here on the balcony? Go back to your house."

-Vladimir: I also saw that there were people in the car when it caught on fire, and they were burned alive inside. After they set fire to the car, we saw that in the middle of the crowd they were beating our neighbor from the first floor, Gurgen Arutiunian. He has a bald patch on his head, and that's how we recognized him. I said, "Look, why did Gurgen go out of his house at a time like this?" They beat him severely. Several policemen approached, pulled him out of the crowd, and brought him home, and he went into the entrance way. You could see that his head was badly injured.

The crowd broke up into several groups. They went off in different direc¬tions: toward microdistrict 2 and our microdistrict 3, to apartment blocks 41, 34, and 36, and Peace Street was full of people, too. The instigators of all this were Azerbaijanis who had come from Armenia. They gathered up the young people, told them all kinds of lies, gave them money, and so these young ones started to attack Armenians.

It was about 5:00 PM. As I watched, things started flying into the court¬yard from a second-floor balcony of a neighboring house, number 20. I said, "Good for you, Vachik, I can see you're defending yourself—throwing things down onto their heads. Later I realized that it wasn't Vachik, his family probably wasn't home at all. This crowd had gone into his apartment and were destroying it. The Azerbaijanis smashed the glass on the porch and threw everything down below; they left nothing in the house. Several hundred people were standing below at a fire where the things were burning, they behaved like animals. When we saw all this, we understood that we couldn't possibly leave our home to go and hide somewhere. Other Armenians from our building had hidden, but we decided that we wouldn't.

-Vladimir: We hid my sisters. I have two sisters, and five or ten minutes before the attack, I took them away to the neighbor's place. The crowd was already at our stairway, on the second floor. There were five people at home, My father, my mother, myself, and my sisters. Zhanna was born in 1965, and Angela in 1971. First my sisters and I knocked on the door of our neighbor across the landing. She was afraid to hide them. She opened the door and said, "I'm a lonely woman, I'm frightened, I can't hide them." There was already noise in the stairwell. Suddenly at that moment, an Azerbaijani neighbor ran up from the fourth floor; her name was Atlas. We lived on the fifth floor. She took my sisters, and I went down with them. She hid them in the sideboard, locked them in there, and I went back upstairs.

-Ivan: Before we hid our daughters, we already knew that they would attack us, too and we had decided to defend ourselves. I took an axe from the balcony and told my wife to boil pots of water.

-Vladimir: I took my military belt with the metal buckle (I served in a rocket troop and returned home in December of 1987); and I took a sharp knife from the cupboard, and at my waist under my sweater I hid a chisel. The noise in the stairwell was frightening, of course, but not very, and when I had hidden my sisters I felt a little better.

-Ivan: When we had hidden the girls, I calmed down a bit, too. If some¬thing happened to us, it wouldn't matter, but they are young. If the girls had stayed at home, those Turks could have done whatever they wanted to them right before our eyes. Of course I was afraid for my wife and son, but what could I do? Since something like this was happening, we had to defend our¬selves. If the whole family had hidden, they would have started to look for us. We turned off the light and stood behind the door with four buckets of boiling water. I had an axe in my hands, and Valodya had his belt. We heard them say, "This is an Armenian family, they have two beautiful daughters, go right in, don't be shy." They knew the floor and the apartment number beforehand.

-Yelizaveta: They shouted, "Come out and give the apartment to us. You'll leave here sooner or later, anyway. Get out. Your home is the City Executive Committee, go and live there."

-Vladimir: They were prepared, they knew exactly where Armenians were living. They shouted, "Give up,..."

-Ivan: They called out Angela's name, and said it was Angela's house. I didn't hear our names. We could tell from the voices that there were a lot of them; from the first floor up to the top, the whole stairwell was full of them. Other Armenians lived on our landing, too, but they all managed to hide themselves in time, and we were the only ones left on the fifth floor. Then we heard them knocking at the door. We stood silently and didn't make a sound. We pretended that no one was home. There had been a plate with our last name on the door, but early that day we had taken it down and painted over all the traces. They started to pound on the door with big rocks. These were blocks, big building blocks of white stone. The locks did not hold. They flew apart. The three of us threw ourselves against the door, but they didn't even feel that someone was behind it.

-Vladimir: We held the door without a sound. We didn't even whisper. Everything we could have talked about was clear. My father was still holding the axe in his hands. The buckets of hot water were standing in the hall.

-Ivan: The door burst open, and they flew into the hallway, like black crows. Right then my wife splashed them with boiling water. I hit one of them in the right temple with the blunt edge of my axe; I broke his head Valodya started to hit them with the belt, and my wife continued to pour hot.

-Yelizaveta: I poured the boiling water on them as quickly as I could from a long-handled tub, and I wasn't even watching where I was throwing the water: in their faces, on their heads, wherever it fell, just to drive them away. The boiling water really helped us, they were frightened and ran down to the third or fourth floor.

-Vladimir: In the excitement, my mother scalded my back with the water. It also hit my father; his arm was burned. When they burst into the corridor, their faces were brutal. I threw myself into the crowd with my belt. Besides the belt, I also had a knife from the cupboard in my hand. I started to strike them. I noticed that my father had hit one of them with the axe. It was a terrific blow; the man fell back covered with blood. I wasn't hit at all. Because of our blows and the hot water, the crowd took fright and started to break up and run away.

-Ivan: At that point, I was struck only once. That first attack lasted five minutes or so.

-Vladimir: Yes, the first clash lasted about five minutes. They started to run away. I managed to catch one of them. I put him up against the wall in the stairwell and started to beat him with the belt. He was about my age, 22 or 23. I hit him on the head with the buckle, and he fell back, covered his face, and shouted. Then he broke away and ran downstairs. So we managed to fend off the first attack.

-Ivan: They ran down to the third floor. Then, after about 10 or 15 min¬utes, they started to come back up in twos and threes and look in at us. As soon as they came near, my wife poured hot water over their heads, and they took off. The ones whose heads had been burned went down, and oth¬ers appeared in their place.

-Vladimir: After we beat off the first attack, my father and I sat down at the table, ate a little, and drank about 50 grams of vodka each to keep our courage up.

-Ivan: Because we hadn't eaten anything since morning. When we caught sight of that crowd and realized that they were moving against the Armenians, we didn't think of food. But then my son and I felt terribly hun¬gry. At that time, the Azerbaijanis were still standing downstairs, so we quickly swallowed a piece of bread.

-Vladimir: They came up for the second time about half an hour after the first attack. During that time, my father and I gathered up from the stairwell the stones that they had brought with them, and we carried them into the hallway. They had thrown these stones at us, but they hadn't hit us.

-Yelizaveta: We tried to fix the broken lock. We thought that they wouldn't come back again. But it turned out that they hadn't left. They burst in on our neighbor, Zina Akopian, and destroyed her apartment; that lasted half an hour to an hour. But we didn't know that they were there, we thought that they had gone away. Vanik and Valodya ate a little, and then repaired the lock as best they could. I spread sunflower oil on Valodya's burned back, although the burn wasn't very bad.

-Vladimir: I was waiting for them to come after us again. I thought, that was the first, but not the last attack. So I inwardly prepared myself for that, although I didn't believe that I would survive. I thought, this is the end, death, but I didn't say anything to my mother and father about these thoughts.

-Ivan: I wasn't as afraid during the first attack as I was after it, because they were saying things like this: "We're warning you for the last time, we'll be here tonight and we'll kill you. Leave the apartment, go away to the club, they're collecting the Armenians there." They shouted this from below. They cursed us with their last words.

The second attack began. There were a lot of them this time too, it was just the same crowd. But they were afraid to come up to the fifth floor, and they shouted from the fourth floor that Armenians shouldn't be living here. We answered them that we wouldn't leave, that it was our apartment and we wouldn't give it up.

-Vladimir: They had the same savage look that they had the first time; they were fuming. They had sticks, armatube, stones in their hands.

-Ivan: They wanted to distract us with their words and break into the apartment. The man that I had struck was also among them. His whole face was covered in blood. He was about 35 or 40 years old. He spoke perfect Armenian; he was one of the Azerbaijanis that had come from Armenia. He said, "No matter what, you've got to give up your apartment to us tonight, you have to leave here." I said, "What have we done to you, what do you want from us? He said, "You shouldn't be living here, they're collecting the Armenians in one place, you go there." We answered again that we weren't going anywhere. A few of these whelps tried to come up to the fifth floor. We started to hurl at them the sticks and stones that we had gathered up in the stairwell, and to pour hot water on their heads, and they ran down.

-Yelizaveta: Then about ten people came up and shouted at me, "Was it you who poured water on us?" I said, "Yes, it was. And as long as you keep trying to come upstairs, I'll pour boiling water on you. So don't come up." But they said to me, "You have to leave all the same. Get out while you're still alive, or we'll kill you." They wanted to trick us.

-Ivan: They wanted to drag us out into the courtyard, to beat us, to kill us as they did the other Armenians, and to loot our apartment. For that reason they distracted us with conversation, but we didn't believe them. After the first attack, I called the militia and asked for help, but they said to me, "We know all about it. Don't you try to give them orders." I finally understood that it was all organized, that we couldn't rely on the police for anything, and I hung up. We weren't waiting for help from anyone: not from neigh¬bors, not from the militia, not from the city authorities. There weren't any city authorities. We weren't expecting help from military troops either, because, although there was a delay, both tanks and soldiers had driven up, but they were attacked and beaten, too, and they went away. So we had no hope that we would remain alive. To tell the truth, I never said this either to my wife or my son, but I was sure that they would kill us and leave my two daughters orphaned. Not one of our neighbors tried to help us, and we couldn't go down to Atlas's place, because she was a sick woman, and besides, she had already hidden our girls. If we had gone down, they would have seen us, and our daughters would have suffered for us. They kept saying that they wouldn't leave us alive. They were constantly trying to come up from the fourth floor in twos and threes, swearing and shouting, but we drove them away again and again. And then their ringleaders came up.

-Vladimir: One of them was the same age as my father. He had been in the stairwell with the crowd and spoke Armenian perfectly. He was a grey-haired man with a bald spot, of medium height.

-Ivan: And the second one was young, with curly hair. They came up to the fourth floor and said, "We won't trouble you anymore, we're asking you to leave and go to the place where all the Armenians are."

-Vladimir: They spoke Armenian fluently, both of them were from Kafan, they said so themselves.

-Ivan: Then the one that I had hit with the axe said, "I came here from Kafan. The river there is full of blood, the train from Kafan to Baku is full of blood, because there are so many murdered Azerbaijanis there. Why should you people here stay alive? We'll kill you, too." Of course I didn't believe that our Armenians in Kafan were doing such a thing to Azerbaijanis.

-Vladimir: A big crowd was standing on the street. If we had gone out, that would have been the end of us. We decided to stay.

-Ivan: At that time a neighbor from the fourth floor, Firdusi Omarov, came out of his apartment and said, "What's happening, what do you want?" They said to him, "Please tell these Armenians to get out of here." Omarov said, "It's their apartment, why should they leave?" They said, "No, as long as they're here, we won't go away, we'll even stand here through the night." Then I saw that one boy the age of my son had come up and was calmly standing not far away from us. Omarov said, "Don't be afraid, that boy was my student." Omarov had been a gym teacher. The boy didn't have anything in his hands. Omarov said, "Vanik, go and bring a few nails in from the balcony, nail the broken door shut, and go where the Armenians are gathered. Nothing will happen to you.:" I answered, "Firdusi, do you really think I can break out of here, go downstairs and get through the crowd alive?" He answered, "Nothing will happen." These negotiations last¬ed almost half an hour. Then the ringleaders also said, "Don't be afraid, we won't trouble you. Nail up your door and go away." They didn't say any¬thing about our daughters, thinking they were at home.

I went out to the balcony for nails and a hammer, and then I looked, and saw that they'd already broken into the room.

-Vladimir: As soon as my father went after the nails, the crowd immedi¬ately flew into the apartment. I was standing in the corridor at that time. A telephone was hanging on the wall in the corridor; they ripped out the wire. I tried to defend myself, but it was too late. They had already caught me, and my father and mother.

-Yelizaveta: I didn't have any more boiling water, and I couldn't pour it on that boy that had come up to the fifth floor as if he were going to help us. When Vanik went after the nails, I was still standing in the stairwell and talking with our neighbor, and Valodya was standing in the corridor. I was saying to Firdusi, "You're doing a bad thing, helping them get into our place. If they come up, we won't have anything left." But he repeated, "Don't be afraid, I promise nothing will happen." And he came up, too, and all the rest broke into our place after him. But I didn't feel any fear, they hadn't beaten us yet.

-Vladimir: Yes, they hadn't touched us. I recognized one of them. I had seen him around town. He was deaf and mute. He sold postcards, stills from Indian films, labels at the Sputnik store. He stood at the sideboard and made a sign with his hand: "Let's knife them." Even before he showed up in our house, I had seen him in the crowd, and he recognized me. And so he drew his index finger across his throat: "Knife them."

-Ivan: I was standing in the middle of the living room with an axe in my hand. They surrounded me on all sides. If I had tried to get into a fight with them then, and hit them, they wouldn't have left us alive. And I decided, "Let them do whatever they want, let them break everything, steal, if only they leave my wife and son alive. They hadn't beaten any of us yet. One of the ringleaders, the curly-haired one, said, "Don't touch them." But with his eyes he directed them to break and loot. So we stood surrounded by them, each of us in a separate corner, and they smashed everything.

