arthur

по дороге на работу заметил в одном из магазинов украшенную новогоднюю елку... подумал "опять новый год, яхххкккк!!!" замечу что говорят что в год свиньи нельзя чтобы на столе была свинина (буд, хряк, поросенок) - типа свинья обидется .. замечу что ежели следовать этому,то հայերը թքեցին փայտիկին

форумские разборки - это виртуальный секс, так что с сексом у нас все в порядке

ГЕРОЙ С "АНТИОБЩЕСТВЕННЫМ РАССТРОЙСТВОМ ЛИЧНОСТИ" "Голос Армении" "Я хочу, чтобы иракский народ знал, что я не для того пришел сюда, дабы совершить те ужасные дела, которые сделал", - заявил на суде в Форт-Кэмпбелле, Кентукки, 23-летний Джеймс Баркер, приговоренный к 90 годам тюремного заключения за участие в изнасиловании и убийстве 14-летней Абир Касим аль Джанаби, а также за убийство ее родителей и 6-летней сестры в иракской деревушке Махмудия. Джеймсу Баркеру вместе с четырьмя другими американскими солдатами - участниками этой кровавой бойни, грозила смертная казнь, однако он согласился сотрудничать с правоохранительными органами, и мера наказания была изменена. После того как он отсидит 20 лет в тюрьме, мера наказания может быть изменена вновь. Другие участники этой трагедии - 24-летний Паул Кортез и 22-летний Джесси Спилман - предстанут перед судом в декабре этого года. С 19-летнего Брайанса Ховарда взята подписка о невыезде, его дело рассматривалось в октябре, после чего он подал прошение о помиловании. Им троим в случае вынесения обвинительного приговора также грозит смертная казнь. Но есть еще один участник, а вернее, главное действующее лицо этого преступления, которому неделю назад удалось избежать обвинений в совершении вышеуказанных преступлений. О нем чуть позже, а пока расскажем, что же случилось в тот мартовский день в иракской деревушке Махмудия. Согласно официальным показаниям, все пятеро солдат относились к 101-й авиационной дивизии, дислоцированной в Форт-Кэмпбелле. Они были посланы на патрулирование к юго-западу от Багдада - к месту, получившему за постоянные бомбардировки название "треугольник смерти". По свидетельству военных, примерно 40% проходящих там службу солдат имеют какие-либо психические или эмоциональные отклонения. В тот день пятеро названных солдат неподалеку от своего поста увидели 14-летнюю иракскую девушку, которую стали преследовать. Дойдя до ее дома, они ворвались в него, а Стивен Грин (так зовут главного участника бойни) загнал в ванную родителей девушки и ее 6-летнюю сестру, после чего изнутри раздались выстрелы. Затем он вместе с Баркером и Кортезом совершили насилие над девушкой, и тот же Грин застрелил и ее, а позже сжег тело, дабы скрыть следы учиненных зверств. Спилман и Ховард, по показаниям Джеймса Баркера, не принимали участия ни в изнасиловании, ни в убийстве, однако Спилман в момент преступления находился в доме несчастной семьи и видел, что там происходило. Затем все пятеро возвращаются в часть, а Стивен Грин через некоторое время демобилизуется из армии по состоянию здоровья - с диагнозом "антиобщественное расстройство личности". Теперь подробнее об этом "герое". Родом из западного Техаса, между прочим, родины президента США Джорджа Буша и его жены Лоры, Стивен рос в так называемой неблагополучной семье. Родители его развелись, когда ему было 4 года, затем мать вышла замуж вторично. В поисках счастья он оказался в Денвер Сити, где с трудом окончил в 2003 году двенадцатилетку. 31 января 2005 года Стивен Грин был арестован за "совершение проступка под воздействием алкоголя" (какой именно проступок он совершил тогда - неизвестно). Тем не менее небольшое криминальное пятно в биографии не помешало ему буквально через несколько месяцев записаться в ряды американской армии. В сентябре 2005 года он был послан в Ирак. Спросите, какая может быть военная подготовка у солдата, попавшего с корабля на бал, точнее с параши в окопы, да при этом имеющего заметные психические проблемы? Ведь для того чтобы демобилизовать солдата с диагнозом "антиобщественное расстройство личности", нужно подтверждение психиатром наличия серьезных психических проблем, ставящих под угрозу функционирование личности в военных условиях. Причем эта болезнь имеет хронический характер, т. е. она не могла внезапно возникнуть за семь месяцев пребывания Грина в Ираке. Ее проявлениями считаются частые нарушения законов, агрессивность, лживость, отсутствие чувства раскаяния. Все указанные определения "болезни" настолько расплывчаты, что под них при желании можно подвести любого убийцу. Почему же "болезнь" не помешала Грину вступить в ряды авиационной дивизии, но помогает ему избежать суда? Ведь обвинители должны еще решить: выносить ему смертный приговор или нет? И если бесчинства Грина его адвокаты стараются списать на "болезнь", то у Джеймса Баркера никакого эпикриза не было. И вот что он заявил на суде: "Чтобы жить там (в Ираке) и выжить, я стал злым и подлым. Подлая часть во мне сделала меня сильнее во время патрулей, храбрым в бою. Я любил моих товарищей, моих командиров. Но я стал ненавидеть всех остальных в Ираке". Кстати, американское высшее военное командование во главе с генералом Джоном Абизаидом заявило, что вывод войск США из Ирака, как того требуют демократы, не представляется целесообразным, так как может увеличить эскалацию насилия в регионе и сведет на нет усилия иракского правительства соблюсти мир в стране. Более того, генерал Абизаид подчеркнул, что американские войска надо не выводить, а наоборот, увеличить их число для лучшей подготовки иракской армии.

