- ROMAN ALEKSANDROVICH GAMBARIAN
Born 1954
Senior Engineer
Sumgait Automotive Transport Production Association
Resident at Building 17/33B, Apartment 40
Micro district No. 3
Sumgait
What happened in Sumgait was a great tragedy, an awful tragedy for us, the Armenian people, and for all of mankind. A genocide of Armenians took place during peacetime.
And it was a great tragedy for me personally, because I lost my father in those days. He was still young. Born in 1926.
On that day, February 28, we were at home. Of course we had heard that there was unrest in town, my younger brother Aleksander had told us about it. But we didn't think ... we thought that everything would happen out¬doors, that they wouldn't go into people's apartments. About five o'clock we saw a large crowd near the Kosmos movie theater in our micro district. We were sitting at home watching television. We go out on the balcony and see the crowd pour into Mir Street. This is right near downtown, next to the air¬line ticket office, our house is right nearby. That day there was a group of policeman with shields there. They threw rocks at those policemen. Then they moved off in the direction of our building. They burned a motorcycle in our courtyard and started shouting for Armenians to come out of the build¬ing. We switched off the light. As it turns out, their signal was just the oppo¬site: to turn on the light. That meant that it was an Azerbaijani home. We, of course, didn't know and thought that if they saw lights on they would come to our apartment.
Suddenly there's pounding on the door. We go to the door, all four of us: there were four of us in the apartment. Father, Mother, my younger brother Aleksandr, and I. He was born in 1959. My father was a veteran of World War II and had fought in China and in the Soviet Far East; he was a pilot.
We went to the door and they started pounding on it harder, breaking it down with axes. We start to talk to them in Azerbaijani, "What's going on? What's happened?" They say, "Armenians, get out of here!" We don't open the door, we say, "If we have to leave, we'll leave, we'll leave tomorrow." They say, "No, leave now, get out of here, Armenian dogs, get out of here!" By now they've broken the door both on the lock and the hinge sides. We hold them off as best we can, my father and I on one side, and my mother and brother on the other. We had prepared ourselves: we had several ham¬mers and an axe in the apartment, and grabbed what we could find to defend ourselves. They broke in the door and when the door gave way, we held it for another half-hour. No neighbors, no police, and no one from the city government came to our aid the whole time. We held the door. They started to smash the door on the lock side, first with an axe, and then with a crowbar.
When the door gave way—they tore it off its hinges—Sasha hit one of them with the axe. The axe flew out of his hands. They also had axes, crow¬bars, pipes, and special rods made from armature shafts. One of them hit my father in the head. The pressure from the mob was immense. When we retreated into the room, one of them hit my mother, too, in the left part of her face. My brother Sasha and I fought back, of course. Sasha is quite strong and hot-tempered, he was the judo champion of Sumgait. We had hammers in our hands, and we injured several of the bandits—in the heads and in the eyes, all that went on. But they, the injured ones, fell back, and others came to take their places, there were many of them.
The door fell down at an angle. The mob tried to remove the door, so as to go into the second room and to continue ... to finish us off. Father brought skewers and gave them to Sasha and me—we flew at them when we saw Father bleeding: his face was covered with blood, he had been wounded in the head, and his whole face was bloody. We just threw our¬selves on them when we saw that. We threw ourselves at the mob and drove back the ones in the hall, drove them down to the third floor. We came out on the landing, but a group of the bandits remained in one of the rooms, they were smashing all the furniture in there, having closed the door behind them. We started tearing the door off to chase away the remaining ones or finish them. Then a man, an imposing man of about 40, an Azerbaijani, came in. When he was coming in, Father fell down and Mother flew to him, and started to cry out. I jumped out onto the balcony and started calling an ambulance, but then the mob started throwing stones through the windows of our veranda and kitchen. We live on the fourth floor. And no one came. I went into the room. It seemed to me that this man was the leader of the group. He was respectably dressed in a hat and a trench coat with a fur col¬lar. And he addressed my mother in Azerbaijani: "What's with you, woman, why are you shouting? What happened? Why are you shouting like that?" She says, "What do you mean, what happened? You killed somebody!" My father was a musician, he played the clarinet, he played at many weddings, Armenian and Azerbaijani, he played for many years. Everyone knew him. Mother says, "The person who you killed played at thousands of Azerbaijani weddings, he brought so much joy to people, and you killed that person." He says, "You don't need to shout, stop shouting." And when they heard the voice of this man, the 15 to 18 people who were in the other room opened the door and started running out. We chased after them, but they ran away-That man left, too. As we were later told, downstairs one of them told the others, I don't know if it was from fright or what, told them that we had firearms, even though we only fought with hammers and an axe.
