TO HIS HOLINESS KAREKIN II

SUPREME PATRIARCH AND CATHOLICOS OF ALL ARMENIANS

Your Holiness,

This year, as the entire Armenian nation marks the 36th anniversary of the Baku Armenian Pogroms with heartfelt anguish, we appeal to Your Holiness with a proposal to join in a memorial prayer to God for the innocent victims, so that it may resound in the Mother See, in all Armenian churches and monasteries, reach the heart of every faithful in Armenia and the world, gathering and uniting all believers under the holy veil. May this requiem not only bear witness to the memory of the victims of that unspeakable savagery but also, in this pivotal period for our Country, Nation, and our Church, serve as proof of the Armenian Apostolic Church's fidelity to traditional values and unwavering loyalty to the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin.

Every year, with the ceaseless pang of sorrow, we offer our prayers to God in the St. Sarkis Church, endlessly and tirelessly warning all mankind about the impermissibility of such a crime against God and the world.

Therefore, with filial humble love, we appeal to You, Your Holiness, with the request to respond to our proposal and honor the memory of the innocent victims in the St. Sarkis Church on January 20 at 12:00 PM.

These days, as we once again recall the bloody revelry of anthropomorphic jackals in Baku in January 1990, our hearts are filled anew with horror and righteous wrath. The streets of Azerbaijan's capital had become the stage of a nightmare, where barbarians, intoxicated by the scent of blood, encouraged and directed by the authorities, smashed and defiled everything that had even the remotest connection to Armenians—their homes, property, sanctuaries... The expulsion of Armenians from Azerbaijan was accompanied by unspeakable cruelty, barbarism, violence, pillage, and even acts of cannibalism...

The Baku Armenian Pogroms were the poisonous fruits of Azerbaijan's multi-year anti-Armenian state policy. The authorities of that country, to this day, pursue a policy of Armenophobia at the state level, brazenly falsifying history and trampling all norms of civilized coexistence. That sinister cult of hatred, ignited during the Artsakh national liberation movement, turned into the direct physical annihilation of the Armenians of Azerbaijan, applying the most brutal, fascist and Nazi methods of Genocide.

All of this occurred under conditions of either the direct permission or the silence of the state's top leaders, when they declared at rallies in Baku: "Land is not given, land is conquered by blood." Law enforcement bodies not only failed to prevent it but themselves directed the pogroms. The mob, made savage by the scent of blood, was led through the streets of Baku by that nation's "intelligentsia," headed by Azerbaijani People's Poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, accompanied by the police.

Two years earlier, on February 28, 1988, the same thing happened in Sumgait, where the rioters were led by the second secretary of the city party committee, Baimramova, later joined by the first secretary, Muslimzade. All Armenians' phones were cut off; iron bottles were made at the factory and later distributed to the pogromists. Criminals were released from prison and joined the mob. The same situation prevailed in all cities of Azerbaijan...

Not only Armenians were persecuted, tormented, and killed, but also all representatives of other nationalities who had any, especially familial, ties with Armenians. The slander and abuse poured on Armenians in the airwaves and press only encouraged the savagery of the mob. The only one telling the truth to ordinary USSR citizens was the BBC radio station...

Military commandant's offices in cities received horrifying reports: "they tortured, dismembered with axes, burned," "they killed together with mother, sister, brother," "after a brutal beating, they burned alive." The executioners, having practiced in Sumgait, successfully applied the same methods in other Azerbaijani settlements: the same bonfires of living people, the same beasts raping helpless girls and women, the same looters seizing others' hard-earned property, who were later glorified and declared heroes. And the same authorities brazenly encouraging them.

The true number of victims remains unknown to this day; to this day, this crime has not been qualified as "genocide." And this despite the fact that the UN called it the genocide of the Armenian population.

Equating the 630,000 Armenians barbarically expelled from Azerbaijan, barely saved, with the 147,000 Azerbaijani Turks who successfully left Armenia is sacrilege. The creators of Azerbaijan's wealth today were primarily Armenians and other Christian nations at a time when the Azerbaijani nation itself did not exist.

These and many other similar facts predetermined the fate of Mountainous Karabakh, when the last 120,000 Armenians, to save their lives, were forced to leave their land after 30 years of struggle.

Artsakh is not merely the homeland of displaced Armenians. Artsakh is the heart of Armenia, its inseparable part. The first school was founded here by Mesrop Mashtots; it was the Armenians of Artsakh who built up Shushi, making it the pearl of Transcaucasia. Ilham Aliyev today drinks water from the water pipeline built by Armenians in Shushi, receives guests in houses built by Armenians, while Stepanakert, which they are now demolishing with their nomadic habits, was designed by architect A. Tamanyan. Obscuring all these facts, Armenia's current administration is carrying out the orders of the Turks.

The elimination and destruction of Armenia continues. The world, which under pressure partially recognized the genocide of Armenians and other Christians by Ottoman Turkey, nevertheless, unlike with the Holocaust, did nothing to redress its consequences and prevent new disasters, and now watches indifferently and coldly as this 5,000-year-old civilization, the last bastion of Christianity in the Armenian Highlands, is being destroyed by the savage Turk. Those highlands where the Aryan—Indo-European—civilization originated and developed, whose heirs are today's Europeans and Americans.

Other Christian nations also became victims of the pogroms and deportations. In 1990 alone, about 80,000 Russians fled Azerbaijan. Their cemeteries have been leveled, tombstones used to pave streets.

The number of Christian victims in Azerbaijan would have been much higher had it not been for the soldiers of General A. Lebed's 106th Guards Airborne Division, who at the cost of their own lives also stopped that revelry of jackals. General A. Lebed left a just description of those days in his memoirs. Unfortunately, the general is no longer with us, but the memory of him and his soldiers is kept alive by the rescued people.

"No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten."

The Lord and the memory of our ancestors are with us.

On behalf of:

The "Patrida" organization of Greeks of Armenia,

The "TALISH: Borderline Settlements" patriotic organization,

The authorized representatives' coordinating council of political, religious, and national groups displaced from Azerbaijan,

Eduard Polatov, lawyer, human rights defender

Hrazdan Madoyan, publicist

Larisa Alaverdyan, first Human Rights Defender of the Republic of Armenia

Armine Vaghamyan, political scientist, translator