arthur

очередная глупость и попытка получить дивиденты. самолет разбился в ночь на 3-е мая, а не первого.

Попрошу всех воздержаться от взаимных уколов и придерживаться темы.

я тоже

Номера телефонов "горячих линий" авиакомпания "Армавиа" В Ереване: (+37 410) 28-63-56 Из России надо звонить: 8 гудок (10 37 410) 28-63-56 В Сочи: (+7 8622) 44-00-88 и 44-12-32 В Москве: (+7 495) 624-37-45 Пресс-служба в Москве: (+7 495) 624 37 45

- VALENTINA (VALYA) GEORGIYEVNA SHAGAIANTS Born 1962 Chief Clerk Sales Department Sumgait Electric Grid Administration Resident at Building 5/2, Apartment 45 Microdistrict No. 3, Sumgait It's been five months since we left our city, Sumgait, and fled for Armenia. We lost our mother, my mother-in-law. Time hasn't softened any of it in my memory. We passed between life and death and were saved only by a miracle. It happened on February 28, a Sunday. In the morning we saw them putting up a tent. Our neighbor, Rima Khalafian, was observing her hus¬band's karasunk. People got together about noon in order to go to the ceme¬tery, and mother—actually, my mother-in-law, but I call her my mother—was with them. Aunt Rima had summoned the police because she was afraid: there had been unrest in town on the 27th, and she feared for the safety of her guests. She asked the policemen, there were five of them, to accompany them to the cemetery. Around 12:30 they all left on a bus. Three policemen went with them, and two stayed. Not a half-hour goes by, and they come back. I'm surprised. I think. Why are they back so soon? Apparently the situation in town was awful. They come back, wash their hands in the courtyard according to Armenian custom, and sit down at the tables under the tent. Almost immediately the tent is surrounded by bandits, barbarians ... I don't know what else to call them. A large crowd, some 150 to 200, if not more. We're standing on the balcony watching. They were armed with knives, armature shafts, truncheons, each one had something different. There were even 10-to 12-year-old children among them, walking with the crowd, some out of curiosity, others, to show where the Armenians live. There were children like that in town, too, pointing out, there's an Armenian car, there's an Armenian motorcycle. When the bandits had surrounded the tent, the police came up to them, one from the right and one from the left, told them something, and they dis¬persed. But later they would come back. A policeman goes into the tent and says, "If you can, clear out the tent, we can't stop the crowd, and it'll be back here soon." We see and hear all this from the balcony, from the fourth floor. Suddenly I see people gathering up all the hors d'oeuvres, the vodka bottles, everything on the tables. Only the tables and chairs are left, the ones Aunt Rima rented. When the people came back from the cemetery, my mother immediately came back upstairs. I asked, "Why didn't you sit at the table?" She says, "Shouldn't I be ashamed to do that? I went to the cemetery out of respect, but I was uncomfortable." She was such a modest woman, she was always too shy to go anywhere. She was a very good woman. So here she's come home . . . even now I can't forgive myself for letting her die with an empty stomach ... I even have dreams about it; she says, "They're taking my clothes off, I'm going outside naked, and I keep eating a piece of bread, I'm eating and eating, walking with this piece of bread ..." She and I are standing on the balcony, looking. And now they're pouring into our courtyard again. The guests have already run off to their homes, and the Khalafians are hiding in their apartment. The crowd swoops down and gets ready to burn the tent. They have something in bottles, oil or gaso¬line, and the tent immediately bursts into flame. It's terrible to watch, and we're looking and thinking that they don't know that we're Armenians, and aren't touching us. Who would have thought it? All the neighbors are watching from their balconies, we aren't the only ones. At that point it had not occurred to us that they might actually go into the apartments. Then they throw a motorcycle into the fire, and poured oil or gas on it for good measure, and it creates thick smoke. My father-in-law says, "Are we not under Soviet rule any longer? Are they just going to come into our homes?" I say, "Father, you see that even if you threw a needle from here it would hit someone on the head, there are so many people down there ..." When they were burning the tent and the motorcycle I noticed two or three Russian fel¬lows in the crowd of Azerbaijanis. I'm one hundred percent sure of this, I saw their faces. They were even shouting along with all the rest. The crowd was shouting, "If there are any Armenians here, come out! We're going to kill you!" They were swearing and cursing. And then, like flies, they fly into the entryway and immediately start pounding on Aunt Lena's door. Aunt Lena Avanesian lives under us, in Apartment 42. We can hear them breaking the buffet, smashing glass. The Avanesians took the first blow. It seems to me that Zhanna, the Avanesians' daughter, is shouting something from the window, sharply, indignantly. Later Aunt Lena said, "It was your tongue that did it all, you said something to them and they came up to our apart¬ment." But that was before the attack, when Nelly, my brother-in-law's wife, and I went out on the balcony, with the Azerbaijanis in the courtyard look-ing up at us with angry eyes. They knew that we were Armenians, even the policemen looked at us askance, with suspicion. And more: when the people were at the cemetery, Nelly's earring fell out, her child knocked it out unin¬tentionally. She went down after it and heard some guy in the entryway say-ing, "Look, she's an Armenian too." Nelly ran to the first floor neighbors, to Aunt Rima. She called us. Geros, my husband, answered the phone. She asked him to come down and get her, saying she was afraid of those Azerbaijani guys. So the Avanesians received the first blow. There were four of them: hus¬band, wife, and two children. Uncle Sasha is around fifty. Everyone calls his wife Lena, but her real name is something else, something pure Armenian. Her older daughter is named Marina, but we call her Ira, we've called her that since she was a girl. She's 24, and Zhanna is 22. We hear breaking dish¬es, shouts, and our apartment is simply shaking. My mother-in-law and I run out onto the balcony. She's also afraid for her younger son, his name is Engels. Not long before he had called to say he was on his way, bringing some glue. Aunt Maria, my father-in-law's sister, was over visiting; we had bought her some wallpaper, she had come from Kirovabad for two or three days. We were worried about Engels, since they had beaten a man right behind our building. They had truncheons, an armature shaft, and at the time it seemed to us that he had been beaten to death. A strange man of about forty years old. Engels told us later that the man did survive. They beat him right next to the hospital; it's right across the street from us, on Lermontov Street. It was a good thing that Engels didn't come right then. His wife wouldn't let him come, she said, we'll both go over there together tomorrow. And Mamma kept crying, "Oh, my son's on his way right now, they'll kill him, right out there on the street." We're standing on the balcony,. there's a pogrom going on one floor down, and right then Ira Avanesian pops out onto her balcony. She's got a knife in her hand, she's ragged, tat¬tered. "Don't come near me," she's shouting, "don't come near me!" We see this from up where we are; it looks like she's been in a fight, she's all ragged. And people are looking from the street, like in a movie, and no one says, "What are you doing, aren't you ashamed? Have you no conscience?" There are women and children standing there. It was just like a movie. As soon as we see Ira we run in the house instantly. We don't know what happened to her. We find this out later, when we all turn up at the neighbor's on the sec¬ond floor. Well, we go inside, and Aunt Lena knocks at the door: "Valya! Call an ambulance! Sasha's been stabbed!" We shut off the lights, everyone hides and we don't know, should we answer or not. Everyone feared for them¬selves. At that moment everyone was thinking about themselves and their families. I go out into the hall; I don't open the door, it's true. I say, "Aunt Lena, all three of the door locks are locked. We called an ambulance and we called the police, and they said, 'Were coming, we're coming,' but no one has come, what should we do?" Well, she goes back downstairs. They beat her, too, as we found out later. There are ten of us in the apartment: Cherkez Grigorian, my father-in-law; his wife, Emma Grigorian; Geros, their son and my husband; me; our children, Kristina and Erik, Krishna's six years old, and Erik is four; Aunt Maria, who was visiting, she's my father-in-law's sister; and Nelly, my sister-in-law, my husband's brother Misha's wife, they live in Stavropol Territory—Misha brought them and left them, then he went home—their children, Artur, who's just four, and Suzanna, she had her first birthday on February 1. Exactly ten people, and only two of them are men. They stay out in the foyer, armed with an axe, a hammer, and a boot hook. Small tables, the couch, and a wardrobe have been pushed up against the door. And we four women and four children are hiding in the far room, in the bedroom. My mother-in-law and Aunt Maria are hiding under the bed. Aunt Maria picks up the bed a little and my mother starts to cry, "Maria, Maria, quick! Quick!" If she had not hidden under the bed, maybe all of us would have been saved . . . We have a large, good pantry in the bedroom, we stored things in there, like work clothes. Nelly and her two kids and my Kristina slip in there. Erik and I hide in the armoire and pull clothes over us. We give the children each a piece of bread. "Quiet!" we threaten, crying ourselves, "Quiet!" Suzanna is only a year old, she is capricious, all the more so since we haven't eaten. There is a pot going on the stove, Mother was making lunch, she had just put some water on ... We should have poured that boil¬ing water off the balcony right onto their heads, but we feared for the chil¬dren. If it had only been possible to defend ourselves . . . But they would have killed us all. That's why Geros and his father couldn't even resist when they broke down the door. So we're hiding, and 1 hear them breaking down the door. It's like they took a log and are beating the door with it with all their might. Geros cries out, "Papa, hold it, hold it!" His entire back was covered with bruises; he held the door with his back. The mob breaks down the door and races into the apartment, immediately filling two rooms. As we found out later, at this point Aunt Maria couldn't stand it any longer, she threw herself out from under the bed and went to them, to her brother, he's her only brother, and wanted to protect him and Geros. I hear a woman's voice, and I think there is a woman in the mob. Aunt Maria is saying, "What have we done to you? I just came here from Kirovabad . . . don't touch my brother . . . I've worked with Azerbaijanis my whole life ..." She starts pleading with them in Azerbaijani. They say, "No, we have to kill you." They are stabbing her hus¬band, and Aunt Maria is covering him with her hands, and gets stabbed in the arm. It's Geros they're trying to kill. And Papa is saying, "Do what you want with us, but leave the children alone." I am able to make this out. Then Geros runs into our bedroom and closes the door and latches it. They start to break down the door to the bedroom. I can't hear Father and Aunt Maria any longer, and realize that either they have been taken away or that some¬thing has happened to them. We sit there, barely breathing, and hear shout¬ing: "Open up! Open the door! We won't hurt you!" Geros answers that he is afraid to open the door, there are women and children in here. When they say that they won't touch the children, I decide to go out. I think, it's better that I go out than if they smash open the armoire and find me in there. And Nelly, too, I latched the door to the pantry behind her, I tell her, "Come out," and open the door. As soon as we are out of our hiding places Geros opens the door. There are beds in the corners, and in the middle, in front of the window, is an open space. We all run toward the window and they burst in, I even lose sight of Geros then, I can't see him. They fill up the room and get up on the beds, becoming so tall that you can't even make them out. Nelly, the children, and I are standing at the window. They are surrounding us. My mother-in-law is under the bed. There are 60 to 70 of them. And that's only in the bedroom. They have knives in their hands, various knives, large and small; I see one with an iron crowbar. I have the impression that it was made especially for them. There are so many of them that I can't see them all, and I am pleading, "Please, just don't kill us ..." I can only see the ones in front; the ones behind aren't visible, there is a guy standing next to me, he's got a big knife in his hands. I forcibly grab his hand and kiss it, saying, "Help, don't kill us, don't make the children orphans!" They are trying to seize the child, Suzanna, from Nelly's hands. A young one is shouting, "Let's kill them." They were all age 17 to 30. There was only one adult, around 37; in a minute I'll tell how he saved us. Anyway this one, who's shouting, is an unpleasant type. His eyes are all bloodshot, either he had smoked way too many cigarettes or was really high on drugs; he looked awful, he's shouting, "The Armenians kill our sisters, cut their breasts off, we're going to kill the Armenians, too, why should we let them live?!" And the adult one, he's tall and skinny, holds up his hand and they are all silent, they all become quiet for a moment: apparently he's their leader, since they all obey him. He's the oldest of them, in any case. He's wearing a hat, and one of his eyes is crossed. His face seems very familiar to me. Sumgait is a small town, and I used to walk to work, and met the same people all the time. He says, "We promised not to touch the children." Just then I notice I've lost Kristina; how did she get out of the room?! The older one is holding up his hand and they make room for us, letting us through. They start leading us out of the apart¬ment. I am being hit and grabbed from behind. I think they're taking my clothes off, but I didn't even turn around. Let them do what they want, just as long as we can get out of here. Geros is first, followed by Nelly and her kids, and Erik and I are last. Someone grabs me from the side, but I keep going, and don't turn to look. Erik is in my arms, but I don't know where Kristina is. Kristina is lost! For the children's sake we would withstand any¬thing. In the hall the endtables were lying all over, upsidedown; the sofa was there ... I don't even remember how we got through it all ... or maybe they picked me up. So we find ourselves on the landing, a floor higher; they have taken us up to the fifth floor, one flight of stairs, ten steps. I shout, "Kristina! Kristina!" and I am answered by the laughter of those beasts. We get up and the tall skinny one starts to beat my husband, slaps him in the face a couple of times, and starts cursing him: "You son of a bitch, why didn't you open the door? If you had opened the door this wouldn't be happening to you. I know you, after all." But my husband had never seen him before. He is silent. He had thrown his hammer down; when they came in, he threw it down . . . They're beating him, and his eyes are filled with tears. He's very hot-tempered, he's always in some squabble at work, quarreling. The Grigorian brothers are too hotheaded. Then I start to fear for him. Later he told me that he withstood it for our sake, that if he had started to fight they would have killed us all, and he didn't want to see them mock us. The tall skinny one is beating him, and he just stands there, silent. He only says, "What can I do? My wife and children are here. For their sakes I'll tolerate it." And that guy keeps saying, "If you had opened the door, nothing would have happened, I know your family." Then I thought, maybe he worked with my husband somewhere or knew him from town. And Kristina is still not around, she's nowhere to be seen. The tall skinny one takes us up to the second floor, to apartment 41. There isn't anyone on the stairs. While we are standing on the landing, another 10 to 15 people burst into our apartment. As soon as that gang rushes in he says, "Come on, quickly, down to the second floor." We go down, and Khanum is coming up toward us. She is our neighbor from apartment 46, the one next to ours. She is about 35 years old. I owe her many favors. Everyone calls her "the streetwalker." I don't know why, but the Azerbaijanis, big, healthy guys, don't come to help us, this one lone woman is the only one who is ready to sacrifice herself to save us. They take all her gold off her, her wedding ring, they even threaten her with a knife. The tall skinny one is letting us go down. We meet Khanum on the third floor, and together we go down to the neighbors', who moved in three or four years ago. The husband is an Azerbaijani, a Talish, actually. We call him Vitya. We don't know his real name, he's originally from the Lenkoran District, and his wife Sveta is a mixture, her mother is Russian and her father is Azerbaijani. They live in apartment 41. I'm telling about them because they are good peo¬ple and would definitely have helped us. But they were out of town during those days. They went to Sveta's mother's funeral; they left their keys with Khanum. They had asked Khanum to water the plants. The apartment is right above the Khalafians', on the second floor, a one-bedroom apartment. We go in there, and there are already a lot of people in there. Two guys from the gang are sitting there. Aunt Lena and Uncle Sasha Avanesian are there. Later I find out that Ira is hiding in the bathroom so that those two guys won't see her. The Avanesians' guests from Baku are there too, the younger brother and sister and their father. But Zhanna is missing, they don't know anything about her. But most important in apartment 41 is my Kristina! Alive and well! The last time I saw Ira she was on the balcony with a knife in her hand, and then, as her mother tells me, they took her and Zhanna out into the courtyard and started beating them. Aunt Lena kept telling the tall one, "Find Zhanna, find Zhanna!" Uncle Sasha was in awful condition. They had dragged him down the stairs by the legs. He was coughing up blood, was holding his hands on his kidneys, shouting and groaning, "Ow, ow ..." We say to him, "Uncle Sasha, quiet, the second floor, they can hear everything, they'll come down here and kill us." There were 13 of us rescued Armenians in the room. Then a fourteenth joined us, I'll tell about her in a minute. And Khanum is sitting with us, and those three. Two of them don't look like ban¬dits, they're well dressed, speak excellent Russian, and one of them even goes to get cotton and iodine . . . Aunt Lena, as I said, had guests: the girl got stabbed, they stabbed her twice. She was around twenty. They broke the arms of both her father and her brother. Exactly one month ago they had removed the boy's cast, his arm had been broken, and they went and broke that same arm again. Essentially all the Avanesians and their guests were victims. Aunt Lena was wearing tattered clothes, and her legs were bloody. She said that they had beaten her severely. We hear constant noise coming from downstairs, from the Khalafians' apartment. The Azerbaijanis there are playing the piano, the walls are shak¬ing. They were playing "Tsup, Tsup, Moi Tsuplyatki," and drinking vodka, evidently, eating; everything was left from the funeral banquet, and they were carrying on. Judging by the noise and the voices, people were coming in and going out. One group after the next. It was quite a feast. I can't forget that in the midst of all this they were playing a cheery little children's song, "Jip, Jip, Jujalyarum ..." It was around seven o'clock. It gets dark early in February. My husband had installed a floodlight in the courtyard. He's an electrician, and you could see everything just like in broad daylight. I still don't know anything about my father and his sister. Mamma was under the bed when we left. I ask the tall one, "Please, my mother-in-law was left in the apartment, would you please bring her here?" He says fine, he'll try. He goes upstairs and about fifteen minutes later comes back with a downcast look and starts com¬plaining: "Those beasts, those monsters! What can I do, they'll kill me ..." Khanum had gone upstairs too. I see her coming back, she gets on her knees and starts to cry. I ask her what happened, and through her tears she says, "They're taking Aunt Emma down the stairs naked. Emma says to me, 'Khanum, help me, stop them. I start to ask them but they hold a knife to my throat and say, 'Helping Armenians? You tired of living or what?!' " When she says that I run into the kitchen, with Aunt Lena after me. We turn back the curtains and see my mother-in-law naked, stark naked, and they're pushing her forward, and she's covering her breasts with her hands . . . She's completely gray-haired, the woman's 58 years old; she worked in a school for 20 years. Can it really be that in that gang there wasn't a single one of her old pupils who could say, "Don't touch that woman?!" She's not bleeding, they're just pushing her. I remember her last glance: she turns around, she has big, round, beautiful eyes, and she looks at them with this awful look . .. it was terrible . . . and that's it, I didn't see her anymore. I want to shout, "Geros, they've got Mamma" But one of the three guys, the short, fat one, says, "Don't say anything. If your husband goes to fight them, they'll kill him too. He can't help her anyway; he'll just be another victim." So I don't say anything. Geros is sitting in the corner, silent, completely pale, with the children on his lap. Aunt Lena says again, "Geros, help, go find Zhanna." And I say, that if he could have, he would have gone to find his own mother. And the tall skinny one keeps going in and out. He has a big knife in his hands, he's playing with it, he keeps it in his hands constantly. Aunt Lena tells us it was her kitchen knife, he took it from her. Then the tall skinny guy says that there is a man lying in the courtyard groaning. Now I had knitted my husband and my father-in-law identical vests out of dark red yarn. He tells Geros that it looks like it's his father, since he's got on the same vest. He gives my hus¬band someone's raincoat and they go out together. Geros carries his father in on his shoulders and lays him down in the hall. His father is unconscious. You can see his brains, his eyes are all bloody, and there are very deep wounds on his head, two or three cuts. They beat him with an armature shaft. . . He doesn't have a face any more, no nose, no lips, no eyes, every¬thing's bloody, you can't see anything. I shout "Papa, Papa, Papa!" but he can't hear, he only groans. Those guys say that the gang has come back look¬ing for him. They say, that man was here, where did he go? Someone tells them that a fellow carried him away. And they say, "We beat him up and down, why'd they carry him off?" Just like the fascists during the war, they'd do their best killing people and then come back to finish off the ones that were half-alive. They came back to finish killing him. One of the three tells Geros that his father should be taken away. He's groaning, and they'll hear him. Geros asks if they will help him carry his father. They say that they don't want to get blood on themselves, carry him yourself. My father-in-law was a big man, strong, red-cheeked, and now there's nothing left of him but bones. Even the doctors were surprised that he lived. He was in intensive care for 18 days, then he came to, but he didn't recognize anyone for a long time. His arms were dead, his legs were dead, only his heart was beating. The doctors said that if he could hold on for ten days he would live. Geros picks his father up on his shoulders and I help him. He takes him up to the Avanesians' apartment because looting was still going on in our apartment. Some people were breaking things, and others were carrying them away. But the Avanesians' apartment had already been robbed. Geros hides his father in the bedroom, covering him with blankets so that they won't notice him if they should suddenly come back. We were a bit calmed by the fact that we had found his father. But what became of his mother? I saw her, but Geros doesn't know this, he says, "Maybe I'll go look for Mamma." I say, "Where are you going to look for her?" I will never forgive myself that we were unable to save her. We knew that death could be upon us at any second. Those three guys said, "Don't be afraid, tomorrow morning we'll come and hide you." Aunt Lena tells the tall skinny one, "You helped us, you saved us. What is your name, where do you live, tell me your address and I will come and thank you." He says, "My name is Eiyub, I live in Microdistrict 12." That's how she found out his name. When the investigator asked me the name of the man who saved us, he did so as though I knew that person's name, and didn't want to give it. I said I heard the name when Aunt Lena had asked for it. Imagine, the man told the truth, he didn't lie to us. His name really is Eiyub and he does live in Microdistrict 12. Before leaving for Yerevan, on June 23, I went to see the investigator again, and he showed me his photograph and said, "No matter Where he is, we'll find him. The main thing is that you recognize him." That means they didn't find him. I told the investigator everything. The investigaton is still going on. They tell me, "You don't have any witnesses, you have to find the people who helped you, we can find the criminals through hem"—the people who dealt Father those blows, killed Mother, and injured the rest. It was nine, and then ten o'clock. How many hours must we go on sitting here, hungry, cold . . . the residents of the house were gone, there was noth¬ing to eat. Khanum went up to her place and brought the children some bread, I remember; it was black bread, Suzanna was playing with the toys in Sveta's apartment. She's still tiny, she doesn't understand what's happening, and we calm the older children so they won't shout: "Bandits, bandits ..." My Kristina still isn't back to being herself, she keeps asking, "Where's my grandma?" She accuses me herself, "You ran away, and didn't save Grandma." She saw it all, she remembers. When we lost Kristina, I started calling her, shouting, "Kristina, Kristina!" From the fifth floor landing and downstairs the Azerbaijanis were laughing, making fun of me, saying, she's still looking for Kristina. Then Father, already beaten up, hears my voice. When he regained consciousness in the hospital he immediately asked, "Tell me, honestly, though, where's Kristina? If you don't bring her to me it means they killed her. I still remember Valya's voice; she's calling Kristina, it means something happened to the child." Engels reassured him everyone's alive and well, they just won't let us into the hospital. Thanks to Khanum, Khanum Ismailova. A very, very warm-hearted woman. We owe her our lives. She saved so many people. She sat with us till the end. Later, at eleven o'clock, Khanum went up to her apartment because her neighbor from the same landing, Elmira Avakian, was hiding there. And came back with Sveta Grigorian, who ran wounded into our entryway. She lived in the building across the way, Building 6/2A. Khanum saw her and brought her to us. She was completely undressed, wearing nothing but her underwear. They beat her and burned her hair. I couldn't recognize her. Could it really be her? She can't get back to normal. I say, "Sveta, what's with you?" And she says, "Mamma, Mamma, Mamma!" It turns out that they killed her mother, Ersile Movsesova, and she was calling her. We lay down to sleep just a little, on the floor, on the bed; every spot was taken, there wasn't any space left at all. Sveta can't even lie down, her whole body hurts. She and the girl they stabbed, the Avanesians' guest, groaned continually. And Ira, as I said before, was hiding in the bathroom. Kristina asked to go to the bathroom, and I took her there and pulled on the door, but it wouldn't open. Khanum said, "Quiet, Ira's hiding in there, they're looking for her." Only a miracle saved Ira. That Eiyub said that there was a girl, a heavy-set one, we beat her. We were surprised that she was able to get up and leave, anyone else would have died in her position, but she got up and went and hid somewhere, and they still couldn't find her. As it turns out, when they took her out of the entryway, she, seizing the opportunity, returned into the entryway. At that moment they were running after her younger sister Zhanna. They were fighting because of her, arguing, Eiyub told Aunt Lena about it: they were chasing Zhanna, but she ran into the entry of another building and into the basement. It was February, and cold, and there was water up to your knees, and she was naked—they had stripped both sisters, both Ira and Zhanna. The bandits didn't follow her into the basement. They figured she was going to die anyway, why should they get themselves dirty going after her? So they came back. That's how Aunt Lena found out that Zhanna was in the basement. She implored him to show her the basement, to find Zhanna. As it turned out later, Zhanna came out of the basement and knocked on someone's door, and they saved her. And Ira went up to the sec¬ond floor, to Apartment 41, and hid in the bathroom. Khanum probably helped her, too. When those three guys left the apartment for a while we quickly got Ira out of the bathroom and hid her in the armoire. I locked her in there myself. The poor girl, she got sick in there; it was stuffy, there wasn't any air, and she sat in there for the two hours plus that those guys were in the apartment. They came back. Then one left, and the second one says, "My mother's at work, I'm supposed to meet her after the shift, I can't stay with you ..." So the three left, saying that they would come back in the morning and help us, hide us with their relatives. So we sit there, half alive, until three o'clock in the morning. We can't sleep. Each of us is thinking about their own fate. I say, "What if they come back tomorrow and kill us? Who knows what they're thinking? What was their purpose in saving us? Maybe they've got their own plans. We're wom¬en in here, young ones, good-looking. Maybe they're going to do something with us tomorrow." I haven't yet talked about Aunt Maria. They took her outside along with Papa, and stripped her naked. They beat her in the courtyard, she told me about it later. They beat her and her brother at the same time. On the stair¬way they ordered them to put their hands behind their heads and go down¬stairs. Suddenly at the entryway they start beating both of them on the head with armature shafts. Papa and Aunt Maria fell down and the attackers start beating them with whatever they can find, kicking them in the stomach, in the sides, every way possible. She saw Uncle Yuri Avakian, the neighbor from our landing; she saw them beating him. When they were beating Papa he was groaning, and suddenly he was still. "I decided," said Maria, "that that was it, that they had killed my brother." I open my eyes and see that they are forcing Yuri to undress. He took everything off except his drawers. They tried to make him take those off, too, but he didn't do it. Then they poured something all over him and burned him. He struggled and contorted on the ground, groaned, cried in a terrible voice, and burned alive . . . And at this point Aunt Maria lost consciousness. She was all bloody. Later, when she came to, it was already quiet. She started making her way up the stairs on all fours. She got up to the third floor, but came across four Azerbaijanis from that gang. "Look," one of them says, "she's still alive." Aunt Maria has gold teeth, she covered her mouth with her palm so they wouldn't notice them and pull them out, and said, "What's left of me? I'm dead as it is." She Was there naked in front of them. And they let her through. She came up into our apartment, crawled the rest of the way there and saw that every¬thing was smashed and that there was blood everywhere . . . we had Armenian cognac in our apartment, they smashed the bottles to smithereens, and cognac is of course reddish, and it seemed to her that they had killed all of us, that she was the only one left alive. Then she lost con¬sciousness again. Later, when we had already been sitting on the second floor for a long time, Geros came up to our apartment and saw her. He said, "Let me carry you away and hide you." And she merely waved her hand, "No, you hide, save yourself." He covered her with mattresses; that tall skin¬ny guy, Eiyub, was with him. He covered her, hiding her. And later when four of the gang came back, they asked Aunt Maria, "Where are those two daughters-in-law of yours?" Apparently they regretted having let Nelly and me go. Aunt Maria pointed with her hand, saying everyone had left. And they didn't touch her, she was half-dead as it was .. . Then they saved us. The students from the military academy arrived. In black sailors' uniforms, with truncheons. They came in armored personnel carriers and buses. At first we were afraid to call them, but then we opened the window and started to shout: "Boys, help us, help!" Their senior officer, a captain, commanded: "Quick into the entryway, second floor!" When the stu¬dents saw the condition we were in one of them became ill. They gave him some water. He drank it and said, "Don't be afraid. They can't do anything to you. We're here now." I was barefoot, wearing only a robe. Suzanna didn't have her tights on, so we had torn a blanket in two to wrap up the child. We went and got on a bus. It was winter, the windows in the entryway were covered with frost, and we were walking with the children . . . People were coming out of our building, Building 5, and out of Building 6, and getting onto two buses. There were many people. The Khalafians came out of the basement. Ten people had been hiding in there the entire time. Only Aunt Elmira Avakian was not there. She stayed with Khanum. Khanum saved her. They tore Uncle Yuri right out of her arms, she had tried to save him, too. And they had called her "streetwalker". . . So many people suffered! And as though on purpose, everyone had guests. If they hadn't been there we wouldn't have suffered as much. Aunt Lena, Aunt Rima Khalafian, and we all had guests. And it happened on Sunday, when everyone was at home. It feels like they chased everyone home and came to cut and slaughter them, like sheep. That's the way it works out, because they told us not to go to work, and we sat at home, we didn't take the children to kindergarten, they had us scared . .. Two died from our part of the building: my mother-in-law and Yuri Avakian. It's a pity that Armenians lived in all the entryways of our build¬ing; and in all of them, except ours, the Azerbaijanis helped by not letting the attackers into the entryway, but we didn't have someone like that. It hurts, about our part of the building. They're all grown-ups, aksakal [of an age to have a white beard], as the Azerbaijanis say. If they had only come out and said, "Don't do that!" In the next entryway there were three Armenian families—Aunt Larisa's family, Aunt Tamara's family and Aunt Emma's; I don't know their last names. An older man stood in front of their entryway and said, "Don't come in here, there are no Armenians in here. But we didn't have anyone with a good heart. After that I came to hate them. So many wounded! The whole Avanesian family: Uncle Sasha, Aunt Lena, Ira, Zhanna, their three guests—all beaten and wounded. Later we found out that Uncle Barmen, the man who hid the Khalafians in the base¬ment, was very seriously injured. He was tall, a very strong man. Kamo, Yuri Avakian's son, came down from the fourth floor by the balconies! Before that he had taken the frame from the bed and hooked electricity up to it. But then they came to our apartment and got a mattress and put it down under their feet so they wouldn't get shocked. Later, when we returned home with the soldiers, I found our mattress in their apartment. Kamo threw cups at the murderers, and an iron, and mugs—everything he could lay his hands on. He was great. It was good that Engels didn't come. We were praying. If he had come, they would have just killed him. Before, on the 27th, Engels and his wife were at our place. We heard the demonstration, we heard them shouting "Down with Armenians!" and "We're not giving up Karabagh!" We saw policemen in the courtyard. One of them, he had a limp, said, "Look at them killing themselves. It would be better to kill Armenians." That's exactly what he said. What kind of authorities can say something like that? The Azerbaijanis were warned, there was a signal. . . It's good that Engels didn't come. My mother-in-law cried so. She was also upset for Nelly, saying she brought her here as a guest, they had asked her to come, and now they were killing everyone. Misha would be left alone as heir to carry on the Grigorian name. My mother-in-law was a golden woman, you can ask anyone from Sumgait. I lived with them for nearly ten years, and we never had any quar¬rels, never argued, and I was closer to her than I was to my own mother. And she was like a mother to Kristina. She was a sick woman; she fainted so many times, we would call ambulances, we held her tongue. It would have been better if she had died from illness. It wouldn't have been so painful, and we would have buried her according to our customs. But instead people came and murdered her savagely. We weren't even able to bury her in a way befitting a human. They wouldn't let us. We couldn't mourn her properly. It's very painful. She was murdered so horribly. They stabbed her with knives, burned her with cigarettes . . . And toward the end, the investigator told me, one of them came up and saw that she was breathing, and got frightened. "Look," he says, "she's still alive, and tomorrow she'll come to and identify us, maybe." So they took a metal rod and stuck it up into her genitalia and moved it around to tear up everything in her abdomen. When you read her death certificate your hair stands on end. The investigators—one was from Baku and the other was from the inves¬tigative group from the USSR Procuracy—drew on paper and told me where and how she was killed. The last blow was struck in front of Building 6/2A, that's across from ours. There, in the first entryway, is where they were fight-ing, where Rafik Tovmasian, Grant Adamian, Ishkhan Trdatov and his father were defending themselves. They held them off for eight full hours. But they took Mamma and left her in front of the entryway. They wanted to show what they were going to do to them next. They wanted to break them ... So they tortured Mamma to death in front of Building 6. Even now I can't strike or scold Kristina. If I just raise my voice at her she says, "Grandma, my dear Grandma, where are you, come to me!" We've been in Armenia for a month now, and she tells me all the time, "Go get Grandma, bring her so we can visit her grave, water the flowers, and tend to it ... " This is a child talking. Her hair has started turning gray. Can you imagine, my six-year old Kristina's hair is going grey?! From the horror of those days, from the suffering. We Grigorians go gray young anyway, but at six years! I guess other people wouldn't even believe it... July 25,1988 Shushan Boarding House near Arzakan Village Hrazdan District, Armenian SSR