-Vladimir: I couldn't use the chisel; you couldn't turn around in a crowd like that. In the apartment they didn't touch us. When the deaf-mute signaled that they should kill us, the grey-haired man said, "Don't, we'll take them out onto the street and then decide what we're going to do." They all obeyed him. Beating us, they started to take us out to the street. It was impossible for us to defend ourselves, because a crowd was also standing in the stairwell. We were about two or three paces apart from each other. That was the hardest moment. We didn't think we would survive.

-Ivan: When the grey-haired ringleader ordered them to lead us out, two of them tore the axe out of my hand. I knew that if I hit them, they wouldn't let us live, but a small hope still remained that we would manage to save ourselves. When they brought me downstairs, one held me on the right, another on the left, and they held my wife and son in the same way. As we were going down, one whelp punched me in the upper lip, and it bled. In the courtyard they had already lit a fire. They wanted to throw me into the fire. I lost all hope then. They surrounded each of us separately, and I could not see my wife and son anymore. I understood that this was death. I was sure that they would kill my son and my wife and throw me into the fire. They pushed me toward the fire, but I dug in my heels and fell next to it. They started to beat me on the head with their feet, sticks, and pieces of armatube bar. After a few minutes, one Azerbaijani came up and said, "Vanya, don't you stand up. If you get up, they'll realize you're alive and start to beat you again." I was almost unconscious and so I didn't find out who it was, but he called me by my first name.

-Yelizaveta: In the courtyard they started to roar at me, "Was it you who poured water on us, you who tormented, you who cursed us? Now you'll see what we do to you!" And they started to beat me up, they hit me every¬where and with everything. "We'll burn you," they said, "and then you'll see what it means to pour boiling water on us." All I remember is that the son of an Azerbaijani neighbor was running around and shouting, "You've beaten her up and that's enough. I won't let you burn her!" His name was Bailiar. There were two brothers. They lived off of the fourth stairway, and lived off of the third.

-Vladimir: We didn't expect anything like that from him, because he was a drug addict. He was constantly smoking anasha, and he got along badly with Armenians. I didn't see him myself, when he was defending my mother.

-Yelizaveta: I had already fallen on the ground and was surrounded by those wretches, and then Bailiar and his brother broke into that circle and shouted, "It's enough that you've beaten her so much. We won't give her up to you to burn. What has she done to you?" And as if they were talking to each other, the [attackers] said, "All right, we'll go away, but it's a shame we didn't burn her." And they left.

-Vladimir: When they led us out of the stairwell, I managed to break away. Now I can't imagine how I succeeded; perhaps because they had lost their heads, or because they had all thrown themselves on my father, but anyway I managed to break free. And then I saw that one of them waved his fist and punched my father. I cried out, then jumped and kicked him in the chest as he deserved. Someone grabbed me from behind and shouted, "What are you? An Armenian?" I said, "Yes." And after that the whole crowd flew at me, surrounded me and began to beat me. I fell. I didn't see my mother until I regained consciousness. They beat me for a long time—with stones and with armatube. There were about 30 or 40 people. I lost consciousness, then came to, but they continued to beat me. Bailiar helped me, too. He managed to chase away the crowd.

-Ivan: Then, after all of that, they told me that some of the neighbors, some young men, went up to Valodya, and said the same thing as someone had said to me: "Don't stand up, don't raise your head, pretend you're dead."

-Vladimir: I don't remember that myself.

-Ivan: My head ached terribly. It was broken and covered with blood. My wife came up to me and asked, "Are you alive?" I said, "I'm alive." She answered, "Stand up, and let's go to the neighbor's house." She and my son picked me up from both sides and led me. My wife's claves were full of glass splinters from bottles, the glass had cut right into her legs. I realized that they had been beating her with bottles. We went up to Atlas's place. We did not go to our own house, and we didn't know what state our apartment was in. Zhanna put iodine on my head, bound it up, and stopped the bleeding. We called an ambulance to take us to the hospital. They answered that they had no ambulances; they had all been destroyed.

-Vladimir: I didn't regain consciousness immediately. After I became con¬scious again, I saw my mother and father. They were lying on opposite sides of me, about five or six meters away. I managed to prop myself up to look; my mother had also raised herself a little. I went up to my mother, and then we both went to my father, picked him up and went to the neighbor's, to Atlas's house. She let us in. My mother tried not to show us her wounds so that we wouldn't worry.

-Ivan: We stayed at our neighbor's that whole night. In the morning we called the police, and in half an hour an ambulance arrived; a doctor and two policemen were in it. They took me to the police station in my dirty clothes and with a bloody head. They examined me and said, "He can't be left here. He must be taken to Baku." So they took me off to Baku.

-Vladimir: After all this, in March, an investigation team from the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR summoned me to the city police department. They gave me a few books of photographs. On each photograph there was a number. There were very many photographs. I started to leaf through these albums and immediately identified one man. It was the one that we had allowed to come near our apartment, the one that our neighbor Firdusi had called his student. I knew where the deaf-mute lived as well, and I told the investigator about this. I set off with one of the investigators, a man named Toporkov, to Microdistrict 2 to find the deaf-mute. Sure enough, he was home. The investigator explained to him: "Take your passport with you and let's go to the department." He didn't recognize me. He had let his beard grow over the last few days. We got into the car and went back to the police department. In his deposition he wrote that he hadn't been at our home, that at time he had been in Baku, that he did not know anything. He was about 30. He denied everything, but I confirmed 100% that he had been at our house. For about fifteen days, we lived, first at the club, and then in a dormi¬tory. When we returned home, my father was still in a hospital in Baku. The day after our return home, the investigator Toporkov, some woman investi¬gator, and an Azerbaijani policeman came to our house. They said to me, "Get in the car, we are going to the department." They told my mother not to worry, that they would bring me back soon. In the car, Toporkov said to me, "Valodya, we're going to the prison now to identify the man that you showed us in the photograph, and we are going to take him to Sumgait." He had handcuffs with him. When we arrived, he said to me, "Sit in this little room. I'll bring in the suspect. You sit and be qui¬et for now." He brought in an arrested man and two suspects and asked the first one, "Where were you on the 28th, and what were you doing?" The arrested man's last name was Ismailov. In general, [the investigator] asked what he was doing there, how he had been arrested, how his photograph had shown up in the book. He denied everything, and then the investigator called me. I went in and looked; he was wearing my grey velvet pants. I returned from the army not long ago, and they made me some new pants. He was also wearing my shirt and sweater. So, he was sitting in person in my clothes. I went up to him and said, "Listen, brother, are those your pants?" I wanted to hit him, but soldiers were standing next to him. I said, "Are those your pants? Your sweater?" A stitch had split in the pants—he was a bit bigger than I was. He said, "It is my sweater, my pants, all mine." I told the investigator that they were my clothes, that he had been in our apartment and stolen them. It turned out that he had been not only in our apartment, but in others as well. The deaf—mute had also been in different places.

-Ivan: When the investigators Toporkov and Mishin were dealing with our case I identified five or six people in the albums, but that was useless, no one paid any attention to them. And I want to say one more thing. The Sumgait genocide was organized. I am 100% certain of it. There were many conversations in the city before the 28th. I heard at work that several hundred Azerbaijanis had come from Kafan to Apsheran, the secretary there was a native of Kafan. He wouldn't accept them in Apsheran. When asked why they had come, they answered that the Armenians had driven them out. They sent them to Sumgait on two buses. They went to the City Committee, and Muslimzade, the secretary of the Committee, went out to them and asked them what they wanted. I saw it all myself on February 26. I was working near the square. I saw a group of people, and went up to them to hear what they were saying. They told Muslimzade that they wanted to organize a demonstration and announce that Karabagh belonged to them. They wouldn't give up Karabagh. Muslimzade said, "You can have a demonstration, but I ask one thing: no discussion and no verbal abuse." They fooled the young people, bought them with cash, and taking the flag of Azerbaijan, they set up a protest meeting and a march around the city. And then the genocide began. It was all prepared before then. Bagirov [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan SSR] set off for Stepanakert. They sent him back from Askeran, he went to Agdam, and he remained there as the secretary of the Regional Committee. After that, they released 55 conditionally sentenced prisoners

from the Agdam prison. They brought them to Kafan and mixed them with the people there. In addition, lists of Armenians had been prepared before¬hand. I learned all these facts from Azerbaijanis in Sumgait after the inci¬pient. After all this, I remained in Sumgait for three more months.

September 10,1988 Kafan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ LEVON SURENOVICH AKOPIAN

Born 1956

Foreman, High-Rise Construction Crew Azerbaijani Stalkonstruktsia Construction and Installation Administration

Resident at Building 12, Apartment 69

Microdistrict No. 5

Sumgait

I was born in Sumgait and lived there until the tragic events, until March 11. My family and I lived honestly, we were good Soviet citizens.

I was on vacation, I was supposed to return to work on March 9. On February 26 I went to my sister's in Block 2 and witnessed the following incident. On the night of the 26th her husband's car was broken into. The car was in the courtyard; they removed the windshield and took out the tape player, the cassettes, and some other things. Investigator Rustamov was at their apartment. Well it was almost five o'clock in the afternoon before he had finished his report. I went to tell my family that I was staying at my sis¬ter's until they had finished up the report. Leaving my sister's place I saw a crowd of 15 to 20 people across from our building. Someone shouted in Azerbaijani: "This is just the book, the movie will be out tomorrow!" I didn't pay any attention to them and didn't realize whom the comment was direct¬ed at.

I got home and said I would be staying longer and then returned. And then somewhere around ten o'clock Rustamov, the investigator, came by again. Well during that time my older brother had gotten an old windshield and we had put it in. And the investigator asked for a ride into town in my brother-in-law's car. We all went together.

What I did notice—this was after ten o'clock—is that little pieces of glass, shards from broken automotive windows, were scattered along the entire road, along our whole route. Well, I thought to myself, a bus probably got into an accident on the way, from the vibration all the glass fell out. That's what I supposed at the time.

In conversing with us the investigator said that a man, an Armenian, was killed on the evening of the 26th in Microdistrict No. 12. This, Rustamov the investigator told us. Well, I asked what the cause of the murder was. He said it was because of a woman. Maybe it really was because of a woman, but it's hard to believe that now.

We drove to two different places and on the way back my brother-in-law and I saw two booths on Narimanov Street: a boot-repair booth and the oth¬er, a tailor's I think, and another, smaller booth where they sold sausages, across from the department store in Block 30. Well all the windows were broken, not a single window was intact. I spent the night at home, and everything was normal: television, the usual-al. And in the morning at 8:30 I went back to Block 2 again. Well my sister started saying things like there had been a demonstration at the City Party Committee the night before and that they were going to kill the Armenians ... I shouted at my sister, saying do you understand what you are saying? You're living in the Soviet Union! How can they kill the Armenians? Just what country are we in? Don't we have any police? Aren't there any authorities?

I yelled at her and we left. We left, but my brother-in-law was extremely upset because his mother and sister were at the dacha. He said we should go get them, there was a lot of tension in town.

And so we were coming to the bus station and witnessed this. There was this mob; there, a wild mob, there were quite a lot of them, now I can't say how many there were, but it was very many.

There was a man, a young man, as it turned out, running, falling in front of the crowd. There, along the Street of the 26 Baku Commissars, for almost two blocks, they kicked him like at a soccer match. His mother ran along next to the crowd pleading and begging, and she was struck too. They beat that woman, but she didn't fall down. She ran in front of the crowd and the son—it was like soccer, I don't know how else to describe it—they drove him to the end of Block 14. Later we found out that he's 28 years old, an Armenian, his name is Vagif, and, it turns out, he's a friend of my brother-in-law. When the crowd went off toward the embankment we drove around the block and my brother-in-law went up to their place. Vagif lived on the first floor in a corner building in Block 14. My brother-in-law came out, there were tears in his eyes, and he says, "I can't believe something like this could happen in the Soviet Union. They beat him badly," he says, "he's barely breathing." My brother-in-law said the family asked him to buy bread. We got the bread and dropped it off and went to the dacha. The dacha is 2 to 3 miles from town. We picked up his mother and sister and brought them back to town. Returning from Block 2 I said I had to go visit my mother. She lives near the bus station, in Block 36. I had already figured it out; I already knew that the city was without leadership and without police. It was already clear that the Armenians had to decide their own fate. There were no ties between us, everybody had only one thought: to find out about the fate of their relatives.

We drove up to the Nariman Narimanov monument on Druzhba Street and . . . stopped. There was a crowd there. There were about, well, some 50 people next to the monument, and surrounding this group of people was . . . a sea of people. Well I don't know, not 5,000, not 7,000, there were more, I don't know how many people were there; they were all standing and listening. There were very many young people there who were holding flags. And on one of the banners, if you can call them that, in black on red, it said "Death to the Armenians!" A man was speaking, he was 40 or 42, who kept repeating that in some district in Armenia an Azerbaijani settlement had been razed and that we should eliminate the Armenians, they should be killed. I also heard this: "A Muslim who doesn't drink the blood of the Armenians is no Muslim! Every Muslim should kill seven Armenians!"

Well his speech went on in that vein. And each time he said the word "death" there were two minutes of, well, not ovation, but of noise, and shouts. The noise and the shouting were being done by those 15-, 16-, and 19-year old guys. Well I just can't describe it: one of them is talking and the others are supporting him, those young guys were supporting what he said. He didn't have a microphone or a megaphone. Everyone listened quietly, and our car was on the side of the road, and I raised myself off the seat slightly and watched.