вы забыли один маленький но очень и очень важный момент: Азербайджан это не Канада, и азербайджанцы тоже далеко не канадцы.

"Динамо" (Киев) и ЦСКА (София) нацелились на Артавазда Карамяна Софийский ЦСКА рассматривает возможность приобретения полузащитника сборной Армении Артавазда Карамяна, который выступает за бухарестский "Рапид". Как сообщает Gazeta Sporturilor, на матче группового турнира Кубка УЕФА "Рапид" - "Млада Болеслав" (1:1) присутствовал тренер ЦСКА Пламен Марков, специально приехавший в Бухарест понаблюдать за игрой Карамяна. Контракт Карамяна с "Рапидом" истекает в декабре. 27-летний игрок уже известил руководство "Рапида", что, если ему не будет повышена зарплата, он покинет команду. В то же время, еще одним претендентом на Карамяна является киевское "Динамо". "Киевляне давно интересуются мной, и, когда представилась возможность, я побеседовал с президентом "Динамо" Игорем Суркисом", - рассказал Карамян. Встреча состоялась в Бухаресте, где "Динамо" играло со "Стяуа" в Лиге чемпионов. При этом Карамян добавил, что никаких договоренностей пока не достигнуто, но не исключил возможности перехода. Об этом сообщает "Спорт-Экспресс". Постоянный адрес новости: www.regnum.ru/news/745208.html

а мне вот это понравилось в исполнении арбузного юзера Durna:

В Европе резко подешевели наркотики Резкое снижение цен на героин в 1999-2004 годах вызвано, в первую очередь, падением в Афганистане движения "Талибан", после чего начался рост объемов производства наркотиков Поставки героина намного превысили спрос на наркотик, спровоцировав при этом резкий рост числа наркоманов В Европе как никогда подешевели наркотики. Согласно пятилетнему анализу цен на наркотики, опубликованному в ежегодном докладе лиссабонского агентства, цены на героин упали на 45%, на кокаин - на 22%, сообщает агентство Reuters. Резкое снижение цен на героин в 1999-2004 годах вызвано, в первую очередь, падением в Афганистане движения "Талибан", после чего начался рост объемов производства наркотиков. Поставки героина намного превысили спрос на наркотик, спровоцировав при этом резкий рост числа наркоманов. На Афганистан приходится приблизительно 90% мирового производства опиума - сырья для изготовления героина. Его объемы сильно увеличились после того, как вторжение, возглавляемое США, свергло правительство исламистского "Талибана" в 2001 году. "Афганистан - ключевой игрок в глобальном процессе производства героина, и события в стране могут оказать значительное влияние на ситуацию с наркотиками, с которой Европа столкнется в ближайшем будущем", - сообщил директор Европейского центра мониторинга наркотиков и наркомании (EMCDDA) Волфганг Гоц. В 2004 году было конфисковано рекордное количество наркотиков в Европе, 19 тонн, на 10% больше, чем 2003 году, говориться в докладе. "Мы не можем игнорировать растущий избыток героина на мировых рынках наркотиков", заявил Гоц. В докладе также сообщается, что конкретных данных по поводу цен на наркотики на улицах нет, однако неофициальная информация позволяет сделать вывод, что наркотики сейчас дешевле, чем в 1980-х. Цена - один из многих факторов, которые побуждают людей употреблять наркотики, поэтому сложно выделить какую-либо одну причину, толкающую людей к наркомании, говориться в сообщении. "Тем не менее, нас не может не волновать, что в Европе наркотики становятся все более дешевыми", - заявил председатель EMCDDA Маркэль Реимен. "Если это означает, что люди из "группы риска" будут употреблять больше наркотиков, цена такого роста наркомании для системы здравоохранения и европейского сообщества в целом будет весьма значительной", - сказал он. Цены на наркотики до сих пор значительно варьируются в зависимости от страны: так цена на грамм марихуаны в Португалии составляет 2,3 евро, а в Норвегии 12 евро. В Турции грамм героина можно приобрести за 12 евро, а в Швеции он же будет стоить 141 евро. newsru.com