- KAMO YURIYEVICH AVAKIAN Born 1963 Arc Welder Polimer Production Association Resident at Building 5/2, Apartment 47 Microdistrict No. 3 Sumgait On Sunday, February 28, around six o'clock in the evening we hear noise out in the courtyard. I go to the window and see that a huge crowd of Azerbaijanis has formed. They're shouting, "Where are the Armenians?" This was no surprise for us, since earlier, that afternoon, they had already approached the building, but the police were there, and drove them off. The demonstrations and rallies began on the 27th. We were at my sister's place, it was her birthday, and sometime around eight in the evening we hear people walking around the city and shouting, making noise . . . We could have expected all of this to be repeated on the 28th, too, but we didn't imagine that they could break into people's apartments and kill them. We thought they'd make some noise and go home. I see them burn the tent in the courtyard, the one our neighbors, the Khalafians, were using for their karasunk . . . Then we hear the shouting and cries of our Azerbaijani neighbor, "What are you doing?!" She lives off our landing, this neighbor. Then we hear the shout of Sasha Avanesian. They live one floor down. Their daughter, Ira Avanesian, starts to shout, to cry for help, and now they're starting to come up to our floor. We live up a floor, on the fourth floor. They're standing around, trying to figure it out, they don't know where the Armenians live. Then one of them, we hear a voice indicat¬ing our apartment and that of the Grigorians, saying Armenians live there and there, but in between that's an Azerbaijani, a woman who lives alone. That's the way it is. There are three apartments on our landing: in two of them, the ones opposite one another, Armenians live, the Grigorians and us, and in the middle is the Azerbaijani woman. And they start breaking our door down. My father and I moved a table up against the door, chairs, various furniture, but the door gave all the same, came open a little, and just then I start throwing glasses and dishes at them. They flee from the shards, but in a while they bring back some sort of shield, close up the crack with it, and we can no longer throw anything at them. They leave our apartment and start breaking down the Grigorians' door. Through the crack we see that they are hitting the door with an axe. Soon the door gives way breaks, and you can her Valya's voice, she's pleading to be left alone . . . Valya is the daughter-in-law of Aunt Emma, the one they killed. We hear them let Valya, her husband Geros, and their kids go downstairs. We hear breaking dishes, and apparently, the axe being used to hack up the furniture. This goes on for about a half an hour, and then they return to our door. For a long time they can't make any headway with it because of flying pieces from the glasses. They're having some sort of argument. One of them says what they were saying earlier, they're going to do this, they're going to do that; another says we've scared some Armenians, time to leave. They have a pipe, that's what they use to break through the door. When the pipe breaks through, I grab for it, to try and pull it through, but I can't do it. They pull it back through and start to pound on the door again. I find an extension cord in my hand, a wire. I plug it in and put it under the door so that if they break through the door and come in they'll get shocked. At some point we hear them talking among themselves. Fire fighters have come. We think that now they'll run off, because the firemen drove them off in the afternoon. But they don't leave, they stay. Mamma gets sick, I keep telling her to climb over to the neighbor's, I think that she's at home . . . but she's afraid. She doesn't want to, she thinks that she can't climb over there, it's the fourth floor, it's high up, then she's able to master herself, she crawls out the window on the back side of the building. My father and I are left in the apartment. Mamma kept saying, "It's peace time . . . and no one is coming to help us ..." Our phone isn't working, the phones have been turned off, we can't get through to anybody. Earlier we asked our neighbor to call the police. She answered that she had tried, but she couldn't get through, the line was busy. Once my mother crawls over, Father and I start throwing things at them again. We throw almost all the dishes at them . . . But it doesn't stop them. One of them lights a piece of plastic and throws it into the apartment in order to smoke us out. Papa pours water on it and puts it out. I realize that it is better to hook the electricity up to something metal, so that the area will be bigger, the voltage . . . Papa and I take the metal frame out from under the bed and put it right up against the door. When they pound on the door with the pipe, the door opens a bit, and obviously, they start getting shocked . . . we can hear shouts, we're getting shocked! They start cursing us. They take a mattress from the Grigorians' and throw it in front of the door, under their feet, so they won't get shocked. One of them cries, "Bring gasoline!" They don't bring gasoline though; they were just trying to scare us. One of them wants to break the light bulb on the landing, but the others are against it; how can we do anything without light? They want to steal things. When they figure out that the pipe is of no use, they take a homemade bench from next door and start using it to break down the door. They break the upper part of the door; we see their faces . . . Earlier I had thought to put a turned-on television in the hall with the screen to the door, so that when they broke through the television would explode . . . Maybe we would be able to get away.... But Father wouldn't let me, because they might bring charges against us later. He didn't know that people would be slaughtered in the city for three days . . . That's when I got the idea of the bed frame. The television was my first idea, but my father wouldn't allow it. He didn't think it would come to anything like that. He kept waiting. The police should arrive any minute. But they didn't. When they broke down the Grigorians' door, they started cursing. One of them called someone's name and told him that there were women there, if you want. I'll sell them to you. "If you want, I'll sell you one for 10 rubles." The other one said, "Young or old?" "Old." They went into the apartment, and I didn't hear any more of their conversation. The whole time I was imagining that the same thing would happen at our place when they came, that they would do the same thing with my mother. When they were saying that an Azerbaijani lived in between the apart¬ments, I knew that they wouldn't harm her, and told my mother that she should crawl out the window over to her balcony. She was afraid she could not make it, even though it wasn't very far at all ... We managed to con¬vince her all the same. She crawled over, the neighbor's balcony is an open one, not glassed-in. But the neighbor wasn't home, as I later found out. She had gone down to the second floor, and there she managed to hide Valya and Geros and the kids, and then, from the third floor, they managed to hide one of the Avanesians ... When they let them go downstairs, I thought that I wouldn't see Geros alive again, but as it turned out, the first moment when none of the bandits were on the second floor, that woman hid them at a neighbor's. They were saved. But Cherkez Grigorian was badly beaten, and his wife was killed on the street... Father and I managed to hold out for an hour, maybe even an hour and a half. The whole time my father threw dishes at them I was looking out the window: maybe the firemen would come, they were right nearby. When they broke into the apartment, there was a crowd behind the building, there were passersby, and the bandits watched to make sure that no one jumped out the window. When it got dark, they probably got tired of standing there, and they went out to the front of the building. Something was telling me that we wouldn't be able to hold out for very long, because the people who were on the landing started to call for help. To be sure, there were plenty of them out in front of the building. We heard their conversation. Someone said that they could crawl in through our window from the neighbor's apartment. My mother was still with us then. Then they decided not to; I guess they didn't want to break into the Azerbaijani's apartment, they didn't. . . Before that, when they were cursing us in Azerbaijani, one stopped them, saying that Azerbaijanis live here too. They were looking after their own . . . After it was all over a rumor went around the city that everything had been done under the influence of drugs, that's why such things had gone on. They said that they were ban¬dits. What kind of bandits were they if they were concerned that other Azerbaijanis might hear them curse? Oh, I also forgot to say that . . . When they were discussing whether to crawl into our apartment from the neigh¬bor's, I told my mother that if they came back, she should throw herself out the window. Mother later told me that she herself didn't know how she managed to crawl over there ... If the neighbor had been at home, maybe my father would have been saved, she would have opened the door to the balcony, and would have hid them in her apartment. I don't know. But more than likely they would have guessed that they had crawled over to her place. The moment they broke down the upper part of the door, the mob was going to crawl through the hole, but my father and I started to beat them off with glasses, and they moved back. Then they thought to take pillows from the Grigorians' apartment and shield themselves from the shards. When they were saying among themselves that they were getting shocked, I thought that it would be more effective if I poured water all over the bed frame, so they would be shocked harder, which is what I did. By this point the door had already come loose from its hinges, come open some, and they started pounding on the meter with a board in order to cut off the electricity. We knew that it was hopeless to stay in the apartment, and I told my father that he should crawl over to the neighbor's. When he crawled over I remained a little while in the apartment, then crawled out the window after him and started jumping down via the balconies ... At first down to the third floor, from the third to the second, and from there down to the ground. At the time I noted that my father saw me going down, and probably decided that I had managed to save myself. I set off running in the direction of the Emergency Hospital, and a woman comes out toward me, a doctor, probably. I tell her what's going on, so we would go there, but she says I had better set out for Baku, or they'll kill me too. There's a fire station next to the Emergency Hospital. I go in there and tell the firemen what's happening in our building, and ask them to help res¬cue people, and they say that they don't have any vehicles, all the vehicles have been broken. About this time a vehicle drives up, the people in it say that they tried to drive up to the building, but stones were thrown at them, and they couldn't drive into the courtyard. When the firemen said that it was impossible to get near the building, I started thinking of who else I could call for help. Just then a police car drives by, a UAZ. I run out to meet it, but they drive by without stopping. There was a policeman seated next to the driver, and I realized that the situation was hopeless . . . They both saw we and didn't stop. Then I returned to the building the crowd was there as before, and there was no way to go unnoticed. I went roundabout ways, across the hospital grounds, and stood near the building and saw a neighbor on her balcony, sweeping. I think either they've taken them outside, killed them, or the neighbor has hidden them and is sweeping to distract attention so they won't think that anyone is in her apartment. Then I see them carrying stolen things out of our apartment. There are some shrubs near the hospital, and I hid in them. When they came closer, I ran toward the hospital, and knocked at reception, and they let me in. I spent the whole night sitting in reception. From the doctors' conversations I gathered that soldiers were being sent to the city. In the morning I went to my sister's house to see what happened to them. Their house was not attacked. My brother-in-law and I return to our apartment together. I find only my mother at the neighbor's house. She tells us what happened that night. After I left they broke into our apartment and saw my mother and father on the balcony. The neighbor wasn't home, and the balcony door was locked. My father wanted to grab the one looking out of the window and throw him down, but my mother wouldn't let him. She thought if he killed someone that they wouldn't get out of there alive. If she hadn't done that, they would have torn her to shreds. As it was the neighbor came down for her and pleaded with them, laying down at their feet, and they left my mother alone. The neighbor's name is Khanum Ismailova, she's 35 years old. My mother sat on the balcony, and my father stood, hunched over. From the open window they figured out where my parents had gone . . . They saw them on the balcony and started to shout—my mother told me about it lat¬er—that they were going to throw all of their possessions out the window and take them. They started to tear out the carpets and throw them down They called the neighbor. She was on the second floor, she came and opened the door. One of them called himself the people's judge. He said, I'm the people's judge; your people in Armenia cut off our mothers' breasts, and we're going to do the same thing to you. My mother said that some fifteen of them had come into the apartment . . . They took my father out, my mother didn't see him again after that, she stayed at the neighbor's until morning. Until the soldiers arrived she heard them stealing things from the apartment, and Khanum went out and looked. Mother asked her to go see what they were doing. It was dark in the apartment, but they found our candles and were searching for money and valuables in the candlelight. Khanum saved my mother, but she couldn't save my father . . . She lay before them on the floor. When they broke in, they smashed either a window or some dishes, and she cut her leg on the shards, so that they would take pity on her. Among them, my mother said, was one who was almost a child, about fifteen years old. He was stubborn, he ran up to strike my mother. The one who called himself the people's judge wouldn't let him do it, pushed him away, and said that he would spare her life for the Azerbaijani's sake. When they left, before dawn, before the soldiers came, they pounded on the door, in order to frighten them, shouting, that there was an Armenian in there, but didn't break in. They wanted to torment my mother to the very end. When the soldiers appeared, Khanum started shouting so they would come up to the building, and the soldiers started leading the Armenians out, the ones who had been hiding at the neighbors' or in the basement. But Mother didn't go with the soldiers, she stayed to find out what had happened to me. She didn't know what had happened to Father, she didn't think she'd ever see him alive again. In the morning when we came, we went up to the neighbor's house and 1 saw my mother. When we went down into the courtyard, on our way to the hospital to find out if maybe my father was taken along with the other wounded people, we saw a group of people in the yard. I don't know where they were from, if they were from the City Executive Committee or what; they had some sort of lists, and said who was in Baku, and who was in the morgue. Then we went to find out what happened to our other relatives. Father was killed in our yard. He . . . the neighbors told my mother about it they beat him and threw him into the fire . . . While they were beating him, the whole time they kept saying, over and over, "You want to go to Yerevan? We'll send you to Yerevan!" He was buried in Baku. They wouldn't let anyone return their dead to their birthplaces, only to Baku or Sumgait. We had wanted to take him back out to the country. A burial commission was established, they wouldn't per¬mit it. My father came from Karabagh, from the Hadrut District, in the village of Susalukh. We saw his body in the morgue only seven days after he was killed. In Baku. His body was burned all over . . . Our building had four entryways, only ours was attacked. They killed Emma Grigorian and my father, Yuri Avakian, and beat Sasha Avanesian, but he was in the hospital. They also beat his wife, but not badly. Their daughter, Ira Avanesian, was wounded with a knife. Zhanna was stripped, but she managed to get away, and hid somewhere with her relatives. People also hid in the Khalafians' basement, only one of them was beaten, nearly to death. In the second entryway, when they were trying to figure out if there were Armenians there or not, a neighbor who was an Azerbaijani came out and said that no Armenians lived there. And they didn't go in there. In the far entryway a Russian fellow also told them that there were no Armenians, and they didn't go in there, either. After the fact I thought that if we had managed to defend ourselves some other way—we had some paint, we could have poured it on them—that perhaps we could have held out longer, and the soldiers would have come in enough time ... I can't get away from the thought that if father had let me nook up the TV like I had planned, it would have scared them, and that might have saved him . . . My mother couldn't believe that they had killed my father, she drove the thought away, telling herself that maybe it wasn't him . . . thinking he'd come back . . . Now I think that if it had been possible to outsmart them, to tie a rope made of sheets to the window frame and throw it down, that they would have thought that we had escaped that way, and they wouldn't have looked over at the neighbor's balcony . .. By the way, that same day, February 28, was my birthday. I was 25 years old. June 12, 1988 Stepanakert