We raced to Father and started to massage his heart, but it was already too late. We asked the neighbors to call an ambulance. The ambulance never came, although we waited for it all evening and all through the night. Somewhere around midnight about 15 policemen came. They informed us they were from Khachmas. They said, "We heard that a group was here at your place, you have our condolences." They told us not to touch anything and left. Father lay in the room.
So we stayed home. Each of us took a hammer and a knife. We sat at home. Well, we say, if they descend on us again we'll defend ourselves. Somewhere around one o'clock in the morning two people came from the Sumgait Procuracy, investigators. They say, "Leave everything just how it is, we're coming back here soon and will bring an expert who will record and photograph everything." Then people came from the Republic Procuracy too, but no one helped us take Father away. The morning came and the neighbors arrived. We wanted to take Father away somehow. We called the Procuracy and the police a couple of times, but no one came. We called an ambulance, and nobody came. Then one of the neighbors said that the ban¬dits were coming to our place again and we should hide. We secured the door somehow or other. We left Father in the room and went up to the neighbor's.
The excesses began again in the morning. The bandits came in several vehicles, ZIL panel trucks, and threw themselves out of the vehicles like . . . a landing force near the center of town. Our building was located right there. A crowd formed. Then they started fighting with the soldiers. Then, in Buildings 19 and 20, that's next to the airline ticket office, they started break¬ing into Armenian apartments, destroying property, and stealing. The Armenians weren't at home, they had managed to flee and hide somewhere. And again they poured in the direction of our building. They were shouting that there were some Armenians left on the fourth floor, meaning us. "They're up there, still, up there. Let's go kill them!" They broke up all the furniture remaining in the two rooms, threw it outside, and burned it in large fires. We were hiding one floor up. Something heavy fell. Sasha threw himself toward the door shouting that it was probably Father, they had thrown Father, were defiling the corpse, probably throwing it in the fire, going to burn it. I heard it, and the sound was kind of hollow, and I said, No, that's from some of the furniture." Mother and I pounced on Sasha and stopped him somehow, and calmed him down.
The mob left somewhere around eight o'clock. They smashed open the door and went into the apartment of the neighbors across from us. They were also Armenians, they had left for another city.
The father of the neighbor who was concealing us came and said, "Are you crazy? Why are you hiding Armenians? Don't you now they're checking all the apartments? They could kill you and them!" And to us :".. . Come on, leave this apartment!" We went down to the third floor, to some other neigh¬bors'. At first the man didn't want to let us in, but then one of his sons asked him and he relented. We stayed there until eleven o'clock at night. We heard the sound of motors. The neighbors said that it was armored personnel car¬riers. We went downstairs. There was a light on in the room where we left Father. In the other rooms, as we found out later, all the chandeliers had been torn down. They left only one bulb. The bulb was burning, which probably was a signal they had agreed on because there was a light burning in every apartment in our Micro district 3 where there had been a pogrom.