не верится.

■ 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

■ 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

■ 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

ребят, давайте Равен украдем B) хорошая девочка B)

а это случайно не великий азербайджанский публицст и просветитель Эльчин Гасанов там глаголет?

азербайджанцы... в течение многих сотен лет..... ба..... убили... Спасибо КПСС...

Мария Шарапова во время итогового турнира WTA в Мадриде догнала и обезвредила грабителя Во время итогового турнира Женской теннисной ассоциации в Испании Мария Шарапова решила посетить мадридское кафе Starbucks. Уже находясь в заведении, теннисистка заметила, что к ней направляются несколько тинейджеров. В руках они держали газеты. Шарапова подумала, что это ее поклонники, желающие взять автограф. Но тут спортсменка попала под "разводку". Один из ребят, приблизившись к ней, одной рукой накрыл газетой ее мобильный телефон, лежавший на столе, и незаметно второй рукой забрал его, пишет "Комсомольская правда". Но Мария Шарапова не пожелала расстаться со своим средством связи и решила вернуть, принадлежащее ей имущество. Спортсменка бросилась вдогонку и с помощью одного из сотрудников Starbucks вернула телефон. Как позднее рассказала сама Шарапова, обескураженные воры, в конце концов, признались: "Мы знаем, кто ты! Ты... Шерлок Холмс!". Обращаться в полицию Шарапова не стала. Отметим, что в Европе очень распространен подобный вид краж мобильных телефонов. Когда вы, расположившись за столиком в уличном кафе, кладете свой телефон или бумажник на стол, к вам могут подойти двое или трое человек с просьбой объяснить им, как лучше пройти туда-то, или где находится какое-то место. Когда вы поднимаете на них глаза, один из них либо кладет на ваш столик газету или карту, либо сует эту карту вам под нос, чтобы вы не видели, что происходит дальше. А дальше воры спокойно забирают то, что вы положили на столик и, говоря вам большое спасибо за помощь, удаляются. Обычно пропажа обнаруживается спустя пару минут, этого времени вполне достаточно, чтобы раствориться в толпе. Напомним, Мария Шарапова в Мадриде не смогла выйти в финал итогового теннисного турнира Женской теннисной ассоциации WTA. На полуфинальной стадии она уступила бельгийке Жюстин Энен-Арден. Таким образом, Шарапова упустила возможность не только выиграть итоговый турнир, но и стать по результатам сезона первой ракеткой мира. newsru.com

В Турции завершились съемки документального фильма "Армянская проблема глазами истории" Турецкий телеканал TRT завершил двухлетнюю съемку документального фильма "Армянская проблема глазами истории". Как передает агентство "Тренд", съемочные группы телеканала провели встречи со 172 экспертами и учеными Азербайджана, Армении, России и США. Режиссер фильма Зейнеб Гюрлу Кечеджилер отметила, что сделала все возможное для объективного отражения событий и фактов начала 20-го века. Постоянный адрес новости: www.regnum.ru/news/738310.html ************************ интересно было бы посмотреть этот фильм, правда не совсем понятно каким боком ученые из Азербайджана тут примазаны...