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- MARINA (IRA) ALEXANDROVNA AVANESIAN Born 1965 Accountant Sumgait Vtorsyr Directorate Resident at Building 5/2, Apartment 42 Microdistrict No. 3 Sumgait It was my birthday. Actually my birthday is February 26, but we were cel¬ebrating it on the 27th because our relatives could come only on Saturday and Sunday. I figured out what was going on in town when I went out on the 27th to buy a bottle of champagne for the celebration. When I was walk¬ing around town I saw crowds of policemen, and someone told me that young people had gathered near the Petroleum and Chemistry Institute, and that there was to be a demonstration, which greatly surprised me, since I couldn't imagine what people could be demonstrating about. That evening we were celebrating my birthday. There were many guests, and somewhere around eleven o'clock we hear some shouts outside, some noise, breaking glass . . . We go out onto the balcony, there's a demonstra¬tion, and shouting: "Armenians out of Azerbaijan!" Well I get mad and shout "Azerbaijanis out of Azerbaijan!" After all I was born in Azerbaijan too. I have the same rights they do. We're all equal. We do all live in the Soviet Union. So I get carried away shouting, and say "You're little pigs . . . piglets you were, piglets you'll be, you'll never be people." The guests leave. The only person left is my uncle, Rafik, his daughter Aida and his son Artur, who all came from Baku. Aida is 21, and Artur is 18. The next day, February 28, was Uncle Misha Khalafian's karasunk, and a great many people came to our building. The Khalafian family lived in our part of the building on the first floor in Apartment 38. My mother went to bake bread for them that morning. She's a baker and wanted to bake her own bread for the karasunk. But Aunt Rima Khalafian, after coming back from the cemetery, said that they didn't need any bread, and I called Mamma to tell her about it and to tell her to come home. So the karasunk Wouldn't be interrupted Aunt Rima hired some police, she paid them 200 rubles so the demonstrators wouldn't interfere. Well. Mamma was con-vinced of the need. Soon her boss brought her home. They had gone by side streets so as not to encounter that brutal mob. People were already back from the cemetery. A big tent had been pitched in the courtyard, with tables set out under it, places already set, and the guests were sitting down. There were a lot of people because Uncle Misha was well liked, he was a good person. Everyone sat down at one o'clock. Then I look and see? Andrei, Aunt Rima's son-in-law, start bustling around. Zhanna's there too, my sister. I see them run into the tent, grab things, run into the apartment, and then back into the tent and back to the apartment They're carrying everything on the run. I can't figure out what's going on. Then Zhanna comes and says, "Ira, a whole mob has come ..." I say, Listen, you don't think they'll break in here?" I don't know how people could just come into someone else's apartment. . . come in without knocking, let alone break in? What kind of behavior is that? And she says, "What's wrong with you, they're in such an aggressive mood there's no telling what will hap¬pen." Honestly, I never thought, I never imagined, that. . . And then comes a call from my mother's work telling us not to go anywhere, awful things are going on! Then Zhanna's friend Olya calls and says that when she came home from the night shift on Saturday she was stopped and grabbed by the throat, and they asked her if she was Armenian or Russian. Olya took quite a fright, but one of the guys said, "Can't you see that she's Russian? What are you bothering her for?" They let her go. She quickly ran home and called us to say not to go out under any circumstances. Honestly, this struck me as funny, not to go out of the house. You never know. It's my city, I was born here. Who has the right to forbid me to do anything? I couldn't understand it at all. All the same we did as we were told and didn't leave the apartment. But our relatives, Uncle Rafik, Aida, and Artur wanted to go somewhere. Acquaintances from my mother's work came and said that they would take them to the bus station and put them on a bus to Baku. We saw them off, said our good-byes, and they left. They set off for the bus station, where there turned out to be a huge crowd, and the station was already completely surrounded. And people in the crowd looked at Aida very suspiciously, since even though you could mistake my Uncle and Artur for Azerbaijanis because of their dark complexions, Aida is a typical light-skinned Armenian. My relatives drove around once, and saw that the buses weren't running, and came back to our place. Aida told us of her experiences: "They had such horrible faces . . . you couldn't tell what was going on, they were all around us. What is going on in your Sumgait? How is this possible? When I go back to Baku I'm going to tell them what's going on in your town ... "We laughed, and said, "Nothing's going to happen, nothing will happen." Really, who could just burst into my apartment? We sat down and watched some show on television, I think it was a fairy tale. And suddenly, more shouts and cries. We run into the kitchen and look out the window. At that moment my mother shouts, "Get back, get back, they're throwing rocks!" I forgot to say that on the 28th the crowd had been near our building before the karasunk began, at around ten or eleven in the morning police started chasing them away, and they ran and laughed. Among them was a short, stocky fellow. And then a neighbor from the adjacent entryway says from upstairs, "You should be ashamed of yourselves, what are you doing?" And that fellow answers "Just wait, well be back at six o'clock be a cemetery here." Well we just laughed at that. And now they were back. It was around four thirty or so. Mama is yelling, "Get back, get back!" They're shouting something down in the courtyard, then they start pounding on the windows, and suddenly someone down there shouts, "Two pretty girls live in Apartment 42!" The whole frenzied mob races up to our place on the third floor. They're right there at our door. Mamma yells, "Open the door, they'll break it down anyway." We don't even have time to get to the door . . . They break it down, but for some reason stay out there in the stairwell. I go out there and tell them, "Aren't you shamed of yourselves! 1 was born here just like you. What have I ever done to you? If you're so strong, then go to Karabagh. Why are you flying around in flocks," I say, "like crows? Can't you do anything on your own?" And they tell me, "we couldn't get a bus to go there. To them." I turn around, there is a guy standing on my left. His face seems familiar, and 1 remember that we worked together once. I once had a job as a commodity researcher at the housing facility, and he and I had worked in the same warehouse. 1 think his name is Safar. So I address him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? I used to work with you. I never did anything to you." They were surprised that I knew him. And they just stood there. Everyone is standing there, looking at me. And just then a really tall guy comes out of the crowd. He has a gray, puffy trench coat and a gray pullover with a pink shirt sticking out from under it. I'm standing in front of them wearing a robe. He grabs the collar of my robe and says, "Come here, I'll show you what I want from you." Before that he must have been standing in the back, and suddenly grabs me and says come here. I became quite frightened and began to shout, calling my mother to help me . . . Then my parents simply carry me away from him, and he grabs my mother and drags her out. At the same time the others car¬ry my father out. I rush out toward the balcony, and Zhanna is standing without moving. "Run for the balcony," I shout to her, and we run out there. And down below men and women—Azerbaijanis—are walking by, looking at us and laughing. I call for help, shouting, "Help! Call the police!" Oh, I for¬got to say that when they first broke through to us I had dialed 02. I dialed 02 and said, "Someone has broken in here!" "What do you want us to do about it?" they ask me. That's something I'll never forget, what kind of police we have. Like they say, 'Cops are crooked.1 I'm convinced of this. I have no faith in our police at all. At least not in the Azerbaijani police. Well, so they'd broken into our apartment and when they saw that I dialed 02, they ripped the phone out and hurled it at me. I just turned around and ran out onto the balcony. Zhanna ran after me. But Aida was so shocked that she didn't budge and stayed there in the room. And they were already smashing up dishes, the crystal; they were hitting the sideboard with a chair, breaking and overturning it. Aida says to them, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" One of them turns and slaps her in the face. She slaps him right back. Then they grab her and pull her onto the bed. They pull her onto the bed, where my uncle had been all along, and he covered her with his body to protect her. We had some stainless steel pipes on the balcony. We had been planning to make some repairs. I grab one of the pipes and think, you never know. And I had an awful lot of books, too. I loved to read. They overturn my bookcase, but in the deluge of books they can't rush out onto the balcony where Zhanna and I are. Only one of them manages to crawl through. I tell him, "It's no problem for me, I'll kill you and throw myself off the balcony What have I got to lose now?" He looks at me, he looks at the pipe—it was a heavy one—and turns around and strikes Zhanna. He hits her really hard in the stomach, and she doubled over and squatted down from the pain Meanwhile the others have started calling for them, and so they go upstairs I think to the fourth floor. Two Armenian families lived there, the Grigorians and the Avakians. Artur seized the opportunity and went down for my father. They probably thought that Artur was with them since he was young, too. They went down and brought my father in from the courtyard. My father was in a horrible state ... I can't even describe it... They tell me what happened to me at the time, maybe it was temporary insanity, maybe it was something else, because Aida and Artur said, "You started to dance and say, 'They've killed Papa.' " Artur slapped me so that I'd come out of it, and Zhanna shouted at me. Consciousness returned, 1 don't know what to call it ... I came to, but after I saw what was going on in the apartment, everything started spinning again. The whole apartment had been turned upside down, heaps of broken dishes, marks on the wall from our vases—I saw them throw the vases against the walls. Well it's just impossible to describe ... The broken chandelier, swinging from a single wire . .. We thought that was the end, that nothing else would happen. As it turns out they had gone upstairs to destroy everything up there. Artur says, "You had better hide." We had a pantry. We kept suitcases in there. We three sis¬ters crawled in there: Aida, Zhanna, and I. We hid in there, closed the doors, and Uncle Rafik and Artur crawled under the beds in my parents' bedroom. That was the adjacent room. As it turns out, other people besides my parents used it as a hiding place. When they broke the door down they dragged them into the courtyard right away, and then later, after they had left the first time, Mamma came back into the apartment. She had nothing on. They had torn all of her clothes off, torn an earring out of her ear—the earring was not a clip-on, and as for the second one, one of them said, "Take it off, Mamma, or I'll take off your whole ear." Mamma took it off and said, "You're not good enough to be my son. Is this the way you treat your mother?" And when my mother came back upstairs after all that and Uncle Rafik gave her a robe, she started to scold us, saying that I was the one who had shouted from the balcony on Friday and that someone had probably remembered and then came back to our place. But my father, like I said, was in bad shape, they beat him severely, and knocked his teeth out. He was uncon¬scious. They kicked him, dragged him down the stairs by the feet, and beat his head against the steps. Later, when we were in the hospital Father remembered being asked, "Which of your arms is broken?" That means they knew that one of his arms was broken—he's handicapped, he crippled his arm on a construction site. It doesn't bend. So when they asked him about his arm he showed the other one, not the one that was broken, but the good one, wanting to protect his bad arm. And they threw him to the ground and started to stomp on that arm. In the full meaning of the word. He was in the hospital and his fingers were all swollen up, especially one, the thumb. After they broke in the first time, Mamma ran upstairs to call because they had smashed our telephone. She told Valya, Aunt Emma's daughter-in-law [Emma Grigorian, who was killed]: "Valya, call. Don't you see what's going on here?" But Valya didn't open the door, she was crying, saying that she had two children and Nelya, Aunt Emma's other daughter-in-law, had just come to visit her mother-in-law for a rest, and she had two children, too. Valya was crying, and said, "Aunt Lena, we called, Aunt Lena, they said they were on their way." But for some reason they never arrived. My sisters and I were hiding in the pantry, Artur and Uncle Rafik had crawled under the beds in my parents' bedroom. My father meanwhile lay unconscious in our room, and my mother had again left to try to call. That's when they came back the second time. There's another blow on the door, and it flies open. Flies open in the fullest sense of the word. It sails off the hinges. And they race into the bedroom. We had some candy in there, my birthday presents. One of them starts to shout, "Look, imported candy!" Well they flew upon the box. Someone grabbed the carpet, and then they wanted to take the blankets and mattresses—I see all this through the crack. When one of the bandits goes to get the blankets and mattresses he sees Uncle Rafik under the bed, is startled, and shouts out, "An Armenian!" He shouts and runs from the room. Then they came back into the room with an axe —that's what Artur said. They had just wound back to use the axe on Uncle Rafik when Artur jumps out and turns his bed over on them. The bandits run out again to get some help, and then return to the bedroom, take Uncle Rafik and Artur out, and start to beat them in the next room. Then one of them says, "There were some girls with them, look for the girls." They start looking around the apartment, looking under the beds, and then go for the handle of the pantry. And I, even naively, you know, am shaking my head, no, don't open it, don't open it. They tear the door off its hinges and say, "Come out." I say, "I'm not coming out." And Zhanna says, "Give us your word as men that you won't harm us. Then we'll come out." They say, "Yes, yes, you have our word." Well, Zhanna tells me, "Go out." Aida also tells me to go out. I say, "I'm afraid." Those guys say, "Come out." Well, we go out together. We go out. They start pushing us, and one of them says, "What did you do with our girls there. Do you really think you'll be forgiven for that?" Like that. They're going to do the same thing with us. They push Aida toward the door and want to drag her into the nursery. The others stand there ready, waiting for them to pull her in. Aida puts up a strong resistance, knocks them away and runs toward the door. She runs to the door to the outside, but they become furious and start to drag Zhanna and me toward the door, pushing us out of the apartment. They no sooner get us out of the apartment than they start to tear our clothes off. Then blows rain down on us. When they take me down the stairs they drag me by the hair. They push Zhanna ahead of me. And there, on the second floor, is Khanum, our neigh¬bor from the fourth floor, from No. 46, I think. Khanum Ismailova. She says, "Sacrifice Zhanna to me, give her to me." She liked Zhanna very much. But they say, "No. We're going to sacrifice her to the others." And drag her downstairs. They drag us downstairs—I don't remember any more. I must have lost consciousness ... or maybe I just blacked out for a minute or something ... I don't know what to call it, it's just not there in my memory. Artur said, "I was on the second floor, and pulled you toward the door of Apartment 41," but I don't remember that. They drag me out into the court¬yard. They were beating Aida out near the road. So I hear Sabirgyul's broth¬er, Vagif—he is from No. 36 on the first floor—I don't know his last name. Vagif, watching them beat Aida, says, "They -didn't beat her enough, it's bet¬ter to kill her." And just when he says this, just at that moment they push me out of the entryway. I turn upon hearing the voice saying, "It's better to kill her," and see Vagif. In the window. He looks at me, starts to laugh, smiles and immediately closes the window and goes into the room. And I. . . well, they're beating me. They hit my head with a stick, a 13-year old boy cut me with a knife, he had a pocketknife, a small one. When I was in the hospital I didn't even show the wound to them, I had treated it myself. They stitched my other wound. There was a knife wound on my chest, almost an inch deep, but I don't remember getting it, because I lost consciousness several times. But the picture of a large kitchen knife in their hands is burned into my memory. They beat me, I fell, got up, they went on beating me, I fell again . . . With my eyes I searched for Zhanna and Aida. I saw them beating Aida, but I couldn't see Zhanna, and kept looking for her. I didn't know what she was. Later she told me that they beat her, too. She called for help, but none of the neighbors responded. She got up and ran, but they tripped her, she fell, but then sprang up and took off again. I know that the crowd drove girls ahead of it, whooping. It would appear a similar fate awaited her, too, but she managed to break away and run off. She ran into a neighboring building, we have a relative who lives there, an uncle. There, probably not having run up all the way, she lost consciousness. Then she came to from the cold in the entryway and started looking for her uncle on the various floors. But her uncle had been saved by his neighbor. So Zhanna wound up in the 18th apartment of the second building of our microdistrict, at the uncle's neighbors'. But this I learned later. They continued to beat Aida and me constantly, and simply couldn't get enough. The guys were all under 25 years old. Most of them were 17 to 18. Most of them. For some reason they were all wearing black. Black and other dark colors. Perhaps so that they would all seem like an ominous dark hoard and it would be impossible to remember individual people. I don't know. They were 17 and 18, those guys. One group of them beat me, and another, Aida, but most of them were upstairs at that time. When they pushed me out into the courtyard I landed right in the crowd, and then someone struck me and I fell face down onto the ground. Someone kicked me quite hard in the chin. The blow was so strong that I just flew up, didn't even fall.. . Once on my feet I could feel blows coming from all sides, I just couldn't stand it... I was no longer in control of myself. I cursed them, called them little pigs, telling them they'd never be people, they would always remain just what they were. Not people! The whole time I was curs¬ing them, maybe they beat me all the more for that. But all the same now I reassure myself with the knowledge that I didn't bow down before them. At the time I was ready for anything, I don't know what I would have done with them, if ... there had been a chance. Then someone called them for help again. Later we found out that they simply couldn't get into the Avakians' apartment, they couldn't break the door down, since Kamo Avakian had managed to electrify the door and they couldn't take hold of the doorknob, couldn't tear the door down. That's why they were calling for help. After shouting for help a group of them, the ones who were beating us, went upstairs. Up till then they had all been beating me; now just three or four remained. I push them back, break away, and run into the entryway. Despite everything it was unpleasant to stand out in broad daylight in that condition. I run into the entryway planning to go upstairs. If not into the apartment, then at least somewhere. I make it up one flight of stairs, go further, but then they strike me. They strike me so hard that I tumble back down the stairs. They grab me by the hair again and drag me out into the courtyard. I somehow manage to continue resisting; there aren't that many of them. Again I