I noticed two young fellows. This was around twelve-thirty or one. It was windy and almost everyone had on jackets or coats. But these two fellows were wearing suits, they had beards, short little beards. The had moustach¬es, these thin moustaches—really thin. Yes, really thin black moustaches. They wore three-piece suits with dark shirts. Well I didn't notice if they were black or dark blue, but they were dark. And both of them had worry beads in their hands.

I noticed them because a group of people from the crowd went up to them. They said something, but I didn't see that those two fellows said any¬thing. They just showed something with gestures and with their heads, nod¬ding their heads and motioning with their hands. Then that group left and the crowd grew and grew, more and more people came. People kept coming, I don't know if they were gapers or what, but they kept coming and coming and coming. The atmosphere was very tense. I realized that those two were somehow leaders. At one point I looked closely in their direction and saw another group go up to them, almost immediately after the cries of "Kill the Armenians!" They went up to them, while they themselves were off to the side. And there were four cars there. I noticed: one was a dark GAZ-24, the other one was light, I think it was sort of steel-gray, and two Zhigulis. They were standing near those cars. And then two groups of people went up to them—one was respectably dressed, clean-shaven, all of them were well-dressed—they went up to them and one of them brought his hand up and back down sharply, and those two nodded their heads. He raised his arm and they both nodded twice. Both of them identically. Those two were so much alike that I even thought they were brothers. Later the investigator showed me a million photos, but I couldn't find them.

They had the beads in their left hands. They made a sharp motion with their right hands and then assumed their earlier position. They put their hands behind their backs and played with the beads. And at that moment the crowd moved off sharply in the direction of my mother's house.

This was near the bus station, and the first building, Building No. 9, where my mother lives, is between the Narimanov Club and the bus station.

Those young people with the banners and flags ran out ahead. One of the flags was white—it seemed strange to me that it was white—with a crescent on it. The white flag had a black crescent on it. I didn't know what kind of flag it was. And then 50 to 60 of those young people dashed off toward my mother's building. As it turns out they were running not toward the build¬ing, but toward a bus. There was this GAZ-53 bus with a blue light on top, a police bus, a white and blue one. The whole crowd of thousands ran after that group. The bus—I don't know if it was from Baku or from Sumgait—was full of policemen, Soviet police. And when the crowd ran toward the bus the policemen, jumping out the doors, ran toward the com¬muter train station, which is located on the opposite side of the bus station. They started running away. Do you understand? . . . they started running away. One of the policemen crawled out of the window and ran off. So they fled and the people in Building 9 stood there watching out their windows. And just then my ... I can't explain it... my arms and my legs went numb: the police, the Soviet police, were running away from them.

They ran up to the bus and smashed the windows, and with those very same banners and those very same cries they climbed up on the roof of the bus. Then they tried to turn the bus over by rocking it... And those police¬men ran toward the commuter train station and stood there, well, 800 to 900 yards away. They stood there and watched.

And now comes the question that any normal Soviet person seeing this would ask. Well, if our guardians of law and order ran away from that mob, then what were we, simple, unarmed Armenians, supposed to do? And the guardians showed us and gave us to understand that there was nothing we could do.

In short, we couldn't get to my mother's place because it was completely surrounded by that crowd. And we drove off in the other direction, having decided that we could get in from the other way. We drove around down¬town and came in from the train station side, and went into my mother's place. The crowd had already set off toward Microdistrict 3. Mother was crying. I say that our family has always lived completely by Soviet laws, by Communist laws. My father died in 1970. He served in the army for nine years, he fought in the war, he fought for four years, received medals, and was a party member starting in 1942. My mother joined the party in 1946. Well, seeing her tears, I knew that this was it. The end. Mother very strongly and coarsely insisted that I go home to Microdistrict 5 and rescue my wife and children. So with a broken heart I set out for my microdistrict. And there the Azerbaijani neighbors told me that all of downtown was surround¬ed by that gang. Really it was a band of nationalists. And everyone was say¬ing there was no way out of town. My brother-in-law asked an Azerbaijani family to hide him. I didn't do that.

And now I'll tell you how I set up a blockade in my room. And this in our town and in the Soviet Union, because according to what people were say¬ing, the mob was moving toward the third, fourth, and fifth microdistricts. I awaited my fate.

I blockaded the front door with whatever I could. This was on the 28th. I got some pepper ready—good thing we had five packages of pepper—a large axe, and a small one, for chopping meat. I wouldn't let my wife go to sleep. The children slept right near the open balcony—we lived on the fifth floor—and warned my wife that when they started breaking down the door she should take the children and jump down so as not to fall into the hands of those savages, so that I would know before they killed me that my family had died that way and not at the hands of that gang.

So we awaited our deaths the whole night. That night, the 28th, I didn't sleep a wink. I heard shots in town, but didn't know what kind of shots they were. I don't know if the gang was shooting or if it was our soldiers.

On the afternoon of the 29th I decided to go to my mother's. In the court¬yard I had already heard—the Azerbaijanis were saying so—that the great¬est pogrom and killing was taking place in Block 36 and Microdistrict No. 3, and that's where my mother's and brother's families lived. I went in that direction, but once again I couldn't get close. Those blocks were completely blocked off by the mob.

Going to Block 45 I saw snow, or at least I thought it was snow. It turned out to be foam. The fire department, about four vehicles, had poured foam over that wild crowd. Almost the entire lot near Block 45 was covered with that foam.

I saw this, too: a naked woman in the middle of the crowd. They were taking her in the direction of the hospital. She was entirely naked, wounded, and there was blood on her body. They dragged her, carried her, kicked her in the back, in the head, and dragged her toward the hospital, which is between the third and fourth microdistricts. After that I turned around and could barely walk all the way home; and I couldn't walk any farther, my legs had become paralyzed.

Sometime in the evening, at eight or eight thirty, I just sighed, a purely human sigh: past our microdistrict—my house is on the street side—drove two armored personnel carriers with our Soviet soldiers in them, and behind them, two Ikarus buses full of soldiers in helmets with shields. I realized what they were and sighed: our Soviet soldiers should be able and were obligated to stop that crowd.

I went outside. It was somewhere around eleven o'clock. The soldiers were warming themselves. It was cold that day, there was a light drizzle, and they were warming themselves near the exhaust pipe of the Ikarus. They would come up to the exhaust pipe of that Ikarus twenty at a time, and stand there warming their hands against the cold. I approached one of the soldiers and talked with him a bit and then went to see the Lieutenant Colonel. He said, "What's going on?" I said nothing much. He said, "Go home assured, we're taking care of your problem tomorrow. All blocks and microdistricts are surrounded by our troops—the assault landing brigade. You can be sure that now they won't touch a single hair on an Armenian head. You can be 100 percent sure of it, we guarantee it. Go home."

So I went home. And by five in the morning the armored personnel carri¬ers were driving back and forth: the microdistrict was completely cordoned off.

In the morning, somewhere around nine o'clock, I heard someone speak¬ing over a megaphone—this is on March 1 already—over a megaphone I hear: "Citizens of Armenian nationality!" Do you know how painful it was to hear and repeat that? "Citizens of Armenian nationality! For the sake of your safety we ask you to come out. We will transport you to a safe place." And this was in a Soviet city. It was our Soviet soldiers who had come to the aid of the Armenian people.

So I, my wife, who was pregnant, and the children—I have two small boys, five and six—went out. This is hard, painful to remember. And we climbed into the military vehicle and they took us away. We were stopped near the City Party Committee. Right across from the City Party Committee is the Samed Vurgun Cultural Facility of the Synthetic Rubber Production Association (we call it the SK among ourselves). And so when the soldiers took us to the City Party Committee and the SK—they're practically on the same square, they face one another—when we were driving into that square, even when we were driving into that square, soldiers with helmets, shields, and machine guns checked our vehicle, our military vehicle, and after that they let us in.

We got out of the car. One of the officers said, "You have small children; there isn't a single free space in the City Party Committee, all the stairway landings, all the rooms, all the spaces are completely jammed. If you can, settle your children into the Samed Vurgun Club." So we went to the SK. At the entrance there were so many people—and all of them were Armenians. This is the picture I saw upon entering the foyer: every yard, on every inch was covered with our people, our Soviet people, Armenians, on the con¬crete; on the floor ... I can't even describe how many people were crammed in there. Even at the entrances to the men's and women's lavatories, even a yard away from the toilets there wasn't room to put the children down, let alone put them to bed ... I can't describe what it was like there.

Everyone was outraged. They were demanding to be taken out of Azerbaijan. We demanded to see people on the Central Committee and the Secretary of the Central Committee. And then Demichev came, and saw, and heard our demands, and left.

On the 2nd we were still all demanding one thing: to be taken out of Azerbaijan.

Oh yes, there's something else I forgot, something that was very insulting to me. On the 29th all the people were hungry and cold. On the 1st they brought us flat, dry shortbread, rolls, and soft drinks. This was in the evening, around eight or nine o'clock. I myself bought two bottled soft drinks for two rubles. At first they were selling them for 50 kopeks, and lat¬er the salespeople were so insolent as to haggle over the prices. And we had small children, and we had nothing with us—nothing to eat and nothing to drink, and so we were forced to buy things at any price, just so our children would have something in their mouths.

And on the 2nd we told this to the Government Commission, to Seidov. I myself didn't say it, but he was told. And on the evening of the 2nd we demanded to see the Secretary of the Central Committee. We were told that we would see either Seidov, the Chairman of the Azerbaijani Council of Ministers, or Bagirov, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani Communist Party. We categorically rejected the meeting and said that we would meet only with someone from the Central Committee in Moscow. We stood on the third floor of the City Party Committee, on the left side, for two and a half hours. The City Party Committee was divided into two parts: half was packed with us Armenians, and the other half had the headquarters of [Lieutenant] General Krayev and the Central Committee people.

And so we waited there some two and a half hours until the Central Committee representative met with us. It was Comrade Grigory Petrovich Kharchenko, a Deputy Department Head from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He came, I remember, at about nine-thirty. We left our meeting with him after noon. We demanded one thing: the organized evacuation of the Sumgait Armenians out of Azerbaijan. He understood us perfectly, and he stated frankly that any Soviet who had seen such horror should not have to live in that city, but there was no directive, no instructions stating that this could be done.

So that was where they were told how the salespeople treated us. And the next day the soldiers—this was at General Krayevs initiative—the sol¬diers started to provide us with food and drink. All of it was military rations. They did that both in the City Party Committee and the SK.

Deeply outraged that horrors such as these had been permitted in a Soviet city—which we included in our charges to the Central Committee, too—we demanded that we be evacuated from Azerbaijan and further demanded that the exact number of victims be made public.

Kharchenko said—and it had already been officially reported that 31 peo¬ple of various nationalities had died—Kharchenko told me personally, "Add a zero to the 31 and you've got a realistic figure." I'm telling you just what Kharchenko himself told me. That's how it was.

Why 31 people? After meeting with our people and others I supposed that some 60 to 70 Armenians had died, because everyone in town knew everyone else; no matter where you went—six here, five there, three there, two there: killed, raped, burned. I can't describe what all that we heard. We were crying every two minutes. The men cried hearing what had happened in our town. The men cried.

It was on the 2nd that I saw the woman named Karina, she was wearing a long coat. She was being carried, she couldn't walk. In order to get in to see Demichev she opened up her coat in front of all of us: she was entirely naked, all black and blue—just entirely black and blue. So that the soldiers and officers who wouldn't let us into the City Party Committee would see what condition she was in, and so that Demichev would see it. And they didn't let her in. And this was in front of all us Armenians. We all saw it.

We talked at length with the soldiers, and I talked with a Lieutenant Colonel who had almost had his eye put out. I can't even describe how that eye was hanging out. His hand was bandaged, too. We cried and said, 'What is this? And all of it here in our country? Why did this happen?' Such were the accusations we put to the Lieutenant Colonel. And he answered the fol¬lowing—I don't know his last name, he was wearing a police uniform, he was a Russian, tall, a big man; crying, he said: "How am I supposed to tell the parents of my soldiers that their sons died in the Soviet Union?" That's what the Lieutenant Colonel said.

Tremendous, tremendous thanks to our soldiers! Tremendous thanks to General Krayev! He is a real Soviet and a real Communist. There, after all the horrors, we realized that in the Soviet Union there really were Communists who carried out their Communist duty. And General Krayev was one of them. And our rank-and-file soldiers, our little soldiers, as my parents say, are also worthy of the title. They're heroes! Great thanks to them!

On the 3rd they took us to the village of Nasosny, to the military unit. There people were feeling better; they didn't calm down, but they were bet¬ter. Everyone received a soldier's cot with clean sheets and pillowcases. In the warm soldiers' barracks all the children had their own cots. And across from us the soldiers lived in tents and buses. I say it again, great thanks to our soldiers! They fed us—I served in the Army, and I know—they fed us wonderfully, they did everything they could so that everyone would be con¬tent, even if it could only be slightly.

We were under protection in Nasosny a while. The whole place was under guard: armored personnel carriers and soldiers with machine gun. On March 8 they took us to boarding houses, to the Khimik, Metallurg, and Energetik medical and health resorts ...

Before that, on March 1, I was able to go to Block 36, to the bus station, to see my mother, I forgot to mention it. And there, walking along Druzhba Street, I witnessed another horror. Looking at a building in Microdistrict 3, you could tell instantly which homes were Armenian: not a single window was unbroken. Just imagine it, when they were smashing out the window frames they took out pieces of the concrete too, right out of the building. That's how wildly, barbarically they destroyed! I saw those awful burned automobiles between the bus station and Block 34. There were many black spots on the asphalt, and there were the carcasses of burned buses and light vehicles. The whole area was surrounded by soldiers.