With the help of the soldiers we made it to the City Party Committee and were saved. Our salvation—my mother's, my brother's, and mine,—was purely accidental, because, as we later found out from the neighbors, some-one in the crowd shouted that we had firearms up there. Well, we fought but we were only able to save Mother. We couldn't save Father. We inflicted many injuries on the bandits, some of them serious. But others came to take their places. We were also wounded, there was blood, and we were scratched all over—we got our share. It was a miracle we survived. We were saved by a miracle and the troops. And if troops hadn't come to Sumgait, the slaughter would have been even greater: probably all the Armenians would have been victims of the genocide.
Through an acquaintance at the City Party Committee I was able to con¬tact the leadership of the military unit that was brought into the city, and at their orders we were assigned special people to accompany us, experts. We went to pick up Father's corpse. We took it to the morgue. This was about two o'clock in the morning, it was already March 1, it was raining very hard and it was quite cold, and we were wearing only our suits. When my broth¬er and I carried Father into the morgue we saw the burned and disfigured corpses. There were about six burned people in there, and the small corpse of a burned child. It was gruesome. I suffered a tremendous shock. There were about ten people there, but the doctor on duty said that because of the numbers they were being taken to Baku. There was a woman's corpse there too, she had been . . . well, there was part of a body there ... a hacked-off part of a woman's body. It was something terrible. The morgue was guarded by the landing force . . . The child that had been killed was only ten or twelve years old. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl because the corpse was burned. There was a man there, too, several men. You couldn’t tell anything because their faces were disfigured, they were in such awful condition ...
Now two and a half months have passed. Every day I recall with horror what happened in the city of Sumgait. Every day: my father, and the death of my father, and how we fought, and the people's sorrow, and especially the morgue.
I still want to say that 70 years have passed since Soviet power was estab¬lished, and up to the very last minute we could not conceive of what happened in Sumgait. It will go down in history.
I'm particularly surprised that the mob wasn't even afraid of the troops. They even fought the soldiers. Many soldiers were wounded. The mob threw fuel mixtures onto the armored personnel carriers, setting them on fire. They weren't afraid. They were so sure of their impunity that they attacked our troops. I saw the clashes on February 29 near the airline ticket office, right across from our building. And that mob was fighting with the soldiers. The inhabitants of some of the buildings, also Azerbaijanis, threw rocks at the soldiers from windows and balconies, even cinder blocks and glass tanks. They weren't afraid of them. I say they were sure of their impunity. When we were at the neighbors' and when they were robbing homes near the airline ticket office I called the police at number 3-20-02 and said that they were robbing Armenian apartments and burning homes. And they told me that they knew that they were being burned. During those days no one from the police department came to anyone's aid. No one came to help us, either, to our home, even though perhaps they could have come and saved us.
As we later found out the mob was given free vodka and drugs, near the bus station. Rocks were distributed in all parts of town to be thrown and used in fighting. So I think all of it was arranged in advance. They even knew in which buildings and apartments the Armenians lived, on which floors—they had lists, the bandits. You can tell that the "operation" was planned in advance.
Thanks, of course, to our troops, to the country's leadership, and to the leadership of the Ministry of Defense for helping us, thanks to the Russian people, because the majority of the troops were Russians, and the troops suf¬fered losses, too. I want to express this gratitude in the name of my family and in the name of all Armenians, and in the name of all Sumgait Armenians. For coming in time and averting terrible things: worse would have happened if that mob had not been stopped on time.
At present an investigation is being conducted on the part of the USSR Procuracy. I want to say that those bandits should receive the severest possi¬ble punishment, because if they don't, the tragedy, the genocide, could hap¬pen again. Everyone should see that the most severe punishment is meted out for such deeds.
Very many bandits and hardened hooligans took part in the unrest, in the mass disturbances. The mobs were huge. At present not all of them have been caught, very few of them have been, I think, judging by the newspaper reports. There were around 80 people near our building alone, that's how many people took part in the pogrom of our building all in all.
They should all receive the most severe punishment so that others see hat retribution awaits those who perform such acts.
May 18,1988 Yerevan