push off my attackers and run up the stairs. The ones who had struck me before are no longer there. Apparently they went further upstairs. Upon reaching the second floor, I start to knock at Sveta Mamedova's apartment; she and I were friends. I didn't know that she wasn't home, and I'm shouting "Sveta, open up, please, open up!" Sveta and her husband live in No. 41. Later I found out that they weren't home that day. They had gone to a funeral and left the keys with Khanum, our neighbor in 46. Khanum was already there. She opens the door, lets me in, and when they want to rush in after me. She slams the door and stands in front of it. They strike her for defending an Armenian. When I go into Sveta's apartment my mother is already there. Artur brought her. Where she was beaten and when, I don't know. She's there, covered with bruises. Something is wrong with her eye, she has broken ribs, but that we found out later. She didn't know that yet, she had only been searching for us. Besides me, Mamma, and Khanum, Artur is there, and then Uncle Rafik comes. He comes with Aida, after he had rescued her. She had been stabbed with a knife near the kidneys, and one of the people standing nearby had said, "That's not how to beat someone, let me do it." He took the knife and stabs her too, and tells Aida, "Show us what kind of blood Armenians have." And she wipes up some blood with the palm of her hand and puts it right up to his nose. And of course she received new blows for that, for her audac-ity—imagine, showing them the blood! Aida has three knife wounds. When they beat her, the whole time they demanded that she say she was an Azerbaijani, but she answered, "I'm an Armenian." They also ordered me to do that when they were beating me, and I said, "I will never renounce my faith or my people." So when they were beating Aida and demanding that she say she was an Azerbaijani, Uncle Rafik goes up to them and says, "She's my daughter, look at me." Uncle Rafik speaks Azerbaijani very well. He tells them, "I'm Azerbaijani, and this is my daughter." Well, they must have start¬ed feeling sorry for her or something . . . She was completely bloody. Blood was literally pouring out of her; the wounds were deep ones. Uncle Rafik says, "She's my daughter, she's Azerbaijani." Someone in the crowd says, "She doesn't look like an Azerbaijani, she's too light." Uncle Rafik answers, "My wife's an Armenian." Well, they started cursing him for marrying an Armenian, sarcastically cursing Armenians. That's when Uncle Rafik brought Aida up to where we were. I forgot to say that Artur and Uncle Rafik were beaten as well. Later they found something wrong with Artur's bones, there were some cracks, and Uncle Rafik's arm was broken. They had tried to hit Artur in the head with an axe but, with some difficulty he was able to fend them off. He's such a strong fellow, he was able to turn away from the blow. Uncle Rafik was beaten seriously. They were beaten while we were being dragged out of the pantry. They were yelling that there wasn't anyone in the pantry, they were trying to protect us. They were probably taken for Azerbaijanis, and were beaten for concealing and protecting us, and for lying. So Khanum hides all of us. She had wanted to save Zhanna before that, when they were taking us downstairs. And meanwhile Artur was urging Zhanna to knock at Apartment 41, to hide her in there. That didn't work, evidently, and Khanum dragged Artur into Sveta's apartment. And then they found my mother somewhere. And I went to Sveta's place because I trusted those people. We had been friends with that family, it's a good fami¬ly, Sveta and Viktor Mamedov. I trusted them, I knew that Viktor was the kind of person that ... If Viktor had been there, or our other neighbor, Samvel, an Armenian from Building 6, they would have gone to fight for us, to defend us, and we all would have been cut up for sure. When they dragged me into Sveta's apartment, at least one of the bandits knew that I was in there. He comes and says, "She went in here." He comes into the apartment and sees all of us, but is looking for me. He doesn't think to come in the bathroom, where they had hidden me. He goes through the room, then through the next room, looking for me, but I'm not there. Then he leaves, and a while later returns with two other guys. One of them has a huge knife. Mamma recognized the knife, it was hers. She's a baker, and she had large knives at home. This guy threatens everyone with the knife and keeps repeating, "This is going to end badly. It should never have been start¬ed in the first place, they're making everything worse." And all the while they continue looking for me: they leave, come back in again, and ask, "Where is she? Where is she? She was in here. She came in here." There were three of them. So these three guys from the mob are in Sveta's apartment almost con¬stantly, but they didn't let others come into the apartment, standing next to the door the whole time and telling the others that their relatives lived in the apartment. They don't let anyone in. I hear all this. I hear them looking for me, and hear them not letting anyone in. I don't know why they are looking for me. Maybe because I recognized one of them, the one who used to work with me. Or perhaps they wanted us all together in order to do something with all of us. I don't know . . . Maybe in fact they wanted to save the ones they could, since after a while—I hear this happen—Nelya, crying, comes with Suzanna from apartment 45, Nelya's the Grigorians' daughter-in-law. She comes in with her two kids, Suzanna, who is crying, and Artur Junior. Then Valya comes in with her two, Kristina and Erik. Kristina had been crying in the entryway, she just stood there, crying. I heard her crying and calling, "Mommy, Mommy." When in the Grigorians' apartment that guy wanted to throw Suzanna off the fourth floor, Nelya fell down before him onto her knees, hugged him and pleaded, kissing his feet, "Please, I beg of you, don't throw my daugh¬ter! Don't throw her! Don't throw her!" And she also said, "I'm not from here, I'm from out of town." Maybe those words saved her daughter. The guy left the child alone and said, "So you're not an Armenian, you're a Russian?" But Nelya didn't renounce her faith either, and answered, "I'm an Armenian." She, too, said she was an Armenian, but from out of town, from Stavropol. After that they ended up in Apartment 41. The three guys brought them. I don't know what their intentions were, but one of them tells Nelya, "If this goes on, I'll come for you tomorrow, I'll get you out of here."I didn't know any of the three's names, and I didn't recognize them from anywhere. Mamma later saw one of them at the bus stop; that was two or three weeks after the pogrom. He went up to my mother and said, "They caught my brother, too, the younger one." One of the three stays with us the whole time in Sveta's apartment. The whole time. But I don't see any of them. First he comes in, then goes out, asking where I am. This whole time I am standing completely undressed in the bathroom. I'm stiff with cold, but am afraid to even move, lest—God for¬bid—there'd be some rustle and they'd find me. They're looking for me, con¬stantly coming in and going out, asking. I am completely numb from cold and fear. And my mother is afraid. She's just terrified. That guy keeps repeating, "We saw her come in here. We saw her." My mamma says, "She's not here. She's not." And when he leaves one of those times—someone was calling him—my mother quickly pulls me out of the bathroom and hides me in Sveta's armoire. So we're sitting in Sveta's apartment waiting to see what will become of us. Meanwhile there is a pogrom going on in the apartment under Sveta's, at the Khalafians'. You can hear everything: dishes being smashed, furniture being broken. One of them down there is a good musician, he's playing the folk song "Dary Khram" on the piano. Just then my mother starts sobbing ... no one knows where Zhanna is, we can't find her. He Plays that tune really well. Then someone starts to play with one finger. We hear the melody from the song "Tsup, Tsup, Moi Tsuplyatki," but it's clearly being played by someone else, the first one played really well, he obviously had studied music somewhere. Around eight o'clock or so my mother pushes me into the armoire and I'm sitting in there, listening, and then one of those three guys comes back again and says, "They're still beating your father." Then he tells my mother, "They're still beating your husband." Then he says to Artur, "Come, let's go, let's bring him here." The second time they beat my father was right in our apartment. When they started carrying out the suitcases, Papa said, "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves, what are you doing?" Then they put down the suitcases and said, "He's still alive?" And started to beat him. Soon my father is brought to Sveta's apartment. Mamma saw them beating Uncle Cherkez. Cherkez Grigorian, Aunt Emma's husband. Those creeps took a bowl, a flat-bottomed one, and just beat his face with it, jumping and dancing on him. Nothing was left of his face, it was completely flattened out. There was no nose, nothing. He was in such a horrible state, you couldn't even recognize him. Valya's husband Geros, Cherkez' son, was in Sveta's apartment. And one of those three comes in again. I think it was the voice that I heard earlier, and says, "They're beat¬ing your father too." It seemed like it was the same voice. "Come on," he says, "let's go take him somewhere." First they carry Uncle Cherkez into Sveta's apartment, but because he was groaning so loud, somebody might hear him from downstairs. So they decide to carry Uncle Cherkez into our apartment. They put him on something, an old raincoat or something, and carry him to the apartment. Geros and two of the bandits carry him. They took him away to deflect the blow from us. While this was going on the piano was being played down at Khalafians'. Uncle Cherkez' sister was seriously wounded that day too. She had come to visit from Kirovabad. Later she and I were in the hospital together. When Geros was trying to protect his father, they drew back to hit him with a crowbar, Cherkez' sister jumped out and managed to push Geros, her favorite nephew, out of the way and the blow fell on her head. She fell down unconscious, and then they hit her a few more times with the crowbar. The wounds on her head were just awful—I saw them when they were being treated; she lay next to me. There were a lot of us in Sveta's apartment: Valya and her two kids, Nelya with her two, Geros, my parents and I, Uncle Rafik and Artur, Aida, and Khanum. Then Khanum brings in a woman from Building 6. She lived on the first floor over there, I don't know her name. We were in intensive care together. She had six knife wounds, and that was only in her stomach. Somehow she managed to run away from there and come to Sveta's place, probably she knew Sveta and knew that Sveta would save her. But she did not know that Sveta wasn't home. Khanum told us later, "I was so frightened. She was standing there, covered with blood and saying," 'Let me in, too." This whole time I'm in the armoire. Then those three come back and say, "We're leaving." That was at ten minutes to eleven, I remember well. I remember it because when I came out after they left, I automatically looked at the clock. But there were still more of them down in the entryway. By now real theft was under way. My chest is drenched with blood, and my head hurts badly. Aida is quite ill, one of the three asks her, "You want me to take you to the hospital? Let me take you to the hospital and tell them you're my sister. Nothing bad will happen." But my mother says, "No, you never know . . . No. It will be better if she stays here." Mamma tolls him that there is a first-aid kid in our apart¬ment with bandages and iodine. Ho goes up to our apartment and finds both bandages and iodine in that awful wreckage. Ho brings thorn down, and Aida, she's a medical student, rebandaged herself and put herself in order. Wo don't oven imagine that Uncle Rafik's arm is broken and that my mother has broken ribs. When I come out of the armoire wo at least try to lie down a bit, but nei¬ther Aida nor I can. It hurts when wo lie down. And that woman with the six stab wounds is lying motionless, pressing her lips together so her moan¬ing won't bo hoard. Wo put the kids in Sveta's big bod, and they're crying, constantly asking for things: "Mommy, I want this, I want that ..." And Valya and Nelya are whispering to them, "Bo quiet, bo quiet." I try to lie quietly, but it just won't work—it hurts too much. Then I got up and walk on tiptoes so that—Heaven forbid—they won't hear anything downstairs. It would bo easy for thorn to come back upstairs. Even though there are a lot of us, we're all beaten, we're all weak, there's nothing wo can do. Suddenly 1 hear a noise. No car makes that kind of sound. It's armored personnel carriers. Geros says, "Soldiers have come." I say, "Let's go look." He says, "No, better not." I say, "Let's go look." And we go up to the window, Aida, Valya, and I. I see soldiers. They have caught a group of the bandits. The bandits were leaving with stolen things, the soldiers spotted them—they have truncheons in their hands—and ran after the pillagers. The bandits turned into a dark alley straight through the hospital grounds. The soldiers went after them. They caught some of them. They're leading one of them. He's struggling and cursing the soldiers, saying what did you come for. The other soldiers are walking around saying, "Where are the people? Where are the people? Maybe they're in the basements." I open the window, even though they fuss at me for it. Mamma's yelling at me, and Uncle Rafik says, "Be quiet, what are you doing?" I open the window and shout, "Hey you guys, help! We're up here!" They hear me and come upstairs to where we are. I walk out of the apartment and my chest is all bloody, and my hair is stuck to my head with blood. I walk out, Aida after me, also covered with blood, all bandaged up. We have some kind of rags on us, they don't fit us. One soldier sees us and faints on the spot. They bring him water and give him a drink . . . The other soldier—he turned out to be an Azerbaijani—tells me, "I can't understand how something like this could happen. This can't be understood with human reason." And I say, "Well, they weren't humans at all." He says, "Maybe there was something wrong with them, maybe they Weren't responsible for their actions?" I say, "No, what do you mean, they were just fine." I ask the soldiers, "Where were you all this time? Didn't you see the police weren't helping us?" They answer, "We didn't get the order until eight in the evening." Mamma starts to scold the soldiers, telling them, "Find me my daughter, what have you done with her? Find her!" They say, "We didn't have anything to do with this. We just got here, what could we have done?" And Mamma says, "I'm staying. I'm not going anywhere until I find Zhanna." And she stays with the soldiers. I go upstairs to our apartment thinking at least I might find something of mine. When I'm going up the stairs four soldiers are carrying Uncle Cherkez. Big, strapping guys, they say, "Look away, you'll be frightened." Well, I turned away. Then they put us in the bus; Papa was all ... he just wasn't himself. Aida had only one boot on, the other had gotten lost some¬where. We set out. On the way to the City Executive Committee there are a lot of broken windows. An awful lot. Very many cars are on fire. I see a Volga, it's overturned and burning. There are soldiers lining our route. We arrive at the City Executive Committee building. My dress is bloody, my hair is bloody. As soon as we arrive they carry out Father, and then we get out. Then they take us to the hospital in an ambulance. They take Aida back to Baku that same day in an ambulance because she didn't want to stay in Sumgait no matter what. The next morning when I awaken a nurse comes and tells we that we will be taken away. I don't know if they're taking Father or not, or where they're taking me. I don't know anything at all. They put us in an ambulance, and again I hear that a crowd is wailing somewhere in the distance and wants to attack the hospital. Then they take us to Baku over back roads. We were lucky, if you can use the word in our situation. Our convoy consisted of eight ambulances, and they didn't touch us; but later, when the ambulances returned to Sumgait to take another load of injured people, they were pelted with stones on the way, and the windows were broken. When I was in the hospital there were an ambulance driver and a nurse lying in the neighboring ward. They were in one of the ambulances and were beaten because they tried to help Armenians. There was a girl from Stepanakert with me in the hospital, she was a stu¬dent at the pedagogical institute, in her fifth year of study. On February 28 she was going from Baku to Sumgait to get some notes. Her bus was stopped. Some rogues come onto the bus, look everyone over and say, "Her—she's an Armenian." Then someone says, "She looks like an Armenian." A fellow is sitting next to her, he asks her, "Are you afraid?" "Yes," she answers. He tried to hide her behind him, but those guys come up and say, "You're an Armenian!" They take her student's record book and read: Shakhbazian, Alvida. They drag her off the bus and beat her severely, she has an extremely serious concussion, extremely serious. After that they were going to burn her. They even poured gas all over her. They had wanted to burn my first cousin Aida too, by the way, but there wasn't any gas. They poured alcohol on her, but it didn't work . .. Zhanna survived as the result of a tragic circumstance. Now she has a long scar across her whole stomach from the left side to the right. She survived only because they burned Artur, the fellow from Building 6. They put him on Samvel's motorcycle and burned him. They burned Artur, and half of the bandits ran over to watch a person burn. I don't know if you can be a human and stand by and watch a person burn. Beasts'. I don't know any oth¬er word for them. Beasts! Sadists! Worse than the fascists! Worse! And in those awful minutes while Artur was burning, Zhanna managed to run away ... In Baku they asked me if we wouldn't like to return to Sumgait. No. I wouldn't like to. I will never want to. I don't want to. I can't. Even though I'm drawn to it, it's my home town. My everything was there . . . our every¬thing. Now we're here in Budennovsk, we're living under very difficult con¬ditions. I am a city girl, I'm used to having everything around ... All the conveniences, everything . . . Despite the fact that our new home is like this, I wouldn't like to go back. Never. Not for anything. No. It's difficult to remember all this, of course, but I want to, I want everyone to know the truth. I want them to. I want the exact number of deaths in Sumgait to be made known. I don't believe it was 32. I don't believe it. I want our contemporaries and our descendants to know what happened in Sumgait. I will not be quiet about it. Now I'm very angry. Angry at that peo¬ple, although I had Azerbaijani friends. I respected those people, respected their poets and writers, and liked several of them very much, had their auto¬graphed books at home. Of course I understand, with my mind I under¬stand, that you can't turn your back on a whole people because of a handful of dregs,... but I can't take it. I've lost my trust in them. Although no matter how awful the horrors we endured were, the Armenians won't renounce the aid of honest people, of Azerbaijanis. No one will forget the people who helped us in those awful days. It was an Azerbaijani that saved us, too. After all that I've seen I am no longer afraid of anything. If we're going to have glasnost, then let's have glasnost. I even told them that at the KGB. I said that if the Armenians rise up against the Azerbaijanis, that I'm in there with them. That's just what I told them. I'm against the investigation being handled by the Azerbaijani investiga¬tive agencies. I saw how the police behaved, how the municipal authorities behaved. The investigation will cover up the facts. I want the mass media to finally have their say. But the mass media is guilty of much as well. They're guilty. Guilty. They should have . . . It's always "glasnost this," "glasnost that" with them. But in fact this glasnost isn't anywhere to be found. You have to call a spade a spade, they should have printed the truth. I'm probably bitter now. Perhaps I'm angry, I may well be. But why could they burst into my home, do as they wished with me and my relatives, and then congratulate me and my relatives on surviving and say, well, go live! Go and live . . . August 25,1988 City of Budennovsk

