Pogroms against Armenians in Baku were organized by Azerbaijani government — Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte

January 18 2025, 12:33

Politics

Speaking with Alpha News, Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, American public and political figure and former resident of Baku, spoke about the events that took place in 1988 in Azerbaijan, which she and her family members witnessed. According to her, no one could even imagine that such a thing was possible in the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan.

“I was born in 1978 in Baku. We lived in the city center. My childhood was very calm, there were a lot of relatives around, and we could not even imagine our life outside of Baku. We had relatives in Armenia and Azerbaijan, but most of our relatives lived in Baku. In 1988, during the events in Sumgait, when crowds of Azerbaijanis attacked Armenians, it was very difficult for us to believe that this could happen in the Soviet Union. I was already 10 back then, and I asked my parents a lot of questions. They did not want to tell me anything because the situation was very tense, especially in schools. But my grandmother told me a lot about Karabakh, about our history. At that time, I began to write a diary,” Anna said.

In her diary she described her childhood and everything that happened to them.

“Back then, my uncle went to Sumgait on a business trip and saw what happened there. He returned and, in one day, gathered all his family members, children, and mothers and left Baku. He could no longer imagine life in Baku after what he saw. He saw how women and girls were killed, how apartments were burned. The situation was tense, but we did not think that something like this could happen in the capital of Azerbaijan,” Anna Astvatsaturian noted.