I went to my mother's from the commuter rail station side. The neighbors said that they had been taken away. They said that they were alive and well. I found them soon afterward ...

We often went up to the soldiers and officers. Can you imagine, they couldn't even talk. They couldn't do it. As soon as they opened their mouths, they would start crying. They had heard and seen it all, but they couldn't describe what they had seen in our town. An officer stood talking to me and crying . . . The soldiers were so terrified . . . Well I looked at them and they were all pale. Here's this soldier riding with us in the bus, accom¬panying us into town, and he's entirely pale himself. The smallest rustle and he would turn sharply and aim the muzzle of his machine gun in that direction, even though there were only Armenians on the bus. They were com¬pletely overcome with terror. Our officers and soldiers didn't know where they were, they didn't know what people or what type of people they were dealing with. Yes, I'll repeat it once again: Sumgait had been lorded over by a gang of nationalists, that was no group of hooligans . . .

On February 29 there were about 20 to 25 policemen standing near our microdistrict: this was off to the side, a bit better than about half a mile from the place where the foam was, where the excesses had taken place, where they raped the woman, where they demonstratively drove her, naked, around the whole town. They, the policemen, were standing there, about half a mile from that spot: they stood there smoking cigarettes. They were completely and utterly in agreement with what was happening, if not con¬tributing. Nothing was done on their part, that's a fact. And I think that the USSR Procuracy dealt with that honestly, humanely, and like Communists. I have faith in our USSR Procuracy, and I am sure of our country: not one of them will escape severe punishment. And they should be punished! So something like this will never again, anywhere, take place in our country... On March 9, when we were in the boarding house, someone asked the Gambarian boys (Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Gambarian had been brutally murdered with a crowbar, and his sons, our friends Roman and Sasha, were with us), someone asked, "Roman, did you get a death certificate?" He said, "Yes." "May I see it?" And can you imagine our horror when we read that death certificate. It said, "cardio-vascular impairment," and below, under the list of possible causes of death, the word "illness" was underlined. So their father had allegedly died from illness, from cardiovascular impairment. Well of course we were outraged.

Then a Government Commission on Sumgait was established, and we were greatly surprised and insulted that Seidpv, Chairman of the Azerbaijani Council of Ministers, was appointed its head. We were against it, but what could we do? We wrote a letter of appeal about Gambarian and went to the Government Commission. Before that we dropped by to see Lieutenant General Krayev, he read our letter and gave us his approval and sent us downstairs to the second floor, where the Government Commission was located. There were four people there, headed up by the Chair of the Union Council of Azerbaijan, she was the Commission's Deputy Chair, Lidiya Khudatovna Rasulova. The first thing she said was: "You do not have the right to write in Gambarian's name."

Besides that we demanded that we, or at least part of us, be evacuated from Azerbaijan in an organized fashion. This she refused. I asked her to give it to us in writing, so that we would have it on paper. And she said she'd give any Armenian a document that stated it was impossible to pro¬vide us with work and housing outside of Azerbaijan. I took this document with me to Armenia and submitted it to the Republic Council of Ministers.

We asked Lidiya Rasulova questions: Why did this happen? She gave the reason for it as being the alleged lack of instruction in Azerbaijani in any technical college or institute in Armenia. She gave us to understand that she did not fault the Azerbaijani leadership for what had had happened in Azerbaijan, even though we openly declared that the Azerbaijani leadership was responsible for what had happened in Sumgait.

On March 11 my family and I left for Yerevan. I want to say this, too: until the 11th it had been drummed it into us that Armenia would not take us, there was no place for us in Armenia. But I came here as an Armenian. We were received very well. On the way from the airport to the Council of Ministers I couldn't be calm for a moment—I'm a man, I'm 33 years old, and I cried the whole way . ..

Here they set us up in boarding houses, gave us shelter, and did every¬thing like it should be done.

And then on April 13, at the request of the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaderships, ten representatives of the Sumgait refugees went to Baku. Chairman Seidov of the Council of Ministers of Azerbaijan tried in earnest to convince us to return to Sumgait. On April 13 we said categorically, "No! We will not return to Sumgait, not a single Armenian will return to the City of Death." And there in the presence of Seidov, his manager of affairs, the new Chairman of the Sumgait City Executive Committee, and the new Secretary of the City Party Committee, I declared that the government of Azerbaijan was responsible for what had happened on February 27 to 29. It was their fault: from the First Secretary down to the janitors of the City Executive Committee, they are guilty of what happened in our city. The Sumgait authorities are guilty, and so is the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani Communist Party.

After my accusation of the Central Committee, Seidov stood up and said these exact words: "I am ready"—this is Seidov talking—"I am ready to get on my knees before you now and ask forgiveness. And tell the three thou¬sand Sumgait Armenians who are in Armenia that I will get down on my knees before each of them and ask forgiveness, just return to Sumgait."

We stated categorically: "No! We will not return to Sumgait!"

On the 13th they offered to take us to the city of Sumgait. The Chairman of the City Executive Committee rode with us in the van. We reached the City Party Committee, where we had been a month and a half before, and it was very painful to see the deserted square. We asked the Chairman to get off the bus and give us two hours' time to drive around the city and look around, ask questions, and determine what the situation was for ourselves. We were prepared for what we saw: it was no longer the same city. More than a month had passed. There were almost no Russians or Armenians to be seen. We went to see our friends who had stayed in Sumgait. I personally went to see seven Armenian families. In six of the seven households the men Were all away—all were looking for apartments outside of Azerbaijan. Six of the seven had seriously ill, bedridden people, old women, mothers. There Was a grown man in only one of the households. He said, "I've got 25 days left until I apply for my pension, and then I'm leaving here. I spoke with Russian men and women. We knew where they lived and we dropped by to see them. And I'll tell you what they think: they, too, no longer intend to live in that city.

Both the Chairman of the City Executive Committee and the First Secretary of the City Party Committee begged and pleaded for us to return. We cut them off, categorically: "No!"

We even refused to spend the night in Sumgait, even though they offered us rooms in the Sumgait Hotel. We drove to Baku. Incidentally, before we left we met an Armenian we knew near the City Executive Committee. We all went up to him. He was irritated, and completely pale. He says, "I've been harassed on the telephone for three days: 'Are you still alive?' I don't know what to do. I came to the City Executive Committee to complain."

Representatives of Azerbaijan came to the Armenian Council of Ministers on April 27 and 28. They assured us that our apartments were being kept safe, those that had property remaining in them. This turned out not to be the case. There is now information that on April 28, the apartment of our compatriot who is now in Armenia was robbed. Vagif Karoyevich Aslanian, born in 1951, who lived in Microdistrict No. 2, Building 2, Apartment 21. He is now living in the Masis Boarding House. He got a call from either his relatives or close friends saying that the door to his apartment was open, he should come. He went. He returned yesterday and stated that his apartment was robbed again. Two months after the events!

May 8,1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

  • 2 месяца спустя...

- RIMA AVANOVNA AVANESIAN

Born 1937

Retired (Class 2 Invalid) Previously Laundry Worker Sumgait Local Production

Combine

Resident at 28/19 Druzhba Street, Apartment 1

Block 5, Sumgait

If my two sons had died in a war I would not be grieving like I am now. I raised my children myself. One was three and a half and the other was only two when their father died at his plant, at work. It was so difficult to raise them, how miserable I was when I sent them off to the Army—how I wept, how I waited for their return, how I cried over each letter. I cried every day until their return, until they came back. How miserable I was!

My children! What, did I just raise them for the Azerbaijanis? I suffered, I raised them, and now they're gone. They never caused any trouble, no trou¬ble at all, they were such smart children. If you want, go out to our court¬yard and ask around what kind of children they were . . . But the Azerbaijanis came, smashed our windows, broke down our door, and killed my two sons, Albert and Valery . . . how can I bear this? When someone's children are sick, they have a fever, they cry, the mother, the parents—how do they feel? I'm a parent, just like you...

The bastards! They killed my children! I am now all alone, without my children, my Valery, my Albert, with nothing at all ... What did you want from us?! Did you want to take dead people's money? To steal their clothes and wear them? To take their apartments so that your wife and children could live there? I wish you were all dead! That's what I want! . . .

Albert and Valery were both unmarried, they were both engaged. I want¬ed to have their weddings, and those Azerbaijanis broke our windows, and I shouted so ... I called so much on the phone—no police, not one of those bastards came to the aid of my children, my children lay on the street until four o'clock in the morning, in front of our building, one on the left, one on the right.

I have lived in this building since 1954. My husband worked at the facto¬ry ... Albert was three and a half and Valery was two when there was an accident at work and their father died. I was pregnant. My daughter was born when I was on the road, 40 days after the death of my husband. My brother and I were on our way somewhere, we got off at the station, and Alvina was born at the hospital there. From there I returned home. It was so hard, I worked so hard, and my brothers, my sister, and my mother all helped ... I barely raised those children ... I raised them, sent them to school. They finished ten grades and went into the Army, and came back. Albert had entered the Institute, he was going to school in the city of Baku. Later he became an economist. Valery taught at the DOSAAF [The Voluntary Society for Collaboration with the Army, Air Force, and Navy.] Alvina also finished ten grades, then, on to accounting school, I gave her hand in mar¬riage—this had taken all my strength, all my tears ...

There was so much ahead of my sons, and the Azerbaijanis came and killed them.

There had been rumors before that day. Valery had been at the City Party Committee building, he came home and told Albert, "Albert, you know, the Azerbaijanis have started saying, 'Leave our soil, Armenians, leave, we're going to get you!' " Our precinct policeman saw Valery there and said, "Valery, what are you standing here for? Don't stand here and listen, go home." He came home and didn't go outside after that, he sat at home. He told Albert, and Albert said, "Just look at what they're up to, what they want from us!" Anyway they sat there chattering, the two of them, and I listened . . . They were having tea and we look and see smoke outside, a car was burning, they were burning a car across the way. Valery says, "Mother, get ready, if we survive today we're going to flee to Krasnodar tomorrow." There was a moment like that ... I put on my scarf. I didn't put on my coat, it's really heavy, I put on a robe and my slippers and threw on my scarf, we were going to leave, to flee. I told Valery, "There's a little money there, get it," and he said, "Mother, we don't need anything, let's go." And I say, "At least take the gold." And he repeated, "We don't need anything, let's go." We were just about to open the door when they started breaking the windows ... All five windows: our apartment is a corner apartment, on the first floor. They were hitting the windows with rocks . . . They started ringing the doorbell: "Open up, Armenians! We're going to kill you!" And softly, Valery told me: "Mother, go hide in the bathroom." And I'm crying, "What do you mean, that you're going to stay out here while I hide?" And he gestured with his eyes, go, go...

Now they were hacking the door down with an axe. They pushed and pushed, but they couldn't break it down, so they began chopping it with an axe, into pieces, starting at the top . . . The whole door, from top to bottom-There was nothing left of the door. I made a sign to my children: Retreat! ... I didn't shout, I thought, now they're going to kill us ... Valery went pale and shouted, "Hand me the pistol, I'm going to kill them!" He said that on purpose. They ran away, they were just hiding somewhere, as it turned out, and we were on the stairs, there was no longer any door ...

We went out onto the landing, and they were at us with rocks. They threw a stone and hit my husband in the head. He started bleeding. The four of us were standing there: Albert, Valery, my husband, and I. Valery took my husband's and my hand in his and says, "Mother, take Father and go upstairs, we'll be right up." Upstairs we had Russian neighbors, in our entryway on the third floor. The Nosunovs, Vanya and his wife Nadya. The two of us went upstairs, and their door was unlocked. We went inside.

Nadya was at work, doing the second shift, and her husband was sick in bed. He has a heart problem and almost never goes anywhere at all. We went into the other room and hid in there. An hour later Nadya comes home from work. She comes home and says, "Your home . . . the rug is burning outside ... your belongings, they are dragging them outdoors, the bastards

" I say, "Did you see Albert and Valery?" She says, "No, I didn't see them." Later she went outside again and when she came back she gave me some medicine. She had seen them down there and found out everything, but only told me: "Emma, they probably ran off." My close friends call me Emma. "Emma, probably it was all over, and your children probably ran away, don't be afraid, don't be afraid, don't be afraid ..." She saw it all, and my children lay there until four o'clock in the morning, on the asphalt, bloody ... Albert was on the left, and Valery was on the right. . . Then the soldiers came and took them to the hospital. But I myself didn't see this, I was told about it. From the window I only saw them carrying our things. The police were taking them ...

I saw Albert and Valery for the last time when they sent my husband and me upstairs. We probably hadn't made it up two or three flights before they had killed them. Those animals dragged my two sons out of the stairwell and killed them! Bastards, bastards, bastards! I want to go and kill them, too.'

I want to fly up to see Gorbachev. We've sent so many letters and tele¬grams, and all we get is "Received," "Received." So what, "Received"? They tell us they've received them, but why aren't they doing anything? When there's one little accident on the main drag in Sumgait a hundred policemen show up to help. But when two sons—not small boys, either—lie on the asphalt all night, no one comes to help. If this had happened in wartime, in 1941, I would have sat there crying and said, "It's not only my sons who were killed." All Soviet people went off to fight during the war, but that night only my children were at war, the ones I raised alone, without a father, not ever even saying the word "Father" because they grew up without even seeing one ... And now, when they'd already started working, earning mon¬ey to bring to their mother, bringing presents to their mother, trying to make her happy—those bastards come and kill my children for nothing. I want to kill their murderers. I will not rest... I don't care if a year passes, two ... as long as I live I will avenge them.