- BARMEN AKOPOVICH BEDIAN Born 1935 Carpenter Agropromstroy Self-Financing Construction Trust Resident at Mir Street, Building 5/7, Apartment 8 Microdistrict No. 1, Sumgait It was like this. I went to the hospital on February 18. They took x-rays. I was having pain in my right knee, and it seemed they had found some salt deposits. I was in bed for treatment from that day on. But the doctors didn't do any analyses; they were waiting for money from me, they wanted a hun¬dred rubles, and only then would they treat me. I didn't give them the mon¬ey, and they didn't start the treatment. My khnami [daughter-in-law's mother], Rima Khalafian, was holding a karasunk for her husband on the 28th. And I thought what kind of relative I would be if I didn't go. I asked the doctor's permission. He told me, "I'll let you go, but you have to be back in the evening." I said, "Fine, I'll be back for sure." The hospital is two blocks away from Microdistrict 3, only 200 yards from Rima's house, but on the morning of the 28th I had to change clothes. So my son came by for me, took me home, and I bathed and changed. My son wanted to go to the karasunk in the car, and I said "Leave the car parked in the lot—the Devil plays funny jokes—or they'll up and set it on fire." The day before, on the 27th, from the hospital window I saw cars being burned. That was in the evening, about five, five-thirty. Entire streets were blocked with people. There was shouting and noise: "Down with the Armenians!" There were slogans and flags. Almost every car that came through was pelt¬ed with rocks, and buses and trolleybuses were damaged. "Drive the Armenians away from here! Get rid of any trace of them! Kill them any way you can!" This was the type of shouting that could be heard. A crowd was walking along the street; it had a leader. He had a bullhorn, and was walking in the front and commanding with the bullhorn: "Shout hurrah! March with strong voices so the Armenians run away! . . . Destroy the Armenians!" He was a stocky man of average height, dressed in black . . . All of Sumgait was mixed up in this. From Block 15 to Lenin Street itself, that whole dis¬tance of slightly better than a mile was filled with crowds, twenty to thirty thousand, no less. Then it all seemed to settle down. I go back to my ward and say, "You guys that was probably the end of the demonstrations." But the Azerbaijanis with whom I shared the ward, says "That's just for starters, just wait and see." I say, "What's going to happen?" One of them says, "All the Armenians are going to be killed." In disbelief I ask, "Listen, why are they going to kill the Armenians?," although with my own eyes I did see them stop a bus next to the hospital, shouting "Are there any Armenians on board? Any Armenians? Get off the bus!" A bit later they caught an Armenian; he broke away and started to run away. And the people who were in my ward—they were on the other side—I seem them zip! dash over to that window. I say, "What's going on? What?" They say, "The Armenian's getting away, they can't catch him." And one of them adds, "No big deal, he only has a day left to live, they'll finish him off tomorrow anyway." And the other, who was also in our ward, says, "Today all the Armenians are being beaten outside, their cars are being burned, and tomorrow," he says, "they'll get into their apartments and kill them all, and burn their apartments." I ask, "How do you know?" He answers, "I won't tell you, but I know that's what's going to happen.-"So in the morning, as I said, my son takes me home, and I change. My son says, "Let's take the car." I say, "No, we won't take the car. Leave the car on the lot." Well, he did what I said. At this time my wife returns home from the late shift and says, "Let me nap for an hour and we'll all go together." I say, "Lie down, we'll wake you." But she fell into such a sound sleep after the night shift that we didn't want to wake her up. We left her and quietly went out, the three of us: my son Andrei, his wife Stella, and I. So we set off along Mir Street and there at the intersection we see two people standing here, three people there, five people over there, and little groups standing in other places. And there are a lot of fire department and police vehicles; they're all there as well. And I say, "See, Andrei, something's probably going to happen again." He answers, "No, really? There are so many police and firemen, cer¬tainly they can stop them." And I say, "What will be, will be ... let's go." We get to Rima Khalafian's place and see the tent. Everything's all ready, but the tables aren't set. I ask, "When are we going to the cemetery?" Someone tells me, "They've already gone to the cemetery, we're waiting for them to return." Stella's feelings are hurt: "Without me," she says, "they went to my father's grave?" Soon they're back from the cemetery. We set the tables very quickly. I didn't sit, of course; as a close relative I looked after the oth¬ers, helping out as I could. Well, the precinct policeman was there and five other policemen with him, to protect us. They even sat with us. Each drank a glass of tea, saying, now don't be afraid, nothing's going to happen, every¬thing will be all right, everything's going to be fine. The person at the head of the table, the master of the toasts, pronounced the first toast to the memo¬ry of Misha, the deceased, and was ready to say the second toast, and we see, from over there, from the Druzhba Street side, a huge mob coming! Like a black cloud. The policemen each quickly pull a spike out of the fence and set off toward the crowd at a run. So they run over there and stop the mob. think the police told them "Listen, as long as we're here don't come over, but we'll leave, and then you can do what you want." I'm sure that's how it was So the police return from the crowd and say, "Quickly, clear the tables, they be here soon." Quick-like, in 10 or 15 minutes, we clear everything off the tables, gather it all together and take it inside. Most of the guests from Sumgait did not come to the karasunk because they were afraid, but the relatives from Baku came. Everything was peaceful there. Seeing what was up they quickly left, seven to eight people in a car. As the close relatives we stayed at the apartment. Our dear Rima says that since we didn't eat any¬thing, let's at least set a table in the apartment. And indeed, I had had noth¬ing at all to eat. We set a small table in the apartment and I have a bite to eat. I think, "I'll go rest a bit, I'm tired from all that, I just got overly excited, and got tired out." I go off to lie down for a while. Then, when I get up, I look—they're just now drinking tea, they've poured me a cup too. And so there are 11 teacups on the table. I drink a cup of tea, watching. Then I see the same crowd, with the same racket, and the same cries: "Kill the Armenians! Destroy them! Burn them!" And the black mob comes into the courtyard. Ours is Building 5, where we were holding the karasunk, and across from it is Building 6, and there are 30-35 yards between them. There isn't a free inch in that space. It's black with those Muslims. They ask the residents of Building 6, "Do any Armenians live in your building?" I guess they don't get an answer. In any case, the windows are closed and we don't hear anything. Then someone in the mob says "Armenians live on the third floor!" I look and see the whole gang go up to the third floor in our entryway. Not two or three minutes go by when I hear Sasha, the neighbor who lives on the third floor, being dragged down the stairs. He is shouting, and they are dragging him. They haul him right outside. This I see from the kitchen. Rima's second daughter, Irina, is there. She shouts, "They're killing Uncle Sasha! They're killing Uncle Sasha!" I say, "Listen, you be quiet or the same thing will happen to us! Be quiet!" Her mother drags her away from the window. They beat Sasha so that I thought that was it, he was already dead. They drag him around and throw him to one side just like a rag. And immediately I see them dragging his wife Lena by the hair. They also pull her outside and begin to beat her. So then they say that Armenians live on the fourth floor too. Yuri Avakian lived up there, I used to work with him. They killed him, they dragged him downstairs and burned him alive . .. I forgot to say that before going into the house we took down the tent. We took down the tables and benches we had rented and stacked them on top of one another, and put the tent on top of them, but left the metal tent frame standing. And when they came into the courtyard, one of them said, "Should we burn it or not?" Another said, "What are you waiting for? Burn the Armenian tent!" And then—I don't know if they poured gas on it or started the fire with paper—I watched it go up! Irina says, "Maybe we should go out and tell them not to burn it?" "Listen," I say, "are you a fool or what? Why go out? So that they burn us up with it? Right there in the tent?" Now the flames reach all the way up to the fifth floor. They throw Yuri right into the fire ... When I saw them beating Sasha I knew that the same thing might happen to us. And I hear someone in the courtyard say, "Armenians live on the first floor, too." Another says, "Those aren't Armenians, they're Lezgin, we can leave them alone." At this point an Azerbaijani came from the neighboring apartment to use the phone, saying that they've killed Sasha, we need to call an ambulance, maybe he's still alive. She called all around, then she calls her brother and he says look what's going on here in the yard, get over here quick, maybe they're going to start killing us, too. I tell her, "You're Muslim, why would they kill you? It's us they're killing." She hangs up the phone and wants to leave. I won't let her. Now the first stone comes flying in the window. Rima says, "Let's go down into the basement." I say, "Right, all of you, quickly, go down into the basement." And my son, Andrei, says, "Look Papa, if we all go down in there, I'm going, but if someone stays, I'm staying too." I quarrel with him and say, "Get down there, quick." He obeys me, and all ten of the people who were in the apartment, I let them all down into the basement. There was an old doormat, an old rug. I cover the trap door with the mat and place the rented dishes on top of the rug and put it over the trap door, too, so that the door can't be seen. I was all alone. And like a polar bear in the cage—have you ever seen one?—pacing from one side to the next, just like that I walk back and forth in the apartment. I see my death before my eyes, that's it... I think, they're young, let them live, and as for me, the hell with it! I've lived 52 years, let them kill me, it'll be OK. And when the first stone comes flying in the win¬dow I think that's it, they're upon us. I look, one stone after the next, one after the next, they break all the windows. And the Muslim, the woman, after all of us have gone down into the basement, she stays in the apartment for a while. I wouldn't let her out. She wants to open the door, and—whoosh!—I pull her away from the door. She tries again, and—whoosh!—I pull her away again. And then her brother sees her from the courtyard, and shouts, "What, have you died in there? Come out!" She says, "They won't let me out, they won't let me come out." I let her out. They pulled her out of the kitchen window. I held her, I couldn't let her out the door, they would have come in immediately from the entry-way, they would have figured out it was an Armenian apartment. So they pull her out of the window. I look and through the window, through the door, through the veranda, they're pouring in on us from three different directions. And I go off into the bedroom, there was a chest of drawers in there. I move it up against the door. When they get into the living room they say, "Hey, there's a lot of stuff in here, everybody, come in here!" There was vodka left; they hadn't let us have our karasunk. I hear one of them giving out vodka. There was a crate of wine, 18 bottles. They broke all the bottles, right there in the room. It looked as though someone had poured it out of buckets. They broke up all the wine bottles, but they didn't break up the vodka. They were giving out a bottle to each person. And then someone says, "Here's a tape recorder—the tape recorder's mine!" Someone else says, "The rug is mine." "Hey," a third one cries, "they've got a piano!" They open up the piano, and apparently one of them has had a musical education, he played it so well, their melodies and songs. One is playing the piano, anoth¬er says, move over, let me play; he plays a while, and the next one says, move over, I want to play too. I think four people played the piano, and they all played extremely well. They start pushing on the door to the bedroom, the chest of drawers moves, and they come in. I am pressed against the wall on the other side of the chest. They come toward me and see me. One of them says, "Ah, here you are, you son of a bitch. We found you!" Both rooms are dark, the apart¬ment is completely filled, they even climbed up on the beds. Young, healthy guys, 18 to 25 years old. And they weren't slobs, either, they weren't wearing work clothes. They were well dressed: One of them had a coat on, one had a fashionable leather trench coat with shoulder straps. When they were in the courtyard their hands were empty, but now, I look, they've got some sort of shiny iron rods, I don't know if they had them in their sleeves or if they had them hidden somewhere else, a foot or a foot and a half long, each one has one. They are glinting in their hands. I say, "Listen you guys, take what you want from the house, but leave me alone." "You son of a bitch, you still dare to speak?" And they start to beat me on the head. I feel blood streaming down from my head . . . They hit me about five times with the rods. I tell you those rods were specially turned on a lathe, I think they were pointed. That takes more than a day to do. They were all the same size, the size that would fit in your sleeve. Later I heard somewhere that those rods had had points put on them specially at the tube-rolling plant. So they struck me about five times in the apartment, and one of them—he was standing on the bed—kicks me in the left eye, and I think, that's it, no more eye. Like an inner tube being pumped up, I feel my eye getting bigger and bigger. And I couldn't get the blood out of my right eye so that I could see. I had a ring on my third finger, that finger still won't bend: they beat on the ring with the metal rod and the ring flew off, and they took it. They took my watch. I had money in my pocket, which they took right away, even the change. I had my driver's license and my passport with me, and they took them. They took my coat off over my head ... I wipe the blood out of my eye and I see all their beastly faces through red. I recognized one of them. His name was Myarkyaz, which means "center." I don't know if they caught him or if he is still on the loose. He lives in temporary housing, and has lived that way a long time; he doesn't have an apartment. He's in his forties. I know that he works in the village of Khyrdalan, at PMK-18—that's what they used to call the place; now they call it MDMK-25. There are five broth¬ers; they all live there, in that temporary housing. One of the brothers, the younger one, they sent off to the country. It seems the mother and father live there, they're old. Now that Myarkyaz didn't beat me, he did not even come near me; he recognized me and turned away. Now when they started beating me and put my eye out, they hit me in the teeth so hard that everything is still loose in there. One of them says, "If we kill him here, no one will see. Let's drag him outside and kill him there." I was glad, I think, "That's good, they won't hear my cries in the basement. "But no matter how they beat me I didn't make a sound, because I think my son, he's young, he'll cry out from down there and they'll find out where they are. So when I hear they're going to drag me outside I become glad. When they dragged me away from the wall, I fell over. I was nearly unconscious, as it turns out. But when they hauled me out of the main door and the fresh air hit me, I sort of came alive again. They dragged me out of the entryway. I look, there's a fire burning, and they say, "Let's throw him in the fire." And—how did I have that supernatural strength after all the blows? I took two of them and slammed them into one another, I had the strength to do that. One fell one way, one fell the other. God gave me size and strength. And though I was in the hospital with a bad leg, probably no car would have been able to catch me, that's how fast I ran in terror. The young guys, 25 or 30 people, chased after me shouting "Catch him! Hold him! ..." And I ran. I ran some 100 to 150 yards, and see a police car, a Volga-GAZ model 24. It was coming slowly and stopped in front of me. I think, "Good, he's going to save me from them." I went for the door handle and wanted to open it, but the car took off with such a jerk that I nearly fell over. Vroom! And it was gone. Police, police . . . please! The car drove away, and I took off running again. I can't see anything at all out of my left eye, and I only have enough time to wipe away the blood from the right so I can see where I'm running. When the police drove off I knew that there was no saving me, and I ran on. And they were after me. I was already losing speed, and they were shouting . . . Three people appeared in front of me, two men and an old woman. The old woman presses against the fence, so as not to fall under the feet of the mob and the two men . . . The mob is shouting, "Catch him, catch him! The Armenian is getting away! Catch him!" and those two bastards grab me. Then the ones following me catch up. So they catch up, and start beating me on the head again with those rods. Now they're only beating me from behind, on the back of the neck and head. You can still see the marks, and the stitches, you can still see everything on my head. I passed out and fell down. On the ground the only thing I can feel is that they are still beating me on my back. Like they are beating a log. I can't feel anything any more, I can't feel any pain, I can only hear the noise, the sound of them beating me. Kicks to my ribs. It still hurts when I cough, I have dizziness, and vomit blood. More than a month and a half has passed, and I am still vomiting blood. I showed my son where they threw me down and told him, "I lost a buck¬etful of blood here." That was between the hospital and the Maternity Home buildings. They beat me and beat me and left me for dead. And said, "Let's go back." I heard it all as if in a dream. When they left I couldn't feel anything. I don't know how long I lay there, if it was a long time or not. Then I can sense a person coming up to me, still as though I'm dreaming, I feel someone touch me, an old Russian woman, "My son, my son." I am not sure whether I am dreaming or not,... I come to and say, "Huh?" "Are you alive, my son?" I say, "Yes, I'm alive." "Get up," she says, "leave, those bastards will come back here." She helps me. She helps me up and leads me to a small park in front of the hospital. She leads me up to the park and says, "I'll come back, but if they see me helping you they kill me, too." Somehow, thinking that I'll collapse any second, I make my way to the hospital to reception. I knock at the door, and a doctor comes right away. He sees me and immediately covers his face with his hands. So he wouldn't see me, that's how awful I looked. And the doctor keeps me there some three hours. Three hours. He doesn't do anything. When my fever starts, when I start to shake like I'm going to die, they get scared too. There's a nurse there, Polina, an Armenian I know well. The doctor says, "Come on, Polina, give him two shots." I say, "Polina, be careful what you put in that needle. Otherwise, heaven forbid, you might get the wrong thing in there . . . but the hell with it, I'm going to die anyway." She looks at the ampules, one has an analgesic, and the other has morphine or something like that. She says, "Uncle Barmen, don't be afraid, it's an anesthetic." She gives me the shots, and then I ask her for cigarettes. She brings me one from somewhere. I light up. They don't even help me wash up, wash the blood off myself. The doctor tells me, "Go wash up." I go and wash out my eyes, I don't have strength for anything else. Then they see that I am shaking all over. The doctor, a young man with a moustache, takes me into a small room with a little sofa and says, "Lie down on the sofa." I lay there about ten minutes, and then I was taken to the third floor. They took me up there in order to sew up my head, to put in the stitches. No shots, nothing . . . they don't even clean or wash my head. When he sticks the needle in and pulls the thread I come right up with the needle. I say, "Doctor, listen, I'm a person too, and as long as my heart is still beating, I still feel pain. Give me a shot." "You're fine and healthy, you can stand it," he says. So he put in the stitches, and he used some sort of rag—either they didn't have any gauze, or they didn't want to waste it on me. They wrapped up my head and put me in Ward 7, on the fourth floor. I don't know what happened to the people in the basement. I kept think¬ing about them. I'm thinking, "Did they find them or not?" I spent the night in the hospital, and don't have any news about them. In the morning around ten o'clock I went down to the third floor, where surgery is, and say, "Listen, are you going to change the bandage or am I going to go on wearing this rag?' The nurse says, "It's too early, come back at twelve." The nurse is a Russian, and I say, "Hey, do you have a telephone I could use to call and see It my relatives are alive?" She tells me that there is a phone in the room where the doctors are. In the house surgeon's office. She says, "Go call from here." Well, I set off down the corridor—it's so hard to walk!—and find the house surgeon's office, where I see the doctor who sewed up my head and some woman in a white lab coat sitting there. I say, politely, "Excuse me, might I use the phone?" This woman—I don't know who she is, a doctor, or a nurse, or a nurse's aide—just flies at me: "Not good enough for you, huh? Your nation should be completely eliminated, so there wouldn't be any more of you left in the world!" "If I had the chance," she says, "I'd kill your whole Armenian nation with this needle!" This woman tells me all this. And I start to cry... This I just can't take, and start to cry ... She wouldn't let me call and I couldn't find out where my wife was, where my children were, and what became of our people in the basement Later it turned out that they were all alive and well, and they had told my wife that I had been killed. Then the head of our department and some other doctor come in and say "Who here are wounded Armenians? They have to leave the hospital. There are cars waiting for you downstairs. You're being taken to Baku." I tell the department head, "Look, how can I go. My wife and children are here, I don't know where they are." "No," he says, "you have to leave here." And they forcibly removed me from the hospital. Because it's night, he said, the hospital will be attacked. "And we should suffer because of you Armenians?" he says, "Our hospital should be burned?" I say, "Listen, I helped build this hospital myself, with my own hands, and now you're throwing me out of here?" "We're not going to suffer because of you," he says, "there's an ambulance downstairs, go and get in it." What could I do? If they're throwing me out, I have to leave. I went downstairs and got in the ambulance. There are four people besides me, right on top of one another. All are Armenians, all are in serious condition. I know them—it's Sogomon's children and his granddaughter. The brothers Alexander and Yuri, their sis¬ter, Marietta, and her daughter of about ten. Marietta's last name is Sayants, but I don't know what Sogomon's sons' last name is. The three adults were badly beaten. Yuri and Marietta's condition is the worst. They were beaten horribly. They didn't touch the child, but she went dark from fear, and made herself into a ball between her mother's legs. They rush the five of us into the ambulance and now we're supposed to go to Baku, but the city is still full of those mobs. And no sooner do we leave the hospital than they are after us, throwing stones at us. They break all the windows in the ambulance. There was a stretcher in there. I take the blanket and cover up the window so the stones won't hit us in the head. And we lay down right on the floor. The driver sees that he can't go anywhere—we were right next to the Emergency Hospital—he just turns and drives right into the building. We stood there for about four hours. The mob, which was throw¬ing stones at us, started to break down the hospital gates. Apparently they had to finish us off, so there wouldn't be any witnesses. But the gates there are iron, and they can't break them down. Then they take some kind of bus, toss out the driver and sit at the wheel themselves. The streets are narrow right there, there's nowhere to turn around—and start ramming the gates with the bus in reverse. The ambulance driver comes up and says, "I feel bad about my car, they're going to find us now and burn it." And I say, "You creep, should you feel bad about the car or the five people in it?!" "There," he says, "is a burned up Zhiguli. A family was trying to get away in it, and they burned them up." I look and see the car, but you can't tell if it was a Zhiguli or not. And inside, five people, blacker than black, burned up … Apparently the family had wanted to get away, and they caught them some-where and burned them. I saw it with my own eyes. The car was completely black, you couldn't tell if it was a Zhiguli or a Moskvich. There was no license plate, no glass, no wheels, nothing. They brought it to the Emergency Hospital into the building. I don't know if they pushed it in, or brought it in something, maybe they towed it in ... I don't know how the car ended here. And five corpses . . . You can see all the bones . . . You can see the skulls... The ambulance driver says, "You see, five people were burned. Now the same thing's going to happen to my car." And we sat there around four hours, in that ambulance, like dead men. The driver would leave and then return, leave, and return. "Lie down," he says, "don't breathe." And then everything settles down. They open the gates, and an ambulance comes out of the Emergency Hospital and drives off. I don't know why it was going, but as soon as it starts off, the mob leaves. It seemed to become quieter in the Emergency Hospital building. Then I look and see that a Zhiguli has come in from the other side, and there are traffic cops in it. They tell our driver, "Come on, follow us." And the gates open. Off we go, with the traffic police leading our way. We don't take Baku Street. We go toward the sea, and then turn toward the village Jorat, and from there toward Microdistrict 17, then through the village Sarai, going a really roundabout way . . . And finally we come out onto the thoroughfare and I see a huge crowd of police¬men, troops, and tanks. I sighed quietly, thinking, Thank God, it looks like I'm going to survive. And they took us to Baku. We were treated fine in Baku. The doctors in the republic hospital, there were Armenians, and Russians, and Jews, and Azerbaijanis — I'm honest about it, they all treated us well. Fine. My wife, son, and relatives found me in that hospital. They had searched the hospitals and morgues for me. Andrei said that they stood almost until dawn in that basement, neither dead nor alive. The military evacuated them. On March 9, when I was discharged from the hospital, the investigators came to see me. I asked them straight away, "Where are you guys from?" They were Russians. "We're from the Committee," they say. "From what Committee?" I ask. "From Baku," they answer. I say, "I'm not giving you any testimony." "Why?" "Because it won't go any further than the paper you put it on." They forced me all the same, and I told them everything. I told them the same thing I told you. Later, they take me and two other victims back to Sumgait in an ambulance. We were wearing hospital clothes, flannel robes, that's what we wore to the City Council. We went up to the third floor and they told us that there was a General up there. I raced to him, to tell him everything, everything that happened to me, what they did to the Armenian people. But they wouldn't let us in to see him. Soldiers were guarding him. We disobeyed them and forced our way in to see him. The General saw the three of us. "Where are they from?" he asks. I tell him, "We fled from the prison." He says, "Change their clothes and bring them back to me." They convinced us and then took us in the ambulance to the boarding house to change our clothes. They gave me this suit, the one I'm wearing now, changed my clothes, and told me, "There's some Minister or other here, Seidov, you can see him." I went up to the second floor, found Seidov, the Chairman of the Azerbaijani Council of Ministers, and talked with him face to face. I say, "So you're a minister?" "Yes, I'm a minister." "I have a favor to ask of you. I want to leave here in my car, for Stavropol, I want to get away from these beasts, and be closer to people. I want to go there, help me get away from here." Well, he says, aren't you a man? Can't you leave in your own car by yourself? You are supposed to have a man's heart . . . And that was it. In a word, he wasn't going to provide any assistance. If you want to go, go. Then I told him, "You're no minister, you're a herdsman." And then I felt something in my heart, and I fell down. He called some doctors, and they took me downstairs, gave me some shots, and I came to again ... That's how it all was. Then on March 14 the whole family left Sumgait for Baku, and waited for the 24th. We had tickets for Yerevan on the 24th. And so we flew here. Our thanks to the Armenian people, who met us at the airport and put me in the hospital; now I'm being treated properly. Since I still need treatment my doc¬tor said, "You need to be in bed another two months. I'll discharge you, but you need rest. Go to a boarding house, spend some time with your family, rest. We have really sick people here," he says, "you don't need to see them." April 24, 1988 Yerevan

