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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jim Dixon, PhD: It was before Kosovo..., July 4, 1999
By A Customer
The Sumgait Tragedy is a compilation of personal testimonies of Armenians forced by violence to flee their homes in Azerbaijan, confronts us with the reality of loss and suffering behind the labels and statistics. An example of "history from below," the volume focuses on the ideas and behavior of ordinary people, and on the impact historical events and ideologies have on their daily lives. This collection is the most important document on these events yet published in English. The importance of Sumgait Tragedy becomes more acute after the genocidal events in Kosovo in 1999. Interviewed by an independent journalist Samvel Shahmuratian in the months immediately following the events described how from February 27 to 29 1988 Azerbaijani marauding mobs in Sumgait, a city of 250,000 near Baku, destroyed hundreds of Armenian apartments and shops, burned and smashed dozens of cars, and beat, burned, stabbed, and raped to death Armenian men, women and children. The pogroms were a symptom of a developing but still insecure Azerbaijani nationalism, which is characterized by increasing intolerance for the claims of ethnic minorities living in the republic. "Having lived in the city for 38 years," one witness recalls, "I had somehow imperceptibly become accustomed to the discrimination, as though it were a natural state of affairs." Azerbaijani hostility toward the Armenian population, which is generically close to anti-Semitism in its form and is profoundly racist, intensified as the movement escalated among the Armenian population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region in Azerbaijan to join Armenia. The increasing tension in Sumgait culminated in a series of rallies in the center of the city, during which speakers asserted the Karabagh was and would remain Azerbaijani. The rallies culminated in a demand to drive Armenians off Azerbaijani soil, kill and rape them. On the 27th and 28th, the rallies dissolved into the mass violence described in the book. The confusion and doubt that still exist over the number of victims raise the question of whether the local and investigatory authorities deliberately minimized the extent of the pogrom. Dr. Nora Dudwick, who was in Yerevan and then in Baku during this period, recall how on February 27 when rallies in Sumgait had already turned into violence, "Vremya," the Moscow evening news program, broadcasted interviews with Armenian and Azerbaijani workers attesting to the "perfect friendship" between their peoples. Over the next few days, alarming rumors spread that 10 Armenians and almost as many soldiers had been killed in Sumgait. When the true scale of the violence became known in Armenia, the official death count of 32 (including 26 Armenians) met with complete incredulity, and rumors spread that casualties are actually in the hundreds. These rumors were later confirmed. The KGB investigators and newspaper "Pravda," the notorious organ of the USSR Communist Party, chose to ignore the background of the events, deliberately misrepresenting and trivializing the events, as well as the pattern of organization and provocation revealed in the attacks, treating them instead as a group of "isolated" crimes. The brave effort of Shahmuratian to compile more accurate casualty figures is no mere numbers game. Rather, it is part of an intense effort to establish the true scope of events, and to ascertain the extent to which the pogroms, which began in Sumgait and eventually spread throughout Azerbaijan, were deliberately orchestrated in Baku and Moscow to drive the Armenians from Azerbaijan, and crush the movement for freedom and self-determination in Nagorno-Karabakh. The compilation of this and other historical material on the conflict with Azerbaijan reflects a determination among Armenians to prevent the reality of the present from being denied, distorted or trivialized in future. The 1915 Genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire once seemed a self-evident and indisputable fact, and was described as such on the front pages of the international press. The subsequent minimization of those events by Turkish "scholars" has taught the Armenian people the importance of documenting and preserving the history so that such a denial cannot happen again.
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