Let everyone who had relatives in Sumgait, let all the women come here and write their petitions about who of theirs was killed: their husbands, sons, and daughters, and we'll put all the petitions together and send them to Comrade Gorbachev. Who has seen or heard that in our times five win¬dows with bars on them are smashed, a door is broken, and two sons are killed? I'm a parent, you're a parent, doesn't your heart bleed for your children? I'm a parent just like you. I want very much to make an appeal to Gorbachev. I want either to send him a telegram to come here or for me to go there. In 1953 I came to this area with nothing at all, and now I have noth¬ing at all once again ... I worked for 35 years raising my children and now they're gone, my apartment is gone, and my things are gone. If a woman doesn't cook one meal for her family, the kids run all around saying, "We're hungry, what she would do? Why isn't there a meal, Mamma?" Well Gorbachev is our mother, our father, our parent. And now when they've killed my children and I see Gorbachev smiling on television I just want to smash the screen. I'm a person too, I want to smile too, I also want to dance and see the weddings of my sons, live with my daughters-in-law and my grandsons and granddaughters. That's why I raised them.

I wouldn't trade my sons for anything. I'll have my daughter, I'll have my son-in-law, I'll have my granddaughters ... I wouldn't trade my Albert and my Valery for anything . . . When my arm was broken at work and I became handicapped it was they who washed me and did the laundry and took care of me, they were such smart children . . . It's as though I lost two families. One was Valery's. He would have wed, had children, and become his own man, he would have had his friends. I lost another family too—Albert's.

I raised my children without their father. Gorbachev didn't pay the costs of their upbringing. Gorbachev didn't give me a single free pound of sugar from the store. When the registration and enlistment office sent Albert off to the Army he was five minutes late and they had already started looking for him . . . but when they killed them no one said "Find them." They don't know where I am and they don't know where my children are buried, who buried them, who cried for them . . .

They don't understand such things. They just gave the order: Go to Block 5, Druzhba Street No. 28, Apartment 1, there's a prosperous family there. They gave them a list at the Housing Office, and now the head of the Housing Office is in jail, the head of the Housing Office for Block 5. I told them there and in the City Executive Committee that if we Armenians weren't wanted they could have come to us or called us and said, "Avanesian, you can't live here, leave our lands, leave our apartments." Why didn't they tell me? If they had told me I would have left the city myself, I would have found another place. For myself and for my children. And now I'm alone . . . Who needs me? Where am I to go? Now I have to buy glasses, blankets, a television—while my television is being watched by some Azerbaijanis somewhere.

It started at ten o'clock in the evening, and my children lay there until four o'clock, and they stole, stole, stole ... I called for an ambulance—none. I called the police—nothing. One wouldn't come, the other wouldn't come . • . why not? And one little accident and a hundred policemen show up. No one came to help my children. When I went to the Procuracy and told them about the police, a Russian from Moscow says, "Why do you keep saying that the police took your things?" Because I'm a witness, I saw the police car come, I saw them take my things. They even took the meat and butter we had bought with our ration coupons ...

And just like before, the response to my telegrams is, "Received," "Received," "Received." Well I know they were received! So what, you received them. Do something! I already know they received them.

At the Procuracy I told them that when the trial of my sons' murderers takes place I will kill them myself. That guy who came from Moscow told me, "If you kill them you'll go to jail." I say, "Fine, I'll be glad to go to jail, jail will be just fine." He raised his hands and said, "Look, if you want you can take your murderers on by yourself." They've been lining their pockets, too. That's why they're not doing anything. When they first came they talked completely differently, and now, four months later, the Azerbaijanis have lined their pockets. And now they're not doing anything.

It was easy for them to come and kill in one minute. I worked my fingers to the bone for 35 years and lost it all in one minute. I don't have the strength anymore. I'm ashamed of myself before my brother and my sister and her sister-in-law. As much as I've been crying . . . The sister-in-law couldn't stand it, she took her children and went to live with her relatives in Kiev. My other brother already got sick: I cried and cried and he got too upset, now he's in the hospital . . . Their family has been completely upset because of me...

I cry all the time, I don't eat anything, and both my sister and my brother have become ill. My other brother got sick too, and they sent me here from Lokbatan, thinking maybe I'd feel better here. There I would go to the ceme¬tery every day, be upset, and cry and cry and cry ... the ambulance, the ambulance . . .

My children's teachers were always happy with them, and now they've found out what happened and they're crying along with me, Russians, Albert's and Valery's teachers.

My children always treated me with respect. When I was in the hospital they would come, they'd talk to the doctors. When I went home they helped me cook meals, I couldn't use my arm at all. They did the meals and combed my hair, went to the market ... I lost very, very, very, very . . . very good children ... I just can't live without them. That day I was at my brother's I almost threw myself off the balcony. I had all but done it and then I started feeling sorry for my brother. I feel sorry for him. It's so bad I told Alvina, "Just give me some vinegar, I'll drink that..." One way or another I'm going to die, I'll throw myself off the balcony, there's no way out...

July 7, 1988 Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ ALVINA MANVELOVNA BALUIAN

Born 1962

Employed

Sumgait Zelenstroy Construction

Administration Plant Nursery

Resident at Sverdlov Street 13/30, Apartment 11

Stroiteli Village, Sumgait

Three months have passed since I lost my two brothers, Albert and Valery Avanesian. It happened on February 28, at seven-thirty in the evening, when it was already getting dark. Eighty or ninety people attacked our building. They shouted, "Out with the Armenians!", "Death to the Armenians!", and "Armenians, open up!" They surrounded the building—we lived on the first floor—they surrounded the building and started destroying the window bars and breaking down the door with the axes and rods they had in their hands, shouting "Death to the Armenians!"

I'm recounting this from the words of my mother, Rima Avanovna Avanesian. At the time I was at my mother-in-law's, since my husband was at work and I didn't want to be alone with my children. I had been at home that morning, but no one was there: my brother had gone out to find out what was happening and I decided I'd go to the village since it was quieter, calmer there. There were already crowds of people walking around town. But it was only when I was in the village that I learned that something terri¬ble was happening, that everything was being broken everywhere, and that they were breaking into homes, raping women, and slaughtering people to cries of "Down with the Armenians!" and "Death to the Armenians!"

The next day a friend came to my husband, Vagif Baluian, and told him, "I think that Alvina's brother is lying dead and a lot of people are jumping on him." My husband didn't understand what he was saying: What? What? Jumping?" The friend said, "One group jumps, the other group waits, and then the other group start to jump." My husband didn't believe him, and the friend went on: "If you don't believe me get in the car, we'll drive over there." (He's an Azerbaijani himself, this friend.) "I'll take you there. Don't drive your car, because they might turn it over and burn you along with it." My husband didn't tell me anything about this, I still didn't know. He got his father, my father-in-law, and they went to our place, and my mother and stepfather were sitting there outside shouting . . . My husband went inside and saw that it was no longer a home. He put my mother and father in the car and brought them to his mother's house . . . We were all sitting inside, we were all shaking ourselves: suddenly we might be attacked. There, at my mother-in-law's house, Mamma wailed and told us what happened that night. We found out more later.

When they started breaking down the door to get in and when the light from the entryway came through the crack the younger brother shouted, "Albert, give me the pistol!" Well, we didn't have any pistol. He was just say¬ing that so they would get scared and run off. They scattered, but one of them stayed and watched. Then Mamma pushed Albert and Valery out of the way and said, "If something happens, let them kill me." Albert grabbed her by the hand, pushed her away, and said, "Go hide!" But she wouldn't leave. She stood there. She saw that person's face. She said, "I wouldn't rec¬ognize him, but he was big, tall, and dark. He was looking at me," she said, "I had never seen him before. He looked at me with terrified eyes, thinking that I had a pistol and that I was going to shoot him. But he realized that there was no pistol. Two or three minutes passed and there were no shots. He ran out of the entryway. We thought that that was the end of it, that it had ended up OK." That's how my Mamma tells it. But that was only the beginning. He had run out to call back the others. Then my stepfather, Vladimir Mikhailovich, said, "Stay here in the entryway, I'll go look." He had two knives. He said, "If they find you, run, and I'll delay them somehow." He had no sooner gone out than the first stone hit him. It was a huge stone. Two or three more stones hit him. They wounded his head, in the temple. He lost consciousness and fell down. When Mamma and my brothers ran to him he was bleeding profusely. Then my oldest brother, Albert, told Mamma, "Get him up and take him to the third floor." She says, "No, you come upstairs too." There was a Russian woman living up there on the third floor. Albert said, "No. You take Father and go up there." And Valery, too, shouted, "Get a move on! We'll be right up!" She said, "I'm not going without you! Come quickly!" She pulled on their arms, but they wouldn't go. Then she somehow got Father up to the third floor.

My brothers were stalling for time to protect them. They managed to get to Aunt Nadya's place. And the mob fell upon Albert and Valery. Valery cried out. Albert shouted to Valery: "Go back, go back." Valery said, "I'm not afraid of them!" Our neighbors on the first floor heard them. Valery went right at the mob, but 18 or 20 people flew upon him and started beating him, and they knocked him down right away. He got one of them, too, but there were too many of them. They knocked him down and started kicking him and beating him with rods. They beat him on his head. Albert went to his brother's aid. Valery shouted, "Get out of here" at him, but he wouldn't leave. He went at them. They beat him on the head with the rods, and he fell down, too. He fell and they set upon him, too, and began beating him and stomping him with their feet. When Valery was lying there half-dead they stabbed him. There were five knife wounds right in the heart. But Albert held on a long time. When the mob was wrecking our apartment a Russian woman, one of our neighbors from the other entryway, Olya, went to him. She said, "I thought he was already dead. But he recognized me in the dark." He said, "Aunt Olya, help me. Call an ambulance." She said, "Albert, the Phones, all the lines have been cut. I can't drag you away because they'll see us." He said, "Please, call an ambulance, I can't take it, everything in my belly is on fire." He had a knife wound in his left lung. He lay there until morn¬ing.

This happened in the yard in front of our building, right under the win¬dows of our apartment, you could say. We had a corner apartment in the far entryway. One brother lay in front of the building, near the entryway, and the other, under the side window.

Late on the 29th, somewhere around four o'clock, the police came, but instead of picking them up and taking them to the hospital or to the morgue, they started going over the apartment first. Well from upstairs Mamma saw them carrying bags and taking everything. They had a big car, a really big one, like the paddy wagons they use for transporting hooligans. She says, "I saw them carrying bags, full bags, out of our apartment. Well," she says, "I don't know what was in them, but they put them in the truck." Those police¬men went in and out two or three times. That wasn't enough for them. Then they brought the truck up to the entryway, right up to the doors, and started carrying out everything else. Mamma hadn't seen the hooligans carrying the things out, but she did see them breaking them up and burning them.

I already mentioned that my husband knew of all this on the morning of the 29th. His Azerbaijani friend told him. Later I asked him, "If he's such a good friend of yours how come he didn't come to see you that night, why didn't he tell you what they were doing with your relatives, why did he wait till the next day to come?" That fellow said, "I was walking down the street and saw him." According to his words he only saw one of my brothers: "When I saw him I started to go up to him to drag him off to the side, but they pushed me away and said, 'Get out of here or we'll see how you like it.' So they tossed me out of their way and I went home. I went home and told my wife," he said, "and she said, 'stay at home, don't leave the house.'"

My husband left immediately. There were Russians, Armenians, and Lezgins in the courtyard. Everyone stood there crying. He got Mamma and put her in the car and said, "If you were human beings you would have come out when they were beating and stabbing them, not now. Now," he said, "crying's no good."

There was a military unit, a motorized battalion, in the area where we lived with my husband's parents. We all went there. The soldiers hid us. We sat up round the clock the night of the 29th there. The soldiers brought us rations. They saw that we had children, and they helped us. That night they cordoned off the unit to defend us in case it were to be found out that Armenians were hiding there. In the morning a major or a captain, I don't know what his rank was, called the City Executive Committee and said that they had been hiding about 60 people since the day before. He said that he needed to get them out of there because it would be found out that they were there and they would come for them. They told him, "Put them in bus¬es and bring them by convoy to the City Executive Committee." They were gathering all the Armenians there. We rode to the City Executive Committee along streets lined with tanks and armored personnel carriers. This was on the 1st. I saw the street where I had spent my childhood and simply couldn't believe it, I thought I must be dreaming. I looked and wept: there were tanks and soldiers under all of our windows.

We didn't go through downtown: they were afraid to drive through downtown because there was nothing but Azerbaijanis there. They took us in another way, one cordoned off by soldiers. We arrived and got out near the City Executive Committee. There were a great many armored personnel carriers and military people there.

I knew about my brothers, but I couldn't believe it. I thought that it just couldn't be, that they had probably gotten away. And when we were sitting in the military unit, when Mamma cried the whole night through, I told her, "Calm down, it's not possible, they probably fled, they're probably at our Aunt's in Lokbatan. It's not possible that anything happened to them." She said, "What do you mean, not possible? Aunt Olya told me that Alik was lying there, that he asked her for help." "No, all the same," I said, "he's prob¬ably wounded . . . They're probably in the hospital or they probably fled, left town." I didn't believe it myself. I didn't believe it until I saw the coffins. Myself. With my own eyes.