аряя фанки ты что в гонконгах делаешь? )))

Победившие на выборах в США демократы потребовали вывода американских войск из Ирака Лидеры Демократической партии США, победившей на выборах, обратились с требованием к администрации президента Джорджа Буша начать вывод войск из Ирака в течение четырех-шести месяцев. В интервью еженедельнику Time лидер демократической фракции в палате представителей Конгресса США Нэнси Пелоси, которая вскоре станет спикером палаты представителей и третьим человеком в государственной иерархии США, заявила, что Американские войска в Ираке воспринимаются как оккупационные. "Наше присутствие там служит магнитом для террористов", - подчеркнула она. Пелоси выразила надежду, что по меньшей мере 30 тысяч американских военнослужащих будут выведены из Ирака до осени следующего года. Сенатор-демократ Карл Левин заявил в интервью телекомпании АВС, что "самой безотлагательной задачей" США после победы демократов на недавних промежуточных выборах в Конгресс "является изменение политики в Ираке", передает ИТАР-ТАСС. Другой сенатор - Джозеф Байден, которого считают одним из вероятных кандидатов на пост президента США от Демократической партии на выборах 2008 года, поддержал это требование своего коллеги. Однако руководитель аппарата сотрудников Белого дома Джошуа Болтен заявил в телеинтервью, что "установление даты выхода из Ирака означало бы настоящую катастрофу для иракского народа". Между тем накануне стало известно, что оборонное ведомство Великобритании активно готовит план "внезапного вывода" британского контингента из Ирака. По данным газеты Sunday Express, в результате операции в "стиле эвакуации войск в 1940 году из Дюнкерка во время второй мировой войны" британские военнослужащие могут возвратиться домой гораздо раньше, чем ожидалось. К разработке плана Лондон, как отмечает Sunday Express, подтолкнули политические события в США, которые неизбежно будут оказывать воздействие на принятие решений в Великобритании. По свидетельству информированных военных источников, в соответствии с подобными планами для эвакуации 8 тыс. британских военнослужащих предполагается арендовать гражданские самолеты, а также привлекать плавсредства. "При этом приоритет будет естественно отдаваться людям и лишь затем будут вывозиться вооружения", - отмечают они. Аналитики не исключают, что в случае внезапного ухода из Ирака британцы вынуждены будут оставить в этой стране военного снаряжения и боевой техники почти на миллиард долларов. newsru.com

Китайская подлодка незаметно подкралась к американскому авианосцу на расстояние выстрела По данным министерства обороны США, в прошлом месяце китайская дизельная ударная подлодка класса Song ("Сун") незаметно следила за авианосцем Kitty Hawk и 26 октября всплыла на расстоянии пяти миль от него, то есть в пределах досягаемости ее ракет и торпед. Всплывшая субмарина была обнаружена в ходе штатного полета одним из самолетов авианосной группы, которая включает ударную подводную лодку и противолодочные вертолеты, которые призваны защищать военные корабли от подводного нападения, пишет The Washington Times. Представители министерства говорят, что китайская субмарина оборудована российскими торпедами, которые наводятся на кильватер корабля, а также могут поражать корабли крылатыми ракетами. Kitty Hawk и несколько других военных кораблей в тот момент находились в районе Окинавы в рамках стандартной осенней программы развертывания. Американские чиновники говорят, что китайские субмарины редко действуют в глубоководных районах вдали от китайских берегов и редко следят за американскими судами. Представитель Командования вооруженных сил в зоне Тихого океана отказался комментировать инцидент, заявив, что подробности засекречены. Представители Пентагона также отказались комментировать произошедшее. "Это говорит о том, что Китай будет более резко реагировать на военное присутствие Америки в Восточной Азии", - полагает Ричард Фишер, военный специалист по Китаю Международного центра оценки и стратегии. Он назвал данный инцидент тревожным. "Учитывая большую дальность новых китайских противокорабельных ракет с подводным запуском, купленных у России, этот инцидент очень серьезен", - сказал он. "Вероятно, это случится вновь, хотя бы потому, что капитаны 40-50 новых современных подводных лодок, поступающих к ним на вооружение, захотят показать зубы 7-му Флоту США". Разведка Пентагона сообщает, что в последние годы Китай произвел большое количество субмарин и кораблей, стремясь контролировать международные воды в Азии. В 2002-2005 годах Китай построил 14 новых субмарин, включая новые лодки класса "Сун" и других типов, как дизельных, так и атомных. Начиная с 1996, когда Соединенные Штаты направили две боевые авианосные группы в воды Тайваня в качестве демонстрации силы, Пекин также закупает и создает оружие, разработанное специально для поражения американских авианосцев и других военных кораблей. ссылка