- VLADIMIR GRIGOREVICH PETROSIAN Born 1956 Barber Sumgait Barbershop No. 1 - MARINA MIKHAILOVNA PETROSIAN (KHALAFIAN) His wife Born 1962 Housewife Residents at Building 24, Apartment 2 Block 4 Sumgait -Vladimir: On Saturday, February 27, we were at my mother-in-law's. We were all returning home together. On the way the trolleybus is stopped, and the crowd started to shout: "Any Armenians in there? Out with you!" This was the second time. We had already been stopped near the Bakhar Restaurant. "Armenians out!" They told the bus driver, "Open the door!" But the driver wouldn't open the door. Then they started to break the glass and threaten to overturn the bus. "If there are any Armenians among you, come out!" Everyone in the bus started saying "No Armenians in here." They stopped bothering us and left, since there were no Armenians. There were probably two or three thousand of them. They were demonstrators, coming from Lenin Square on the main drag. We just happened to be coming their way. -Marina: I got frightened because of the kids. I didn't know that the worst was still ahead of us. -Vladimir: We got home. I looked out the window, and there was a rally going on in Lenin Square. I couldn't hear anything, so I opened the window and caught a few phrases. The speaker was saying calm down, we won't give Karabagh to the Armenians, Karabagh is ours. From the crowd some¬one said that if that didn't happen they'd be back again the next day at ten o'clock with a new demonstration. A young fellow at the microphone said My mother lives in Agdam, I can't bring her here, all the roads are closed. Maybe they've already killed her there." Like that, yes. Another says that the Armenians in Karabagh killed two Azerbaijanis, a 16-year old, and the other, a 22-year old, wasn't it... -Marina: And this they said after Katusev, Deputy General Procurator of the USSR, spoke on television. He said that two Azerbaijanis were killed. Can it really be right to say something like that on television?! It was right after that that they became so angry. -Vladimir: That's what we think. That's what everyone thinks. They say everything started after that. -Marina: And everyone blames that Katusev. -Vladimir: The next day was the karasunk for my wife's father. I got up in the morning and said to my wife, "You stay with the kids, I'll go find out what's going on. Maybe the situation in town is such . . . that it's dangerous to go outside." My father and I went to see my wife's mother. Her name is Rima Khalafian. She says, "Well, are we going to mourn today?" "It's danger¬ous today," I say. She says, "Well that's all right, there's nothing we can do anyway, the guests have already been invited." I say, "Then let's go get the police, they'll come here and keep watch, if someone should come ..." So we went and told the police. Then my wife and my mother arrived. And we had wanted to rent a bus. We went out, but couldn't find one—no one would agree to drive. They said, "What, not on a day like today. I don't care if you give me 100, 200 rubles. I won't do it." We went back to the police. They rounded up a small bus and rode with us to the cemetery. We held the ceremony and all went home together. We had a tent set up in the courtyard for the occasion. The tables were set, the relatives were sitting down, and the police were standing there. Somewhere around one o'clock in the afternoon we look and see a crowd coming. We say to the police, "Do something." There were seven policemen. In the yard they found sticks and some sort of pipes . . . they hadn't brought anything with them, no weapons, nothing. So they up and set out toward the crowd. Five minutes later they come back and say, "Pick everything up quickly! They'll be back." Well, we say "We just sat down, by tradition we must drink toasts for the soul to rest in peace ..." There were about a hundred people sitting in the tent, they're saying, "what do you mean, half an hour? Everything has to be cleared away in two or three minutes, they'll be right back." Well we packed everything up and the relatives immediately went their separate ways. The ones who had come by cars from Baku—everybody. The closest relatives stayed on. I didn't want to go home, I figured it would probably be safer here: we're right downtown, it'll begin here, it's better to stay. We sat in my mother-in-law's apartment. Suddenly we hear shouting: "Hurrah! Hurrah!" They were coming. We look and there are hundreds of people in the courtyard—it's filled. -Marina: They're whistling and yelling. "Hurrah!" "Ermeni! Ermeni!" [Armenian! Armenian!] -Vladimir: The crowd moves closer and falls upon the tables, benches, and the tent: they gather it all up into a pile and set it on fire. Uncle Sasha Avanesian and his family lived on the third floor. He came out onto the bal¬cony and shouted, "You pigs, animals, what are you doing?" -Marina: His daughters were shouting too. -Vladimir: But he didn't realize that they had come for him, for us, come to kill us. And when they heard him they shouted "on the third floor!" We heard their voices in the entryway when they were going up the stairs: the Avanesians live on the third floor, we're on the first. -Marina: They say, "It's they, probably, who are having the karasunk." -Vladimir: "There," they say, "that's where the Armenians live, let's go." -Marina: That's just what they said, "gurkhy," that's karasunk in Azerbaijani. -Vladimir: When they came to where we were they knew that one of the Armenians was having a karasunk. A Russian in Building 6 told them. Later, on March 10, he saw my father at the bazaar, they're friends. He says, "You had a karasunk on a day like that? We told them," he says. "They came to us and asked whose it was. We said 'the Armenians'. If we hadn't told them, they would have killed us." They already knew, they knew when they were coming that it was an Armenian karasunk. They just got the floor wrong at first. The crowd goes up to the third floor. We hear shouts. My mother-in-law says, "That's Lena Avanesian." -Marina: The daughters were screaming. -Vladimir: The daughters were screaming, "Help! Help!" -Marina: "Stabbing! Murder!" -Vladimir: They stripped them naked and took them out into the court¬yard, and began to beat them. I saw this out the window. I hadn't yet gone down into the basement. -Marina: They took Uncle Sasha into the courtyard first, and started beat¬ing him. How they beat him! We heard his cries. "God, it's Uncle Sasha ..." -Vladimir: Yes, it was Uncle Sasha. They mocked him. Our girls were say¬ing, "The pigs, look what they're doing." And he was in the courtyard, screaming. . . -Marina: He was a Class 2 war veteran, he had seen combat . . . When they were still in the apartment you could hear the voice of his wife. And the swearing from those in the mob . . . The daughters were screaming and crying. Then they started knocking on our door. -Vladimir: Not knocking, they were breaking it down. -Marina: There was an Azerbaijani in our apartment, a neighbor. She had come over to use the phone. Her name is Sabirgyul. She lives across from us. She came and says Sasha's in bad shape, let's call an ambulance. We try to call, but it's impossible to get through. No one answers the phone. We asked Sabirgyul, "Stay with us." -Vladimir: "If anyone knocks, say that Azerbaijanis live here so they won't come in." And she says, "Good, I'll say it, but stay with me, I'm afraid too." My mother-in-law is in an awful state: "I'm most afraid for Irina." Irina is her second daughter, a beautiful single girl. "Now they're coming here," my mother-in-law says, "now they're coming here." Irina says, "I'm not going into the basement, I'm staying here!" Her mother screams at her, "You're crazy. What's important now is to save you; you go downstairs. We're all going to the basement." When everyone who had been in the apartment was in the basement, I stayed with Uncle Barmen. Sabirgyul says, "If you leave me, if you go away, I'll say that there are Armenians here, I'm afraid." I reassured her, "Don't worry, I'll be here right next to you." And she calls out the window, "Don't come in here," and while she does it, she waves her hand to indicate that there are no Armenians here, "Azerbaijanis live here." But someone in the courtyard gives us away, and the mob starts to throw stones against the glass. Sabirgyul is shouting and rushing about. . . But her broth- er, Vagif, is in the yard. "What are you in there dying for?" he says, "come out of there." And Sabirgyul goes out. I tell Uncle Barmen, "Let's go down to the basement too. Maybe they won't find us." He says, "No, you go. I'll go into the bedroom, I'll be in the bedroom." I go downstairs and he closes the trap door after me. And immediately they rush in, and it all began. You could hear everything in the basement. -Marina: Yes, you could hear everything. And there was so much noise: they weren't just wrecking our apartments, but other people's, too. You could hear the sound of glass, something fall from high up. -Vladimir: Then they brought Emma Grigorian from the fourth floor into the courtyard. Before that they beat her husband, Cherkez, near the entry-way. They beat him for five or six hours. Regardless of who or what group went up to him, they all beat him. They hit him on the head with frying pans, I don't know what all they hit him with, on the head .. . -Marina: He groaned so, and cried out! You could hear the cries of Valya, Emma and Cherkez' daughter-in-law, all the way from the fourth floor. She screamed like a crazy person, calling her 6-year old daughter: "Krishna! Kristina!" We had already thought that they had taken her, carried her off. Poor Valya is screaming, and there is laughter from the yard: "No-oo, there's no Kristina any more, not any more!" Some boy was calling from the yard. Others were also laughing because she was shouting "Kristina! Kristina!" They had killed her, and that's all there was to it. Then they brought out Aunt Emma, I heard her voice, too. They stripped her. And when they broke down our door and came in they said, "Ah, there's bread here!" Muslims don't serve bread at a karasunk. -Vladimir: They said, "This is the house that had the karasunk. Come on, let's wreck it, let's break everything ..." -Marina: "Don't drink vodka from open bottles, they're probably poi¬soned. Don't eat anything, there might be poison in it. Take the unopened vodka." Then we heard them curse the memory of my father and throw his photograph .. . -Vladimir: It was a big photo, an enlargement, on the piano. They stomped on it and threw it out into the yard. -Marina: They cursed my mother in every possible way . . . Then they started to play the piano. The felt themselves quite at home, quite free, they took their time breaking everything ... I heard someone being beaten in the room. -Vladimir: That was Uncle Barmen. They found him . .. -Marina: I also thought that it was Uncle Barmen, my sister's father-in-law. They started beating him . . . And I say, "I think they're beating Uncle Barmen." And Vladimir says, "No, he went with the neighbor, Sabirgyul." -Vladimir: I said that so that everyone else in the basement would not panic. There were ten of us down there. -Marina: And Barmen's son, Andrei . . . we could barely hold him back. He couldn't bear it, he kept whispering, "My father's up there! My father's up there!" We barely held him back. We calmed him: "Don't worry, your father is at the neighbor's." Then we hear them say, "Let's go up to the fourth floor. There are Armenians there, too. Let's go up there!" The mob went up to the fourth floor, and what they did up there! This I found out about later, when the soldiers in the armored troop carriers came. Through the grate I saw them burn somebody; later I found out it was Yuri Avakian. He also lived on the fourth floor. They just dragged him out of the apartment, beat him, and then burned him . . . Through the basement window I saw a per¬son burning ... I couldn't take it any more, I thought "God!" I thought that it was Uncle Cherkez, but it was Yuri. -Vladimir: He held them off for a long time, Yuri, a long time. I heard the Azerbaijanis say "We just can't seem to break his door down. Get a crowbar, quickly! Get a crowbar to break down this door!" His son told me the details later. His name is Kamo. He climbed down the balconies. He said, "At work I'm afraid to look down from the second floor, I cannot imagine how I got down from the fourth floor." -Marina: Kamo somehow managed to hook electricity up to the door and shock the people in the mob. -Vladimir: They got the metal frame from the bed and stood it up against the door and ran the current through it, so the frame would be live. Then they poured water on the floor. So the floor was conducting electricity too The mob came in and was shocked. Then they dragged in mattresses from the neighboring apartment, where the Grigorians lived, and raced into the apartment over the dry mattresses. -Marina: Someone in the crowd yelled, "When we get the door open we'll cut them all up, every last one!" Because it had taken them so long with the door. Kamo's parents had gone from the back room, from the bedroom, over the balcony to their neighbor's; she's an Azerbaijani named Khanum. But the bandits guessed that they had probably gone to her place, since there was no where else they could have gone on the fourth floor. And they started to pound on her door. Khanum opens the door, gets onto her knees, and says What do you want? Don't hurt these people! Here, if you want blood ..." and she cuts her leg, runs a knife along it, "here, here's blood for you! But don't hurt them!" But all the same they just grabbed Yuri by the arms and led him off. But they didn't kill his wife . . . From our section of the building they killed two people: Yuri Avakian and Emma Grigorian. Cherkez Grigorian and Sasha Avanesian didn't die, but now they might as well be dead. Our Uncle Barmen is also in serious condition . . . We saved ourselves, but what we went through down in that basement!" -Vladimir: There were so many boxes in the basement that it was impossi¬ble to move -Marina: There was nowhere to stand. -Vladimir: The basement was small, really small. And we squeezed together into a clump away from the trap door so that they wouldn't see us it they opened it. -Marina: We were packed in there. My child, Diana, was drenched in sweat. .. -Vladimir: She was completely drenched when we came out of there . . . -Marina: She was afraid to make a sound. She says, "Mamma, who is that?" I say, "Diana, dear, be still! Later, later!" She was all wet, we pressed her against us. There were dishes and tanks all around us in the basement.., the slightest movement would kick up a roar. And the whole time they were above us, standing right over our heads, on the balcony. We could clearly hear them talking among themselves. -Vladimir: And there were Russians among them. -Marina: They spoke perfect Russian. -Vladimir: Those were Russians talking. They spoke without any accent whatsoever. -Marina: We heard a fire truck drive into the courtyard. Something seemed to move on the fire escape, and then something broke . . . you could hear it. The vehicle left, but then another vehicle drove into the yard ... We were already going crazy. There was just nothing to save us any longer. We thought of death, of ... No matter where we had called beforehand, the police, the fire department—there was no help for us. And we all thought they'd probably kill us, we'd be lucky just to survive. -Vladimir: 1 didn't believe we would get out of there alive. I thought, "All the same, they'll find us all the same, eventually they'll find us." -Marina: I thought they'd find us too. -Vladimir: When they went out onto the balcony and started to walk right over our heads and stopped on the trap door, the trap door let out a squeak, and I thought they were opening it. There was a woman with us, a relative from Baku, who came for the karasunk, Sveta by name. She whispered into my ear, "If they open the trap door, you grab at least one of them and drag him down here, and we'll hold him hostage." I answered that I had thought the same thing, and agreed to do it. But it was our fortune that they failed to notice the trap door. -Marina: When they were breaking dishes on the balcony the shards fell down through the cracks between the boards. I stood dead still. Well, I thought, this is it! They carried so much out over our heads and didn't guess, they didn't open the trap door, and now they'll catch us all. This is it! -Vladimir: And then our child started to whine. He's three years old. Before that he had been sleeping. Thank God we were able to calm him down. His name is Grisha. That's my father's name, too. "Papa," I say, "I am tired of holding him, I can't hold him any longer." I held him in my arms the whole time. He's small. Diana stood at least, but he couldn't stand, he was tired and his legs wouldn't hold him. Diana stood on her feet the whole time, the poor kid. She held out. Standing. When we left she was all wet. Her dress was entirely wet. From terror. She was shaking. I felt her legs touching my leg, and felt her quaking all over. I told my father to sit on the floor somehow and take the child, "I can't hold him any longer." I was already having spasms in my legs. My arms were tired, they hurt. Well imagine holding a child for seven hours. I tell my father, "Sit down gradual-1 somehow so no one will hear." He sits down ever so slowly on the con-Zete floor and I slowly hand the child to him. The boy is already asleep. I hand him over and he starts to sob in his sleep. I say, "Papa, turn him some-how so he won't sob, or they'll hear him." And all of us—all ten of us—sup¬ported one another. We said, "Quiet, quiet," we whispered with a rustle, "quiet, quiet." We sat that way, awaiting our lot. -Marina: The whole time we were shaking and quivering. Some got thirsty, but withstood it. Our mouths were completely dried out, everyone had a bitter taste in their mouths, and at the time I thought it was just me. There was no air, there was nothing to breathe. In addition, there was a fire in the courtyard, and the smoke ... The smell of a person on fire ... -Vladimir: One of the women said, "I need to go to the bathroom so bad¬ly." And I tell her, "Do it on the floor, standing ..." What could we do? It wasn't so much from having drunk anything as from fright, probably. For all of us. -Marina: From fright. -Vladimir: Don't think that those creeps were interested only in murder, beating, and rape. They stole Armenian property everywhere. Our place was no exception. -Marina: In the basement I heard them say, "Look at this carpet! Come on, bring it!" -Vladimir: My wife's coat had a collar of polar fox, they didn't even know what it was, one of them said, "Look at this coat, it's llama, take it!" -Marina: They partied and stole. They played the piano. They were musi¬cians, simply professionals, they played so well. They played and broke everything in sight. -Vladimir: They played "Jip, Jip, Jujalyarum" [a children's song] the whole time. -Marina: And danced, too. They did everything that came into their heads, just to be making noise. -Vladimir: The scum! It's nauseating to think about it... We know a guy in a boarding school, he says from a balcony he saw a naked girl being led around . . . They led her around naked and beat her, the whole mob . . . There was a streetlight, and nearby they stopped her, formed a circle around her, and started to clap, so that she would dance. They clapped and she lanced, and they were laughing and mocking her so. And showed, just look what they do to Armenians, what they were able to do. -Marina: Incidentally, there were some adolescents among them, about twelve years old. When they were beating Cherkez, he was already on the ground, completely beaten, and a boy comes up to him and says "Say fundukh." We are all listening. "Say fundukh," he says, "if you say fundukh correctly, it means you're a Muslim." Fundukh means "nut," Armenians and Azerbaijanis pronounce it differently. -Vladimir: They knew that Cherkez was an Armenian, they were just making fun of him... -Marina: Cherkez pronounces the word perfectly. The boy says, "Oh, so you're going to Armenia? We'll watch you go!" -Vladimir: They said "Are you going to Yerevan? Are you going?" to Uncle Barmen. You could hear them beating him. We simply didn't want to think that it was him they were beating . . . Andrei, his son, kept saying "Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa ..." the whole time, and I said, "Still, be still..." -Marina: His father didn't even make a sound so that we wouldn't become upset and give ourselves away. He knew that his son wouldn't be able to stand it, and would jump out of the basement. He was silent for all of our sakes. They tormented him in every possible way, and he was silent all the same. -Vladimir: My mother was in the neighboring entryway the whole time, where her sister's family lived. When the crowed surged in, my mother and my sister's family hid at the neighbors' on the first floor. They kept them there for an hour, and then said, "We're afraid too, you have to leave. If they come they'll kill us along with you." My aunt said, "How can I leave?" Her son, my first cousin, had gone childless for ten years, and suddenly they had a baby; the child was but two months old at the time. My aunt says, "We have a child, how can we go outside, they'll kill us immediately . . . there are bandits in the yard, how can we go outside?!" And the neighbor answers, "I don't know what, do you want them to kill us too?" And threw them out. They went out into the entryway and ran up to the third floor. The neighbor was coming out of his apartment, had opened the door, and my aunt just flew right in there. They were told, "No, no, you can't come in here." But she simply raced in there with such force, everyone went in after her. Later my mother told me, "When I heard from the courtyard that they started to wreck Rima's place, and thought that they had stabbed all of you, I couldn't stand it, I wanted to run right to your place." But my aunt told her, "If they've killed them, you can't help them and you'll just give us away. Better stay here." So they wouldn't let my mother leave. If she had come over to where we were, they would have killed us all for sure. They would have gone after her and found us ... -Marina: We were all saved at 2:30 in the morning. The soldiers came and evacuated all the Armenians. -Vladimir: That was our fortune. Just think of it as though we were born a second time. The whole time we were in the basement I thought, "I wonder what time it is? If only it would get light soon, if only. Maybe when it gets light they will stop." And suddenly we hear military commands from the courtyard: "Detail, flank left, detail flank right! . . . And then they begin to call, "Are there any Armenians left alive? Are there? Come out!" I wanted to go out, but my mother-in-law holds me by the arm and says, "Don't go out don't go! They're probably saying it in Russian on purpose, trying to trick us." "No," I say, "I heard orders, those are soldiers." I served in the Army, I know all the orders. I am already opening the trap door. My mother-in-law keeps it up: "No, no, no, don't open it!" I hear the soldiers leaving, their voic-es getting weaker, and I just stand there, nervous. I can't stand it. "That's it, I can't stand it, I can't stand it!" I push open the trap door with all my strength, crawl out, and shout, "Soldiers, soldiers! We're here, we're here! Help, we've got children here! Children, children! Come and get them!" The soldiers hear me and come over .. . We're so frightened, in such a hurry, that I just hand the children over to the soldiers through the broken balcony win¬dows. The soldiers say, "Come on, come on." My mother-in-law says, "What's with you, let's go out through the door, why are you . . . ?" But the women are going right out through the windows. They cut their hands on the glass ... -Marina: I cut my fingers too ... -Vladimir: We were afraid, afraid to go out through the rooms. -Marina: There were still people in there, I could feel it. The gang had left, but there was still someone in there. Because when the soldiers came, some¬one ran through into the bedroom, one person. In the basement we heard the person constantly rummaging around among the broken things and shards, going over them, searching for something . . . The troops put the Armenians onto a bus. There were many wounded, it was horrible to see—the faces were barely recognizable! I see a person, completely covered with wounds, mutilated ... I look closer, and it's Uncle Sasha! I didn't recog¬nize our neighbor from Building 6; her face was covered with blood. Later someone said that it was Sveta, Valodya's wife. They had dragged her stark naked through the street by the hair. We see Valya, Emma Grigorian's daughter-in-law, with her Kristina and with another child, also alive and unharmed. But Uncle Cherkez was nearly dead. In the bus Valya told us that they were going to throw her child out of the window. She rushed to plead with them, to kiss their hands: "You, my brothers, don't kill the children, don't kill us, don't kill, spare the children, don't leave orphans ..." All of the Avanesians were wounded. They had guests over that day. They had come from Baku to celebrate their daughter's birthday and couldn't get home, that's why the bus was already filled to overflowing. A girl who had come to the party had been raped and stabbed, grazing her kidneys, her heels were cut, and her earrings were torn out, taking the skin with them. They raped her right before her father's eyes. And they mocked and made fun of her. But they didn't kill the father. They said, "That's enough for him." What they did to his daughter was enough for him, they decided, just let him suffer. -Vladimir: They broke his arm when he tried to defend his daughter. -Manna: That girl was brought onto the bus as well. I tell her, "Sit down." She says, "I can't sit down." Her heels had been cut, she had to stand on her toes, there was blood ... It was just hideous. -Vladimir: It was a war, a war! -Marina: What do you mean war? It was worse than war. There was a general who said, "I was in the war in Afghanistan but I didn't see anything like this." -Vladimir: The soldiers told us, "We thought we had landed in Afghanistan." When the alarm was sounded they were not told where they were being taken. But later, on the way to Nasosny, the soldiers told us: "How can you live with them? They are animals, not people." We said, "We just live and tolerate it. What can we do?" April 21, 1988 Yerevan