The whole City Executive Committee was jammed with people. They were all ours, all Armenians. There wasn't even room to stand. After the authorities found out that two people were coming to Sumgait from Moscow—I think they said who it was, Demichev and one oth¬er person, I don't remember anymore, I really wasn't up to paying attention at the time—they moved us to the Samed Vurgun Cultural Facility, we call it the SK. It's right next to the City Executive Committee. We went outside. Some people had children, some had their belongings, some were weeping, and others were crying out from horror. We crossed over the square accom¬panied by soldiers. They had formed a cordon of soldiers. They stood every two steps with machine guns, maybe every other step. There were soldiers on the left and on the right. And the whole square was surrounded by armored personnel carriers. We went down the middle, between the left and right rows. Once we were in the SK, the ones who got there first took the chairs and settled there: they occasionally showed movies. The people who came in later sat right on the floor, right down on it, without anything under them. We settled in on the second floor, also right on the floor. But after a half an hour my husband found some cardboard boxes and tore them up to make mats. We put the children on them so they wouldn't be so cold. We have two children, daughters. Iline, the older one, will soon be six; Vika is four and a half. The children had been up for 24 hours already, and had had Nothing to eat or drink. When they wanted to eat we had nothing to give them, then they asked to be taken to the lavatory, but there were too many People and you couldn't get in.

Some people had brought things with them from home: bread, potatoes, or boiled meat, and everyone shared among themselves. But the next day, that was March 2, the soldiers gave us, the Armenians, their rations. The soldiers were Russians, but they handed out their rations. We all got into line—like in the war movies, where people are in line with ration cards for bread or water. Lines. They were long lines, 200 or 300 people. I stood there, waiting for my turn to come, and remembered, and thought. Two or three days, this was nothing. How must it have been for the people who lived through the war and didn't starve for one or two days, but for four years?

The soldiers gave us their rations. There were sausages, too, and pastries, and there was sweet tea, soft drinks, and mineral water. The bare essentials, anyway. There was meat, too. They brought the children hot cereal, for the little ones and the infants. The soldiers helped us. Our thanks go to them. But had they come just a bit earlier, 24 hours earlier, on the 27th, I wouldn't be left alone in the world. I would have my two brothers.

So there we were in the SK, sleeping on the cardboard. My husband put his coat down on the cardboard and put our children on it, and I covered them with my coat. Mamma sat right on the cardboard and waited to see what would happen. We spent three days there. On the 4th, or maybe it was the 5th, I no longer remember, because it was a hard time for me, my neigh¬bors came to me and said, "Alvina, it seems your uncles from Yerevan have arrived." I said, "How could they know that we're here and what has hap¬pened in Sumgait? We didn't send anyone a telegram." Our neighbors had wanted to send a telegram, but Mamma said, "There's no need, they all have cars, they'll come in their cars and they'll be burned, too, all the more so if they find out that they are Armenians from Yerevan. Then I would have lost not only my two sons, but my brothers, too."

I don't know how they found out what had happened. They found out that same day, the 28th, in the evening. They found out and flew in on the fourth or the fifth, as soon as it was possible. My mother's two other broth¬ers live in Baku. Her middle brother, Uncle Nikolai, works at the State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate. He's a police captain. He set out from Baku, but on the way he was stopped by the police. They knew him. They said, "Where are you going, Nikolai?" He says, "To Sumgait." They say, "Have you lost your mind? Blood is flowing in rivers there, Armenian blood. We're telling you because you've worked with us a lot: Don't go." He says, "My two nephews have been murdered there. If that's the way it is, let them kill me, too. I'd have no reason to live!" He asked another policeman, an Azerbaijani, to come with him. They got in a car and came. When they reached the city the other policemen refused to drive him in: "I won't take you in there. Go by yourself. I feel sorry for you: you'll die there too." Our uncle later told us: "I walked down the streets and didn't recognize your Sumgait." The city was littered with stones, windows were broken, and booths were burned and smashed. He walked and walked and finally reached our house, Mother's house. He said, "When I saw the windows, the glass shattered with stones … and the broken bars ..." Our uncle saw the condition our apartment was in and became ill, and sat down on a bench. No one approached him. But after half an hour he saw our neighbor Igor. He asked, "Where are they, the rest of them? What happened? Is it true they were killed?" Igor told him, "Yes, they killed Albert and Valery, but the son-in-law picked up the mother and father and took them to his place. Now they're at the SK, where the Armenians are hiding." Our uncle went to the square, found us, and took us away from there, and sent us to Mother's sister in Lokbatan . ..

My brothers and I spent years of our childhoods without a father. Our father died in 1961, before I was born. Mother went to his home village to hold the karasunk, and on the way she went into labor and I was born. Before he died our father said, "If it's a girl, we'll call her Alvina." And that's what she did. Mamma lived alone in Sumgait. Her brothers came and helped her. Well, we grew up. Six or seven years passed, Mamma's older brother told her, "You should get married. You're still young, you're only 30 years old. You need a husband because the children need a father." And Mamma told him, "No, I don't need anyone. I've raised them alone so far, and I'll go on doing it alone." He said, "That's not right. You should do it for their sake. They'll be grown up tomorrow and you'll need a lot of help and support. No brother can do what a husband can do." Well after a while Mamma got mar¬ried. Vladimir Mikhailovich took the place of our real father. We were raised well, he didn't deny us anything. He never asked my brothers where is your paycheck or your advance like some parents do. He brought it all home himself, he never reproached Mother for anything. We grew up calling him Father, Papa. He was our father. He was always a good person. And now . . . he's in bad shape. Something is wrong in his head. I can tell when I talk to him. Something is wrong with him. He received a heavy blow to the temple. They beat him with rocks.

Mamma is now in Lokbatan, she's in poor condition, too. She has fre¬quent pains in her heart. Our aunt, her sister, says that each week, almost every day, the ambulance comes. She had had heart problems before, she'd been to the hospital. But imagine that you had borne and reared sons, two sons, and raised them to manhood and then one day, in a matter of hours, minutes, you lose them forever.

The older of my brothers, Albert Avanesian, graduated from the Economics Institute in Baku. He was a senior engineer. Albert was, well you could say he was a quiet fellow. He wasn't hotheaded, he loved to read, he had a large library, and he was a respectful boy. He didn't like it when it was noisy or anything at home, he didn't like company, either. He preferred to spend all his free time reading books or watching television. The younger brother, Valery Avanesian, taught driving at the driving school. Now Valery was a big, hot-blooded fellow. He was strong and loved risks. I told him, Why do you take risks? You have clients who come to you and want to be taken somewhere, why do you take risks? You could lose your license. You might get caught. You're breaking the law. Why do you need to do that?" He said, "Alvina, remember this: a man who doesn't take risks isn't truly alive."

He often repeated these words to me and said, "A person must live well, because he lives only once." He was hot-tempered. He became incensed when that gang of people attacked him and Albert. He went right at them. He wasn't afraid of them. There were about 80 of them, and he was alone, not counting my other brother. He defended Mamma and Papa, telling them: "Get out of here!" Those words meant, "I'll protect you." Mamma called them, pulling them by their arms: "Let's go, I'm not leaving you." Then the older brother got angry: "We're telling you to get out of here! We'll come right up." But it didn't happen. They didn't go up. They had been bru¬tally murdered.

My husband went to the morgue. At first he had gone around the hospi¬tals, but they weren't there. Then he went to the Sumgait morgue and asked someone; there was a man standing there, a guard, no doubt, and he had the keys to the morgue. My husband asked him to show him the morgue so he could see if his relatives were there. The guard said, "No, I can't, I'm not allowed to let you in because the doctors aren't here." My husband slipped him a ten-ruble note. He let him in, but said, "Look quickly so we're not seen in here. We're not supposed to be here." When the guard opened the door to the morgue refrigerator, he saw Valery first, and lying next to him was Albert. My husband said that there were maybe 20 people in there, and among them many young ones—burned, stabbed, and beaten, and he saw a child but couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child was 10 or 12 years old. My husband returned to the SK and told me that they were at the morgue. I said, "But did you see them? Maybe they're in the hospital? In serious condition?" He said, "What do you mean hospital! They're at the morgue!" Until then I hadn't believed it, I had still had some tiny hope, but upon hearing his words I felt everything start to spin and it grew dark before my eyes. I felt ill and started to cry. I started to cry. I didn't cry long because my mamma was sitting next to me. I had told her that they were alive and that they were in Lokbatan, at Aunt Asya's, that they had man¬aged to get away.

My uncles went to the Sumgait morgue to pick them up and bury them, but they were no longer there. The morgue was empty. They were told that they had been transferred to the morgue in Baku. Before that Mamma had gone to see the Deputy Chairman of our City Executive Committee, Tavakiul—I think his last name is Mamedov—and said, "Allow me to bury my children." He had lived off our courtyard for a long time, we were neigh¬bors, so to speak. Well he said, "Sister, ask whatever you want, but don't ask me that, it's beyond my control." But then my mother turned away saying, "I have nothing more to ask." And she left, and came back to where I was and sat near me.

Uncle Benik and Uncle Edik left for Baku and saw them in the morgue there. They were there. There were a great many corpses. According to their words they were just . . . well not corpses, but chopped meat. Albert had a tag on his arm with the number 162 on it, and Valery had 164. That means there was someone between them, so someone ended up between them. For some reason I think that person was our neighbor, Shagen Sargisian.

It's very difficult for me to talk about this. When I recall all this every¬thing goes dark before my eyes. I can't stand it. A fair amount of time has passed already, three months, but it seems like it happened yesterday. That it will happen tonight.

We buried my brothers in the village of Lokbatan near Baku. It's permit¬ted to take photographs at the cemetery. We hired a photographer, and he shot the whole thing. The next day, when we went to pick up the pho¬tographs, he said that the KGB had come to him and exposed his film to the light, saying that he couldn't do that.

There were difficulties during the funeral, too. We wanted to see their faces, to see that it was Albert and Valery in there and not stones and sand. We were not permitted to do this near our home. We walked and cried, and there was a whole crowd there with us. Almost the whole village of Lokbatan, all of them. Russians came out too, and cried, and people of other nationalities came out and everyone cried because these were the caskets of two young people, two brothers. Their photographs were carried in front of the procession. We arrived at the cemetery and it was already time to put them into the ground, but we weren't allowed to open the coffins there, either, and see their faces. A cry went up, there was a stir—it was our family, relatives, and friends, saying we won't put them in the ground until we open the caskets. My aunt opened them, even though we weren't permitted to do that. She opened them and they were covered with white sheets. I stood near the coffins and removed the sheets. I became tremendously dizzy. I saw them: the first was Valery. He was covered with bruises. Well you might be thinking that he had lain in the morgue a long time and had become blue with time. No, half of his face was white, and the part that had been beaten was swollen and covered with bruises. There were wounds all over Albert's face, his whole face was all scratched up. But they lay there peacefully, they looked like they were sleeping. I had often seen them sleep¬ing, and when I saw them at the very end it seemed to me that they were sleeping then, too.

I don't wish upon anyone, upon any sister, that at my age they should bury their two young brothers, who are only 31 and 33. It is very painful for me, too painful. I can't even describe the feeling. That was the last time I saw their faces.

We do know this: an investigation was conducted in Sumgait and one of the bandits who killed the younger of my brothers, Valery, was identified. The neighbors told us. They said that they brought him, that bandit, and he showed the members of the investigation how everything had happened. [He told them that at first they had knocked down Valery and then kicked him, and then, he said, they wanted to burn the corpse. But then they want¬ed to see what was in the apartment, because everyone raced up to the apartment. And he left him there: he was dead anyway, he couldn't hurt him anymore.

Maybe their pride was one of the things that killed my brothers: they did not leave, they didn't go hide at the neighbor's. The neighbor, an Azerbaijani woman, called them and said, "Come to my place." But Valery said, "What, and hide at a woman's?" They died, but they saved their mother. But I think it would have been better . . . Mother said, "It would have been better that I died myself than to see the death of my children, whom I raised alone and with such difficulty, who then grew up and had their lives ahead of them." Suddenly, one day in two hours' time, to lose two sons!

Now the trials in Sumgait have been halted because, of the killers who murdered and burned Shagen Sargisian, only Ismailov has been caught. He got 15 years. But that's not right! We, the citizens who lived in Sumgait and saw all of it, are outraged. The raid on our apartment, for example, was con¬ducted not by one person, but by 80! All of them should be tried.

I think that my brothers' murderers will also stand trial, but it won't be a trial that gives one of them 15 years while the rest go free. I, Alvina Avanesian—Baluian, by my husband—demand a just trial. Let all of my brothers' killers be caught: not one of them, not two, but all 80. I want the murderers who stomped and savagely beat and killed not only my brothers, but others of our Armenian people in Sumgait, to stand trial. And not so they are punished with 15 years' deprivation of freedom, of which they serve at most five years, get out on amnesty and a few years later go and slaughter Armenians again. I want them to stand trial and all to receive severe punishment, nothing but severe and just punishment.