■ RIMA JUMSHUDOVNA KHALAFIAN Born 1940 Seamstress Sumgait Knit Outerwear Factory ■ IRINA MIKHAILOVNA KHALAFIAN Her daughter Born 1964 Copyist Design Department Azerbaijan Tube-Rolling Plant Residents at Building 5/2, Apartment 38 Microdistrict No, 3, Sumgait -Rima: The whole tragedy began for us on February 28. That day my daughter and I were to hold a karasunk for my husband. We had told all the relatives to meet at our place. We spent most of the night getting ready, and in the morning I said "I feel something wrong in my heart, something's going to happen." The situation in town was bad. On the 27th I saw a big crowd on Lenin Street shouting that Karabagh was not going to be given to the Armenians. I became upset, of course. I went to the policeman from our microdistrict; he has an office in Building 7. I went to ask that the police maintain order while we were honoring my husband's memory. You just never know what might happen. Then our acquaintance called, the one who was supposed to drive the bus so we could all go to visit my husband's grave. "I can't get to your place," he says, "it's impossible. The road is closed near the car plant." I told this to the district policeman, and he found a bus himself and says, "Come on, go quickly to the cemetery." I say, "What do you mean, quickly? People are supposed to come over at one o'clock this after¬noon." "No," he says, "you have to hurry." At 11:30 we left with our close rel¬atives for the cemetery, and the policemen—there were five of them—went with us. We returned home and quickly set the table, and the guests took their places. I had invited many guests, but all of them wouldn't fit into the apartment, so I had rented a big tent. We set it up in the courtyard, along with tables and benches. The guests sat for a while, and suddenly there was noise and shouting. I look up and see about a hundred people coming our way. Young men, Azerbaijanis, from 13 to 25 or 30 years old. They've all got sticks and pieces of machinery in their hands. I was simply petrified. Our district policeman and some others went up to them and told them something, and then they left. Our guests from Baku started leaving in a hurry, and there had been only a few from Sumgait; many just hadn't been able to get to our place. We quickly cleared the tables and took everything inside, and folded up the tent and left it and the tables and benches in the courtyard. My closest friends and relatives were there in our apartment. My daughters were there—I have three daughters. Marina has two children, Stella recently got married, and Irina's still single; she and I lived together. Anyway, when everything seemed to have calmed down, I tell my daughters, "Set the table in the living room." We hadn't eaten since morning. We sat down and ate a little, and the men were trying to reassure us, saying don't be afraid, nothing's going to happen. And so we convinced ourselves that nothing would happen, cer¬tainly they wouldn't force their way into our apartment. . . At 5:30 there was more noise and that shouting again. I go to the window and look out—a crowd has put our tent, tables, and benches into a pile and set them on fire. -Irina: The Azerbaijanis in the building across from ours were trying to make them feel ashamed, saying "what are you doing?" They answered, "Keep quiet or it'll be bad for you, too." -Rima: Then the crowd rushed into our entryway. We lived on the first floor, but at first they didn't bother our apartment, they ran upstairs. Good thing that our name wasn't on the door, just the apartment number. They shouted, "Let's go up to the third floor!" An Armenian family lived on the third floor—Sasha and Lena Avanesian and their two young daughters, Ira and Zhanna. -Irina: From the kitchen window I see them drag Sasha Avanesian out of the entryway. They drag him out and immediately throw him under a bench. I say "Mother, Uncle Sasha is lying under a bench, I don't know if he's dead or alive." He's completely still. About this time our neighbor returns from the hospital (she had taken her child there) and sees Uncle Sasha, and comes running to our place to call an ambulance. Her name is Sabirgyul. She's an Azerbaijani, her apartment is across from ours. We called an ambu¬lance, and said that people were being killed here. They answered, "We're coming." We reported the fire to the fire department, and they said "We're on our way." But no one came, no one came to help us. We also managed to call the police, but no one came. When the district policeman and the others left they had given us a phone number, and said if anything happens, if there should be an attack, to call. I no longer remember the number, but when I was in the Nasosny village and the investigators asked, I wrote it down for them. -Rima: Sabirgyul calls and says that people are being killed, but I'm simply overwrought and don't know what to do. Then there's pounding on the door, "Sabirgyul," I say, "tell them this is an Azerbaijani apartment!" She goes to the door and without opening it says that Azerbaijanis live here. They believe her, and I hear someone shout "to the third floor!" When I hear the cries of Sasha and Lena's daughters, it was as though I had been scalded with boiling water. "Girls," I say to my daughters, "quick, into the base-ment." Irina puts up a fight: "Mamma, I'm not going to the basement. You go down; I'll lead them away from you. I speak Azerbaijani well, maybe I can convince them to ..." I say, "Are you crazy, go down to the basement this minute! It's for you . . . it's you I want to save, and you want to stay here? No!" The basement was under a glassed-in balcony; my husband had dug it out four years earlier. I don't know what would have come of us if it weren't for that basement. We went down into it, Irina, Marina and her husband Vladik, their two children, Stella and her husband Andrei, Marina's father-in-law, Sveta, our relative from Baku, and I. Ten people. One person stayed in the apartment, my daughter Stella's father-in-law. His name is Barmen Bedian. He saved us. You can see the trap door to the basement on the balcony floor, and that's why Barmen stayed, in order to cover it up, to hide the trap door. We had an old rug, he used it to cover up the door, and later, when they broke down the door to the apartment, the entire floor of the balcony was covered with shards of dishes. Later Barmen told me "Rima, I had enough time to get the glasses off the table so they wouldn't figure out that there were a lot of people here. I only left one glass." The poor man, how they beat him . . . now he's here, in Yerevan, in the hos¬pital . . . When they rushed into the apartment he thought only of us: "I for¬got to tell them to unscrew the light bulb in the basement," he thought. But Vladik unscrewed the bulb as soon as we got down there. The switch was on the balcony, and if they turned it on, the light would be seen through the racks in the plank floor and from outside as well, through the basement window. -Irina: There was a small window there, with a metal grate, for ventila¬tion. Either they didn't see the window or they didn't pay any attention to it. -Rima: Through the window I saw someone climb up the downspout and peer into our kitchen. A couple of others were deciding what to do, and one says "I asked, it's an Azerbaijani apartment." "No," says the other, "Armenian." They break the glass on the balcony, break down the door, and we hear the whole apartment filling up with people. They did what they wanted, breaking things up, stealing, having a great time of it. From the noise and the voices it seemed it was happening right in front of our eyes. As soon as they came in, they started smashing the buffet; broken dishes flew onto the floor. One of them says, "Look how much stuff that Armenian has in here." We had cognac in the bar, they get it out, and someone says "Hey, Armenian cognac!" Someone else says "Don't drink it, it's poisoned." And what went on in the courtyard! We heard Zhanna Avanesian being forced out of the entryway, she's 22 ... They beat her, and her mother was screaming. And the crowd was singing "Vaksaly," which is ... I don't even know how to explain it... -Rima: It's an Azerbaijani song, they play it at weddings when the bride is brought out of her parents' home. They sang it to taunt her. -Irina: Zhanna cries out, "Please, please leave me alone, what have I done to you?" Later we learned how she managed to save herself. -Rima: In our apartment someone started playing the piano; a trained musician from the sound of it. They played "Dary Khuram," an Azerbaijani song. -Irina: They played a couple of other songs, too. Some of my father's tools were on the balcony. One of them shouts, "Anybody need an axe? They've got everything here, come and get it." We hear the sounds of the tools being handed out. At this point either they had caught Barmen or had brought in one of the neighbors. They got the large photograph of Papa with the black ribbon on it, and they said "Tell us who this is. When did he die?" But there was no answer to their question. They found either my mother's or my pass¬port and asked "Who is this? Where is she?" Again, no answer. Among them were people who spoke perfect Russian. I don't know if they were Russians or Azerbaijanis, but they spoke perfectly, without an accent. They all had terrible voices. -Rima: They were beating Cherkez Grigorian right under our window, saying, "Come on, answer, are you going to go to Yerevan? Answer!" Cherkez' wife, a woman over 50, was brought out into the courtyard com¬pletely naked, and later they killed her. Cherkez, hurt, was shouting "Emma, Emma!" He cried out and groaned for a long time. He's really in bad shape right now, completely battered and bruised. -Irina: Besides Aunt Emma, from our part of the building Uncle Yuri was killed. Yuri Avakian. He was burned alive. -Rima: They took him, alive, and threw him into the fire, where our tent was burning. -Irina: I don't know who exactly it was they had at that moment, if it was Uncle Cherkez or Uncle Yuri, but I heard the crowd decide to kill him. One says, "Let's burn him." Another says, "No, let's just beat him so that he suf¬fers and dies later." A third says, "Let's cut him up." This all took place just a couple steps away from us, under our kitchen window. I heard the names of two people in the crowd, the ones who were deciding how to do the killing. I think they were the leaders. One was named Aydin, and the other, Faik. -Rima: How many they killed from the building across the way! Building 6. Many were killed there. -Irina: They killed Armo Aramian and his son Artur. They burned Artur alive, too. They killed Valodya and Razmella Arushanian, husband and wife. Razmella is actually only considered missing, but everyone knows that she was burned. Ishkhan's father was killed. So was Rafik [Tovmasian]. -Rima: Killing wasn't enough for them. They stole, too. They take my daughter's coat: "Hey look at this coat! Llama!" They drag our rug out over the balcony: "Beautiful rug." They stole everything, down to the last pair of boots. My relatives had taken up money to help me out—they took that, too. And what they didn't want, what they didn't like, they broke or cut up with knives. They played and played on the piano, and then broke it. Finally, toward the end, about the only thing left was the clock. One says, "Hey, look, the clock still works." After that I hear a crash, a cracking sound, and I think, the clock, too." Later I saw what had become of our home ... I can't even describe it; it was like the place had been bombed. Even the curtain in the bathroom, they even tore that. Even that! They didn't take the everyday dishes from the kitchen. Those they broke on the floor and against the walls. They ripped up the pillows with knives. They smashed up the rented china on the balcony, the slivers rained down on me through the cracks between the planks. My daughter, Irina, she's 23 years old, everything was already for her trousseau—the suitcases were packed, I had even bought the wool for the bed ... they carried it all off! But I couldn't care less about the things, no. How many horrors we lived through down in that basement! Ten hours we were down there, ten hours. It was crowded, we barely all fit in there, and there wasn't any air. Marina and Vladik have two kids. The boy is three, he fell asleep right away. The girl—her name is Diana—she stood there, ten hours that girl stood there with us. I felt around for her, I thought, maybe she's too frightened to breathe. She's five years old, she understands everything. I touch her, and her whole dress is wet, she had broken out into a sweat from the fear. A child, just a child . . . and you don't know, you don't know what to do ... I touch my girls to see if they're still alive, or if they've had heart failure ... -Irina: I decided . . . it's even funny . . . that if they found us, they would take us out of there ... 1 was planning to convince them, to let everyone else go and they could do what they wanted with me. I'm not married anyway, I don't have anyone . . . Well, of course, everyone was thinking about how to save their own people. -Rima: At three o'clock in the morning the soldiers on armored troop car¬riers arrived. We hear someone speaking Russian in the courtyard: "Are there any Armenians alive here?" Vladik says, "It's soldiers!" I say, "No, no! What soldiers? They're doing that on purpose to find the people who are hiding." And at first we didn't respond. Later my son-in-law couldn't stand it any more, he opened the trap door. We look out. Sure enough, it was sol¬diers. Thank God! They saved us, took us to the City Council building where they had collected all the Armenians. All of us went out into the courtyard right through the balcony window, we were afraid to go through the rooms. My younger son-in-law and I went to find out what happened to his father, Barmen. He wasn't in our apartment, and I thought then that they had killed him, too. Mid-March, 1988 Yerevan

Нет, Арт, тем про убийства нет. Временно они перенесены. И пожалуйста давайте займемся чем-нибудь другим. А эту тему думаю можно просто закрыть. Прочтите и все. Спасибо за понимание.

- VITALY NIKOLAYEVICH DANIELIAN Born 1972 Attended 9th Grade Middle School No. 17 Resident at Building 4/2, Apartment 25Microdistrict No. 3 Sumgait Really, people in town didn't know what was happening on February 27. I came home from school at 12 o'clock, being excused to leave before the last period in order to go to Baku. When we left, everything in town was fine. Life was the same as usual, a few groups of people were discussing things, soccer and other things. Then we got on the Sumgait bus bound for Baku for my first cousin's birthday, my father, my mother, and I. We spent the day in Baku, and on the 28th, somewhere around 6:00 p.m., we got on the bus for home, figuring that I'd have enough time to do my homework for the next day. When we were entering town, near the 12-story high-rises, our bus was stopped by a very large crowd. The crowd demanded that the Armenians get off the bus. The driver says that there are no Armenians on board; then everyone on the bus begins to shout that there are no Armenians on board. The group comes up to the doors of the bus and has people get out one by one, not checking passports, just going by the way people look. We get off the bus, but are not taken for Armenians. We set out in the direction of home. At first we were going to go into an old building where we knew there'd be a place to hide, but the whole road was packed with groups of people, all the way from Block 41 to the 8th Microdistrict. These groups were emptying people's pockets and checking Passports. People who didn't have passports with them were beaten as well. Then we decided to go home instead. Near the 12-story high-rises I saw burning cars and a great many people standing around the driveways, yelling - "Death to the Armenians" was written on the cars. When we came into the courtyard—we live in an L-shaped building—it was still quiet. We went on upstairs, but didn't turn on any lights. We tried to call Baku to warn our relatives, who were due to arrive on Wednesday, not to come. Then there was a knock at the door. It was our neighbors, who advised us to come down to stay at their place. We went down to their place, and they led us to the basement. They live on the first floor and have a base-ment which you enter across the balcony. We sat in the basement while an Armenian woman was beaten—she ran away naked. Our neighbors' daugh-ter said that's right, that's what the Armenians deserve, because in Stepanakert, allegedly, people were being killed, 11 girls from Agdam had been raped. We didn't stay very long in the basement. We tried to support one another as best we could, looking out the small window with the iron grating. Papa watched and said things now and then. He said that there was a fire near Building 5, probably a car on fire. Then one of the groups approached our driveway and demanded that they be shown the apart¬ments where Armenians lived. The neighbors said that there weren't any Armenians here, and the group set out for the other wing of the building. They appeared from the 5/2 side of the building, where, I later found out, a woman had been murdered. The woman who ran away naked died. Yuri Avakian was killed, too. When the crowd left, the neighbors said that it was all over and we could go home. We went back up to our place and again didn't turn on the light. We started to gather up our things in order to leave Sumgait for a while. We tried to call a relative who lived in Sumgait, but there was no answer. We decided she had already left. We sat at home. The phone rang, and the caller asked to speak with my father. I called him to the phone. It was Jeykhun Mamedov, from my father's work brigade. He said he was disgusted by what was happening in our town. He asked for our address and promised to get a car and help us get out of the city. To be quite honest, Papa didn't want to give him our address, but my mother got on the phone and told him. Some 15 minutes after the call a crowd ran into our entryway. Bursting into the building, they broke down the door and came into the apartment... They came straight to our apartment, they knew exactly where the Armenians were. They came into our place. We tried to resist, but there was nothing we could do. One of them took my parents' passports and began to read them. He read the surname "Danielian," turned the page, read "Armenian," and that alone was enough to doom us. He said that we should be moved quickly out into the courtyard, where they would have done with us. Another, standing next to him, pushed some of the keys on the piano and said "your death has tolled." They had knives and steel truncheons. I had a knife in my hand. Unfortunately, I didn't use it. I just knew that if I didn't give up the knife things would be much worse. They struck my par¬ents and said that I should put the knife on the piano. Then, one of them commanded that we be taken outside. One person was giving orders. When we were taken outdoors I went in the middle, and my mother was behind me. Someone started to push her so she'd walk faster; I let her go ahead of me, and fell in behind her. When he tried to push me, I hit him, and at that moment they began beating my parents; I realized that resistance was com¬pletely useless. We are taken out into the courtyard, and the neighbors are standing on their balconies to see what will happen next. The crowd surrounds us. At first they strike me, and I'm knocked out; when I come to, they beat me again ... I lose consciousness often ... I don't see or hear my parents, since I was the first one hit and was out cold. When I come to I try to pick them up; they are lying next to me. The crowd is gone, the only people around are watching from their balconies. That's it. I try to pick them up, but can't. My left arm is broken. I start toward the drive, wanting to tell the neighbors to call an ambulance. The bodies of my parents are still warm. We were attacked at around 9 o'clock. I regain consciousness at about 11 and try to make it up the stairs home . . . When I knock at the neighbors' door, they push me back and tell me to go away. I go up to the third floor, our neighbor puts a damp cloth on my head and says she will call an ambu¬lance; she sends her son off for one and takes me to our apartment. I often look out the window to see if the ambulance has arrived, but I can't see very far as a result of the blows, and it seems that my parents have already been taken away. Then I calm down and try to convince myself that they have been taken away, and everything will be OK. But they were still there. Later, at 8 in the morning as I found out, the ambulance picked them up, but they were already dead. If they received attention on time, it is possible they would still be alive. Later, around 12 o'clock on the 29th, policemen in civilian clothing come to our house with some "assistants." They call an ambulance, and 20 minutes later it arrives, and I am taken to the Sumgait Emergency Hospital. There they stitch the wounds on my head and rebind my arm. At 3 o'clock I and the other Armenians who are in the hospital are sent by ambulance to Baku. In my ward at the Sumgait Hospital there were five people, all of them Armenians. The hospital was nearly overflowing with Armenians. The only Azerbaijanis there were those whose car had flipped over before the events, before the 27th. Then I was in the Semashko Hospital in Baku. I was there 38 days. When I was released, on the 40th day, I found out that my parents were dead. At first they told me that they were in Moscow being treated, but later I found out that they were dead. My father's older brother told me. My father's name was Nikolai Artemovich Danielian. He was born in 1938. My mother, born in 1937, was Seda Osipovna Danielian. Papa worked at PMK-20, the leader of the roofing brigade; mamma was a compressor operator. They were also beaten on the head. The coroner's report stated that their heads were smashed open and bled profusely. At the confrontation I met Jeykhun Mamedov, who had called. As it turned out later, he had been the one who tipped the crowd off. He had called specifically to find out if we were at home and to find out the exact address and dispatch the group. He knew the phone number, but didn't know the address. Before the events I had never seen him, but had often spoken with him on the phone, when he would ask to speak with my father. I knew him by name. He denies that I was the one who answered the phone, saying that my father answered it. He denies that he called from a public phone, saying that he called from home, which also isn't true. I heard noise the sounds of automobiles. As I later found out, earlier he had been convicted, but had never served any time—he had received a suspended sen-tence. He was about 20 years old. I don't know if he has since confessed or not. I am sure that he was the one who tipped the crowd off. One-hundred percent sure. My parents were from Karabagh. Father was from the village of Badar, and was two years old when his family moved to Baku, where his elder brothers were to go to school. He was a student at the Naval School, but never graduated. He went off to work on the virgin lands [one of the gigan¬tic agricultural projects instituted under Khrushchev.] When he returned he lived in Baku, and later moved to Sumgait, helping with the town's con¬struction. Mamma was from the village of Dagdagan, also from Karabagh. She worked in Sumgait, first in a bookstore, and later, on a construction site. My sister is older than I. She lives with her husband here in Karabagh. I always loved my parents. That was why I went on to 9th grade, because it was their dream that I would continue my studies. I finished 8th grade and wanted to enter the Baku Nautical School, and after that, the Military School. But later I changed my mind, or rather, my parents got me to recon¬sider, saying that it would be better to finish the 10th grade and then join the Naval School. I was planning to be in the Navy almost my whole life long—since childhood I had dreamed of being a sailor. My father wanted it more than anything. He always recollected his youth, telling of the School, and he always said that he had made a big mistake in leaving it. Now 1 live in Karabagh and never plan to leave here. I will stay at the home of my grandfather, of my ancestors, till the end of my days. While in the hospital in Baku I learned the fates of many others who had suffered as well, like Ishkhan [Trdatov]. He managed to hold them off [at their residence in Microdistrict 3, Building 6/2, Apartment 6.] for a long time, lost his father [Gabriel], and by some miracle managed to survive. I also learned of Uncle Sasha, from Building 5/2, whose daughter was raped . . . Besides them, Valery—I forgot his last name—was in the hospital too, about a year younger than I, he went to School No. 14. He was riding with his parents in the car. People were throwing rocks at them, he was hit, and his parents brought him to the hospital, and he was in our ward. We even came to be friends. Before that we had just seen each other around town. But in the hospital we got to know one another better. I learned of the fates of others, those who had died, or who were befallen by misfortune . . . Today Suren Harutunian, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia, was shown on television. To be honest I am glad that Armenia agreed to recognize Nagorno Karabagh as part of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. I was repelled, no, revolted, to hear the Baku announcer who read the decision of the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet Presidium against Karabagh becoming part of Armenia. After the events in Sumgait and those in Baku, the best solution is to give Karabagh to Armenia, return it to Armenia, since the people want to live peacefully with the Azerbaijanis, but everything has to be right before they can do that. I arrived in Karabagh on April 11. I felt very bad. I had constant headaches. After a while my strength returned. My older sister, Suzanna, took me in. I think that justice should prevail; the people are demanding their due. You can't take away what is their due. My parents and I often spoke of Nagorno Karabagh, often visited here—I spent almost all of my vacations here. We had even decided that if Karabagh would be made part of Armenia, we would move here for sure. We always said that the Armenian people had suffered much, and that what had been done in 1921—removing Nagorno Karabagh from Armenia—was wrong. Sooner or later, mistakes should be corrected. And in order to correct a mistake, it must not be repeat¬ed; and the fate of all Nagorno Karabagh lies in the hands of our govern¬ment. June 13, 1988 Stepanakert

Pogroms against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan. Sumgait eyewitness accounts Compiled and Edited by SAMVEL SHAHMURATIAN Foreword by YELENA BONNER Foreword It is extremely difficult to write a foreword for this book. Yet reading the book is even more difficult, unbearably so. It is not literature: It is living tragedy, an open wound for all the people who lived through those days. The recollections of eyewitnesses are like a conversation with oneself. Not before a camera, nor a microphone, nor printed in the press. They are the kinds of things people tell themselves, and perhaps their mothers, in the darkest of night. And, probably, no one else. But you are reading it. You must read it! Tears well up in your eyes, and pain wrenches your heart. And burning shame, shame that this happened here, in my time and in my country. Each of our citizens, then, was a participant. Sumgait shook the Armenian people. It stunned with its brutality and with its cynicism. It struck Azerbaijan with its organization and its impunity. And it stunned people in Russia, but only those who knew the truth. This immense country — a sixth of the planet — does not know the truth even to this day. And the West hardly even noticed. Such was our glasnost in action. One is ashamed to recall how, during those days, when the dead were being buried and all of Armenia was on strike, Russian workers reproached the Armenians from the screen of Central Television for their failure to work, because plan targets would not be met as a result of the Armenians' actions. You wanted to turn away from the screen so as not to see the faces of people who, once again, had been misled. History will undoubtedly pass its verdict on the Sumgait genocide. But judgments of living history always come too late, bringing further misfortune. I think that today's lack of progress in the country that proclaimed the policy of perestroika has its roots in the time when people believed in perestroika's slogans. The time when Karabagh chose to follow the path sought by its people, legally—by decree of its governmental authorities. It was an absolute majority: 75 percent of the people inhabiting the territory. This was among the first stirrings of perestroika in the USSR, and Armenia became one of the first republics in which perestroika came to life, with many thousands of people turning up for rallies crying "yes" to Gorbachev. Never before and nowhere else in the country had perestroika and its initiator seen such support. But our regime fears unsanctioned popular movements more than anything else. As in the case of all our most important problems today, the government's lack of understanding and its inability to cope provided time for the dark forces to plan what happened in Sumgait. The authorities tried in every way possible to hush up and wallpaper over Sumgait, and to represent it as something other than what it was. General Secretary Gorbachev was often to repeat, "We were three hours late, it was a small group of hooligans." Coming from him, such words were even more shameful than they were from the mouths of ignorant workers. Beginning with the first mistakes made in Karabagh, the Sumgait events—which remain without official condemnation—brought an avalanche of tragedies down on our country, tragedies that will take long to fully comprehend: Kirovabad and the streams of refugees from both sides, Tbilisi, Abkhazia, Fergana, Uzden, Ossetia, and now, the latest horror, Baku. It is not the Azerbaijani Popular Front—the "extremists"—who are to blame (first it was the Armenian, and now the Azerbaijani extremists who were fingered), but rather the authorities' fear of losing power. In the meanwhile, we have become a country of refugees. We are now hushing up these events just like we hushed up the famine in the Ukraine and the deaths of millions in the 1930s. Now the whole country is in a state of excruciating anticipation: What will come next? And everyone is searching for his own answer to the question of whether and at what point it was necessary to introduce troops into Baku. And why. To save the people or to save the State? Such are our thoughts on what has taken place. We are all searching for a way out of today's dead end. The conclusion most often is to avoid stirring up the past—yet this is not the distant past, it is the past of the last two years. The most frequent notion is to begin with the tragic January of this year. But in our country in recent years all the months have been tragic. I think that we must begin with the full truth of these two years. Our leadership must tell our country everything. The whole chain of mistakes, instances of idleness, and intolerable actions. It is only with the whole truth that the search for solutions can begin. There is no need to fear—not for Muslims, not for Christians, and not for atheists: We are all people. But without shedding light on the truth, all our efforts will be for nought. Perhaps I, being half-Armenian and half-Jewish, should not be the one to write this foreword. Perhaps it would be better written by the Azerbaijani woman who saved an Armenian family; this book contains her words: "Look what's happening out there, my child is seeing all of this, tomorrow he'll be doing the same things." This is a warning for all of us on this Earth. If we do not find a way to make each state, be it large or small, a state for the people, and not the other way around, then our children and our grandchildren will become a brutal, unhuman mob. Yelena Bonner Moscow February 1990

Арт, веди Нарине на наш форум )

кто есть кто там? я тоже зашел

забыл добавить : фамилия сафароида Сафаров, а не Сафарян