May 28,1988

Shushan Boarding House

Near the Village of Arzakan

Hrazdan District

Armenian SSR

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ MADLENA ARKADEVNA AGAJANIAN

Born 1955 Previously Passport Office worker

After moving to Sumgait in 1985 left work to care for her child

Resident at Building 13/31, Apartment 45

Microdistrict No. 1

Sumgait

You could tell something was in the offing a week or even ten days before those awful events took place. All around—friends and neighbors—were spreading rumors that the Armenians were killing Azerbaijanis, mocking us, using violence. That this should be avenged, and soon we would be beaten and killed. Things like that. Well of course I didn't take any of it seriously: how could something like that happen under the Soviet government? Around a week before it happened my neighbors said that an Azerbaijani child had supposedly been thrown from the window of a bus in Stepanakert. Particularly zealous in this regard were the neighbors on our landing—Mikhrali Aliyev, his wife Rafiga Aliyev, and their 16-year-old son, Mubaris Aliyev, who was filled with animosity toward Armenians. Constantly—and I lived there about three years—he would curse the Armenians using foul language, and I was nervous even going home: he could spit right in your face, kick the door ... I'd be walking with my child and he would shout to scare the child. Because of him I was forced to get a new apartment, and I was just about to move to the new one. But as a result of the events the woman from Hrazdan who had agreed to trade apartments with me sent me a telegram canceling the exchange.

I had of course gone with this to Mubaris' parents a number of times, and they only laughed and said, he's just a child, it's nothing, forget it... About ten days before the events he came back from Baku where he was in a boxing competition, and says, "In the bus a respectable, older man said that Armenians should be stabbed on sight." He came up to me and grinned, saying, "I'm going to be the first to stab you. If something does happen I'm going to stab you."

And this ... on Saturday or Sunday morning, I can't remember exactly, they were out on the landing again, the father, the mother, and the son, and they were again repeating that we Armenians had burned entire Azerbaijani settlements in Armenia and raped the women, cutting off their breasts. They said things like that and looked at me with great anger, as an enemy. I said that of course none of that was true, and they said you'll see, true or not, the same thing is going to be done to you. The whole family stood out there on the landing, and while they were there two men came up the stairs. One of them I knew. About a year before I had put up an announcement: "Seeking exchange for apartment in Russian or Armenian city." One of them had come to see me at the time and said that he was from Kafan and he wanted to exchange his three-room apartment for a two-room one. And would throw in some money as well. I said I didn't want to move to Kafan, it was too far from Yerevan. He of course parted from me with hostility, tried to force me, pressuring me: you have to exchange, why did you put up the announcement? I said I didn't want to, I didn't want to move to Kafan. He left, and now, a year later, in those terrible days, on that Saturday or Sunday, he was back. He came with another man, he was 36 and had very dark skin, and says, "Well, are you going to exchange now?" I told him, "I said no, I don't want to move there." He smiled: "Well just see what happens to you." This man's name was Faik Geiushev. I think he was 19 or 20, he was regis¬tered as living in Kafan, but his whole family almost, in his words, was in Sumgait all the time, and he wanted to go to school in Sumgait. The man who came with him told me—and not just me, but everyone on the landing, and they agreed with him ("That's what should happen")—that Turkey was already planning to help them; they were going to get rid of all the Armenians, there wouldn't be a single Armenian left; and that Azerbaijan should become part of Turkey. Turkey had already delivered an ultimatum to the Soviet government: if you can't take care of Azerbaijan give it to us, and we all agree that we want to become part of Turkey. I had never seen him before, he came with Geiushev. They left and I went out almost right after them to go to the drugstore, I had to buy some medicine for my child: he has diathesis, and 1 am always buying him medicine. I set out for the drug store and I saw them standing there, and now a third person had joined them. They stood there a long time talking something over: I went to the drug store and came back, and they were still there.

On Sunday, out the window I saw about 50 adolescents, aged 15 to 17, running in a group. They had a flag, and they ran near my building shout¬ing, "Down with the Armenians!" and "Karabagh will remain ours!" But that's nothing! Later, from the balcony, 1 saw an endless crowd. They walked and ran like barbarians, shouting, wailing. Then, of course, 1 didn't think that my neighbors' words would come true and they would attack us. 1 thought they had heard that a demonstration was taking place somewhere and they were imitating it, and it sounded like the roar of the wild. Well at the time 1 didn't place any particular importance on it. True, a little later 1 found out that near the bazaar they had overturned and burned an automo¬bile and broken the windows in the Sputnik store and in the Kooptorg sausage store. This my mother saw. Mamma came to my place, she lived downtown, near the City Party Committee. She said that there on the square, it was awful what was going on, so many people, largely young peo¬ple and mostly men—there weren't any women there. Everyone was shout¬ing "Down with the Armenians!", it was terrifying to walk by there, and all kinds of people were getting up on stage, and again they would shout "Down with the Armenians!" and "Kill the Armenians!", and one of them was our neighbor. He was Mamma's neighbor, his address is Building 4A, Block 1, but I don't know his name, but I do know that he is the Director of School No. 25. On the way to my apartment, in Block 14, Mamma saw an Armenian apartment being destroyed, they were smashing the windows. She said, "I have a friend in the next building on the fifth floor, an Armenian, and I went to her apartment terrified, and waited until they left, and then came here." She came and said, "With all this going on, come to our place. It's probably safer there, it's downtown, near the City Party Committee." I say, "Under the Soviet government no one can break into my apartment. At a minimum I won't go out of the apartment, let them rage on out there. Apparently they're also having all kinds of rallies and demonstrations, they're probably behaving like animals there, too, well, let them do it."

It started to get dark and suddenly there is noise, a howl, as though wild animals had burst into the courtyard. This was on the 28th, Sunday. Mamma and 1 went out onto the bal¬cony—I lived on the fifth floor—and looked down. We were gripped with terror. Our courtyard is gigantic, and it was entirely full. I don't know if there were a thousand of them or two thousand, but there were very many, just a terrific blackness, they were all wearing black. And they howled and shouted, "Death to the Armenians!" and "Armenians come out!" You could hear the breaking of glass on the second floor, Lusya lived there, an Armenian. Then there were blows on her door, heavy ones. We heard and saw all this and realized that our turn would come too.

There were three of us, Mamma, my son, Sasha Garakian, he's two, and I. When [ didn't agree to go to Mamma's place she said, "I'm not leaving you here alone. In that case I'm not going either. I'll stay here with you." We ran over to the neighbors' across from us. The neighbors next door, the Aliyevs, had gone downstairs. It all had a sort of recreational appeal for them. They were standing there, watching and laughing—they just found it interesting. But the other neighbors were at home, they opened the door. We didn't even ask if we could come in or not, we just raced into their apartment. But they immediately started chasing us out, pushing us from behind: Leave! A man lives there, his name is Alpasha, I don't know his last name, his wife's name. is Khajar, and his sister is Peri. And all three of them started pushing us from behind, wanting us to leave. "If they find out we're hiding Armenians it'll go badly for us, too. What are you upset about? Your people killed ours, violated them, and now it's your turn." I asked them—they had small chil¬dren, too, two small children—I said, "No one will know, take my child. I'll give you my sister's address, she lives in Abovian, send him to them if they kill us. They pushed the child right out after us.

We returned to my apartment and 1 could barely open the lock, my hand was shaking so. We shut the door behind us, and literally five minutes later they started to kick the door. I grabbed my child and ran into the bathroom. Of course I knew there was no hiding from them, but all the same ... I couldn't think of anything else to do. Mother held the door, they were bat¬tering it,and then—the neighbors' empty gas bottle was out there, and they Pounded the door with it, they rammed our door for about 20 minutes.

There were two strong locks on the door, they pounded on them, and my child got scared from the blows and began flinching. He practically jumped out of my arms with each blow, trembled and flinched, but didn't cry out and didn't cry, he only winced like that. When they broke through the locks, Mother began shouting so horribly that the child became petrified. They broke down the door and her legs gave way, she almost fell down, and she could hardly talk: she could barely get out, "Please, I beg of you" and some disjointed words. I was in the bathroom listening. She tried to say, "Kill me, don't harm the children," but nothing came out, something was holding her tongue. She told me about it later. Mother says that there were almost 40 of them, my two rooms were full. They burst in and turned everything upside down. Now I had been getting ready to move, and everything was already packed, only the television and the refrigerator were left, everything else, every last thing, was packed in boxes and crates. They found everything there: the money and the gold, they took all that, they turned everything inside out, they cleaned out all the suitcases and boxes. One of them stood next to my mother. Later he said he was a Lezgin. He told her, "Don't be afraid, Aunt, don't be afraid." And he told them, "OK, that's it, let's leave." And this is what happened to the rest of our entryway: they threw all the Armenians' things out the windows, smashed everything, stole everything of value, and wrecked and tossed out the rest. One person in the gang want¬ed to do the same thing in my place, he went out into the kitchen to smash the window, but the Lezgin told him, "Don't do it, come on, leave." Anyway, they took what they liked and left. Three people remained. When they had been ramming the door with the gas bottle they got their clothes smeared from the wall, and they went into the kitchen to clean them off. On their way back they opened the door to the bathroom. They saw that the child and I were in there, huddled in a corner. One went up to my child—"An Armenian puppy!"—but the Lezgin carelessly grabbed him by the collar: "OK," he said, "let's go, there's nothing left to do here." And those two left. The child was almost unconscious, he had a fever, he lay there in my arms and would wince every couple of minutes. The child was senseless. When they left, that fellow, he was around 25, said, "I am Lezgin by nationality. Those people told me that the Armenians were killing and raping our peo¬ple, and that they were going to do the same thing back. But everywhere we went," he said, "I tried to help the Armenians. They stole, and I told them take whatever you want, wreck everything, but don't kill. I did what I could to help. But where there were men there was nothing I could do. Where there were men they just tore them to pieces, they didn't spare anyone, espe¬cially where there were young men. It's a good thing," he went on, "that your brother or father weren't here."

It was a miracle that we survived. We quickly went down to the second floor. There were old people living down there, they beat them. I don't know their last name, but their first names were Lusya and Kommunar. They were going to burn their apartment. There was an Azerbaijani woman there the whole time. She seized the bottle of gasoline from them and said, "Spare me and my apartment. If there's a fire in here my place will go up too." She barely got the bottle away from them. They smashed and wrecked every¬thing there, and carried off the money and valuables. Everything was asun¬der in the apartment, and Lusya was in serious condition: she lay there, scarcely breathing, her legs had given way. She asked me to sweep up the shards because there were broken dishes all over the apartment—they had even smashed the chandelier to smithereens. I swept up and tried to put things in order a bit.

They beat the other Armenian neighbors from my entryway as well, Their close neighbor, also a Lezgin, by the way, rushed to their aid. They broke his arm. His wife ran in too, and they struck her, too. They broke down the door, but they continued to defend them. They wouldn't let them harm the children—there were children there. They took the children to their apartment. I think the Lezgin man's name is Abbas, and his wife is Zhenya. It's Zhenya for sure, and I think the man's name is Abbas. They said, "We'll get them out of here, just don't kill them." The mob agreed: "We'll be back to check. They better be out of here in 10 minutes." The neigh¬bor, the one they beat up, is an Armenian from Kirovabad. He had recently moved to Sumgait and worked at the military unit, he was a truck driver. His truck was parked right next to the building. He took his wife and chil¬dren—they have a three-month old infant, and the older child is two—and in that cold he quickly got them into the cab and drove off. So they left, but we don't know where they went or what came of them. He was afraid: everyone said that those hooligan gangs were everywhere, that they were stopping vehicles and slaying the passengers. We don't know if they are alive or dead, just that they left. His name was Edik.

The Aliyevs from my landing went to see all the atrocities, and came back laughing and telling how they were getting the Armenians, how they had burned three Ikarus buses at the station. The most brutal slaughters were at the bus station. The Aliyevs had been there, too. One of their relatives had accidentally gotten hit in the leg with a rock. That was when the soldiers were throwing rocks. He was limping and the Aliyevs were laughing: "Who cares about the soldiers? They came but didn't have orders to shoot, all of them were beaten with stones, they carried them off bloody in stretchers. So don't take heart, all the Armenians, all of them, will be killed all the same."

One of my friends lived near the bus station. I ran into her here, in Armenia. "Do you remember," she said, "the military people asked us to write about what we saw and put it in the boxes." Of course I saw those box¬es, I saw the faith in justice with which the people wrote. I also, by the way, wrote down what I had seen, but I didn't put the letter in the box, I gave it to the man from the Moscow KGB, and then only after he had showed me his identification. So my friend described how the soldiers had been beaten with stones. But the letter didn't go where she wanted it to. When they took her from Nasosny to her apartment to pick up essentials, two Azerbaijanis came by to see her, they were either from the investigative group or from the Procuracy. And she saw that one of them was holding her letter. They said, "You wrote that you saw the soldiers being hit with stones and being carried away bloody on stretchers, did you really see that? Why did you write something like that?" She said, "Here, look, the visibility from my window is very good, you could see everything: how they stopped the buses and took the Armenians off to the side and beat them. With my own eyes I saw them throwing stones at the soldiers from the roof, stones that had been specially brought in trucks. Many of the soldiers were wounded, and they were car¬ried off in stretchers, covered with blood." And those two told her, "What, only dead and injured people are carried on stretchers? Maybe the soldiers were just sick?" That's what they said to her . . .

On February 29 after all the shocks my mother and I wrapped up the child and somehow made it to her apartment downtown. It was evening, and we were walking, trembling with fear. We were afraid to go out in the daytime because that neighbor boy Mubaris Aliyev was outside shouting to the passersby: "Hey, are you an Armenian? You, are you an Armenian? Show me your passport!" When it got dark I saw that he had gone. We quiet¬ly went downstairs. Downtown there were tanks and troops—we were quite glad to see them, naturally—and police, and many military trucks. The cen¬ter of town was cordoned off. There were no longer any large gangs there, but they were carrying on in groups of 10 to 15 . I went onto the square and addressed one of the military men: "Can it really be that you came here and you can't put a stop to all this?!" He said, "We're doing everything possible, we're trying. But what can we do? Your leadership is responsible for all of it, all this was planned." That's just what he said. Well of course we had thought that it had been planned. It would have taken ten minutes to avert it. Apparently they didn't want to. And the First Secretary of the City Party Committee—everyone was talking about it—marched in front of the crowd along the embankment, he marched ahead of that wild mob for a long time. And it wasn't just a group of them, like it says in the papers. A group is 50 people, and on the afternoon of the 28th, I think it was, when they passed our building, I watched for a whole hour, and there was no end to them, they just kept coming and coming. It was an endless mob of howling ani¬mals ...

When we went to Mamma's, the child was still in serious condition, he needed urgent medical attention. We went to an old Russian woman, and she was able to get him over his terror, and wanted to give him shots. The shots were given by a neighbor, an Armenian. She was a midwife at the Maternity Home. She said that there had been an attempt to attack the Maternity Home, but the soldiers prevented it. She saw much with her own eyes: she saw a woman thrown off a balcony, and how they wrecked apart¬ments, she said they flung things out the windows, and whoever was down¬stairs snatched the suitcases and rugs and ran off.

As soon as my child was better I went outside. Despite the fact that there were troops there, things were still happening here and there. The military brought all the Armenians to the City Party Committee and the SK club. They recommended that people not stay in their homes. I went and sough the advice of an officer: "What should we do, we have a seriously ill child, he needs injections, and the needles have to be boiled, and there's no way we can do it in the club, they're on top of one another in there." He said, "No, go to the club." I said it was impossible. "The child will die there. If you can, try to stay near our building." And the military—the officer and a group of soldiers—spent the night on guard near our building. They even lit up all our entryways with searchlights, combed attics, and walked on the roofs all night. Because of the presence of the military, we were able to calm down. All the more so since earlier some minors, around 15 years old, had come up to our building asking where the Armenians lived, and our neighbor on the second floor in the first entryway, a musician, Suleymanov, I think his name is, gave us all away.

In the morning I went out for milk. Everyone in the city was panicked because the bandits had said, "If you don't withdraw the troops we will fin¬ish the Armenians and start on the Russians." All the Russian women were saying, "It's awful, now all those animals will be attacking us." Returning from the store I heard two respectable-looking men in their fifties discussing the events. I paused for a moment, not too far away. They were saying that everything had been done wrong: groups of a thousand had taken to the streets, and then the tanks came and ruined it all, and now they were going to catch everyone. They should have moved in groups of 10 to 15 , like guer¬rillas, and then they could have killed all of them. But this way, they said, they couldn't get rid of them all, there are still some left.

April 22,1988

Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

■ SUREN PARSEGOVICH OGANIAN

Born 1931

Retired Stonemason

Resident at Building 17, Apartment 74

Microdistrict No. 4

Sumgait

From 1948 until those days I lived in the city of Sumgait. I worked almost 40 years there ... I am going to tell what I saw. On the 27th my wife and I came home from our dacha, and we found our daughter and son-in-law waiting for us with their two children. They had come from Baku. We were glad to see them. We sat and talked awhile, and ate. Then my son-in-law went out onto the balcony to smoke and called me: "Pop, there's a crowd out here, I don't know what's happened." I go out to the balcony and look, and there are several hundred people walking in columns: "Down with the Armenians! If there are any brave Armenians, let them come out!" Well I say, "Fine, close the door, come back in, to Hell with them."

They spent the night with us, they were going to stay till Sunday, but then it all started. The neighbors came and said, "They're killing people, in Microdistrict 3 they've started killing people . . . they've stabbed so many, they've burned so many, they've ..." Everyone had their own story. And we . . . where were we to go? There was nowhere for us to go by then. We sat at home quaking.

We waited until it was evening, until eight o'clock, and saw that on the first floor—I live on the third floor—on the first floor at Rafik Bagdasarian's apartment they'd broken all the windows and carried their belongings out¬side. It was a nice apartment, his son was supposed to be married, not that day, the next. And everything that had been bought for the wedding, they took it all, and they threw the rug and their clothing into the courtyard, right under our balcony. We saw them set fire to it. Well at that point it seemed they were leaving. They were leaving and then someone from the other side yells, "Hey, where are you going, come back, they say there are still some more Armenians here, on the third floor!" That was our apartment.

They're pelting our windows, the rocks are flying, really big ones, and they're flying right into the apartment. A couple of minutes later the door¬bell rings and there are knocks at the door, and the children are already screaming and crying, my grandsons are small . . . My daughter, her hus¬band and two children, my wife, and I are at home. I tell my son-in-law: "Garik, don't be afraid, nothing will happen," and I tell my wife, daughter, and the kids, "Go in that room!" I had an axe in my hands. I was in a hope¬less situation. They're pounding on the door, but we didn't open it, so they started breaking it down. They start breaking it down and my son-in-law, my wife, and I are holding the door, and my daughter is begging them, "Please, I have two small children, don't break it down, don't kill us!" She is begging. I say, "Listen, get away from here, those jackals won't listen to you, and you're getting in our way! Go into the other room, maybe we can defend ourselves." She doesn't obey me. She doesn't do what I tell her, and by then one side of the door is broken and they hit her on the bridge of the nose. With a big crowbar. Her face becomes all bloody . . . and I pushed her forcefully into the other room. By now the door is completely broken down. No sooner is the door down than I wind back with the axe and they flew out of there like bullets, they all ran away ...

If I had wanted to I could have hit them. But if I had hit them they would have burned all my children, those creeps. They ran away, and I chased them down two flights of stairs. There were so many of them that they couldn't all get down the stairs, they got in each other's way, and five of them went up to the fifth floor, they ran upstairs. Our neighbor's son made them go back down, led them past our door. And down in the courtyard they were talking about coming back again. They had a leader, he said, "What's the matter, why didn't you get them, why didn't you kill them?!" This our neighbors told us later, I didn't hear it myself. They were going to come back again, and our neighbor told them, "Listen, don't go up there, he's a hunter, he's got a rifle, he'll kill every last one of you if you go back up there." I didn't have any rifle. Our neighbor was just helping us, he saved us. They didn't come back up, they left. Here I'm telling you this and I myself can't believe that my son-in-law and I drove them off. I can't believe it myself, but apparently there is a God, and He helped us. So that's how my son-in-law and I saved our family. We somehow fastened the door and went to our neighbors'. My daughter and her children spent the night on the fifth floor, and my wife, my son-in-law and I stayed on the second.

The next day my son-in-law was going to Baku. He told me, "I've got the key to the workshop." He's a tailor, or was, rather. I say, "There's no need to go, the situation is bad, don't go." He says, "Pop, I promised, I need to make some fillets, I have to go." Anyway, he got to Baku fine, and that same day he made the fillets for the patrolmen, and set back out for Sumgait. He told his father, "Papa, I'm going to Sumgait, to my children." But his father knew everything, Garik had told him. His father says, "No, if the situation's like that, don't go." This was on the 29th. His father wouldn't let him go, he even hid his shoes so he wouldn't go to Sumgait. And he asked his father, "Father, I told you the situation yesterday, if we had been in the same situation, would you really have left us?" He said that, took his brother's shoes, and went out. At five in the evening he was on the road to Sumgait...

Meanwhile, we had been evacuated to the Metallurg Boarding House and thought that Garik was safe.

My daughter's face was beaten, the bruise won't go away. The doctors came and said, "What help do you need? You don't need any help." I got mad, I was a little rude to them, it's true, I said, "For four days you've been saying 'What help do you need?', 'What help do you need?', what's the Point?" We stayed at the City Executive Committee for 24 hours, they asked it there, and on the fourth day at Metallurg they came again and asked the same thing. I lost my temper: "Just what help are you? I'm the father, I'm concerned, maybe there's a fracture; take an x-ray." They started to calm me down, they called an ambulance from Baku to take her to the hospital. I say, "My daughter, my daughter, since you're going, take the children with you, they say it's quiet in Baku. Take the children. If Garik is there, stay there, but if he's not, come back." She took the children with her. They took an x-ray in Baku, the bridge of her nose was fractured, it was a small one, but all the same there was a fracture.

They put a bandage on her and some two hours later we see her coming back to the Metallurg with the children. Garik's not at home! She came in crying, "Papa, Garik's not at home." I went to the authorities and told them what had happened. They sent me off with a police major and I spent two days going to every hospital in Baku, I didn't sleep for two days, and at the end I went to one of the morgues, and all the dead from Sumgait were there. I go in and see Garik's sister coming out of the mortuary. Her name is Karine. I say, "Karine jan, is Garik there?" Crying, she says, "Uncle Suren, he's not there." I say, "What, aren't you glad he's not there, what are you cry¬ing for?" It turned out later that he was there, she hadn't recognized her brother because he was completely burned . . . she didn't even recognize her own brother. Well, if he wasn't there, he wasn't there, and so I didn't go in.

I returned to Sumgait. There's a military unit in Nasosny where all the Armenians were. I checked all the lists, thinking maybe I'd find him, and went to the SK club and looked there, I looked at the Khimik, at the DOSAAF ... I looked everywhere and he just wasn't to be found.

The next, day, in the morning, that was March 7, Fataliyev summoned me—I don't know what his job was, but he was in charge where we were—and he says, "Suren-kishi [form of address], we found your son-in-law, it's true, he's dead." In Sumgait there are railroad tracks going to the BTZ plant, and there, near the overpass of the road to Baku, there are rushes there, it's about five hundred yards from the Sumgait bus station. "In those rushes," he said, "they found your son-in-law, he'll be buried on the 9th, you can go to the burial."

I took my daughter and went. . . On the 9th we got him and buried him in Baku, in Ermenikend, there's a cemetery there. We observed the yotnoriak [seventh day requiem] and came here, to Yerevan, as fast as we could.

I was summoned to the Sumgait Procuracy, and the investigator was a Russian. There I found out what had happened. The bus had come from Baku and was driving into Sumgait. The bus was stopped. They let the Azerbaijanis out of the bus one by one. They got Garik out of the bus and killed him and burned him. My son-in-law's name was Garry Artemovich Martirosov. He was born in 1955.

Two children now have no father. A girl and a boy. The girl is five years old, and the boy is two. Without a father.

April 21,1988

Yerevan

Ссылка на комментарий
Поделиться на других сайтах

Гость
Эта тема закрыта для дальнейших сообщений.

  • Наш выбор

    • Ани - город 1001 церкви
      Самая красивая, самая роскошная, самая богатая… Такими словами можно характеризовать жемчужину Востока - город АНИ, который долгие годы приковывал к себе внимание, благодаря исключительной красоте и величию. Даже сейчас, когда от города остались только руины, он продолжает вызывать восхищение.
      Город Ани расположен на высоком берегу одного из притоков реки Ахурян.
       

       
       
      • 4 ответа
    • В БЕРЛИНЕ БОЛЬШЕ НЕТ АЗЕРБАЙДЖАНА
      Конец азербайджанской истории в Университете им. Гумбольдта: Совет студентов резко раскритиковал кафедру, финансируемую режимом. Кафедра, финансируемая со стороны, будет ликвидирована.
      • 1 ответ
    • Фильм: "Арцах непокорённый. Дадиванк"  Автор фильма, Виктор Коноплёв
      Фильм: "Арцах непокорённый. Дадиванк"
      Автор фильма Виктор Коноплёв.
        • Like
      • 0 ответов
    • В Риме изберут Патриарха Армянской Католической церкви
      В сентябре в Риме пройдет епископальное собрание, в рамках которого планируется избрание Патриарха Армянской Католической церкви.
       
      Об этом сообщает VaticanNews.
       
      Ранее, 22 июня, попытка избрать патриарха провалилась, поскольку ни один из кандидатов не смог набрать две трети голосов, а это одно из требований, избирательного синодального устава восточных церквей.

       
      Отмечается, что новый патриарх заменит Григора Петроса, который скончался в мае 2021 года. С этой целью в Рим приглашены епископы Армянской Католической церкви, служащие в епархиях различных городов мира.
       
      Епископы соберутся в Лионской духовной семинарии в Риме. Выборы начнутся под руководством кардинала Леонардо Сантри 22 сентября.
       
      • 0 ответов
    • History of Modern Iran
      Решил познакомить вас, с интересными материалами специалиста по истории Ирана.
      Уверен, найдете очень много интересного.
       
      Edward Abrahamian, "History of Modern Iran". 
      "В XIX веке европейцы часто описывали Каджарских шахов как типичных "восточных деспотов". Однако на самом деле их деспотизм существовал лишь в виртуальной реальности. 
      Власть шаха была крайне ограниченной из-за отсутствия государственной бюрократии и регулярной армии. Его реальная власть не простиралась далее столицы. Более того, его авторитет практически ничего не значил на местном уровне, пока не получал поддержку региональных вельмож
      • 4 ответа
  • Сейчас в сети   9 пользователей, 0 анонимных, 535 гостей (Полный список)

  • День рождения сегодня

  • Сейчас в сети

    536 гостей
    Rubik Дрейфус_ Колючка Анчара ст. л-т RDR luc Good Boy stephanie S Левон Казарян
  • Сейчас на странице

    Нет пользователей, просматривающих эту страницу.

  • Сейчас на странице

    • Нет пользователей, просматривающих эту страницу.


×
×
  • Создать...