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Speech by Hon. Adam B. Schiff of CA in the House of Representatives

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  • Speech by Hon. Adam B. Schiff of CA in the House of Representatives

    US Official News
    March 1, 2013 Friday


    Washington: HON. ADAM B. SCHIFF OF CALIFORNIA IN THE HOUSE OF
    REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, February 28, 2013

    Washington


    The Library of Congress, The Government of USA has issued the following Speech:

    Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, this week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary
    of the pogrom against people of Armenian descent in the town of
    Sumgait, Azerbaijan. The three-day massacre in the winter of 1988
    resulted in the deaths of scores of Armenians, many of whom were burnt
    to death after being brutally beaten and tortured. Hundreds of others
    were wounded. Women and girls were brutally raped. The carnage created
    thousands of ethnic Armenian refugees, who had to leave everything
    behind to be looted or destroyed, including their homes, cars and
    businesses.

    These crimes, which were proceeded by a wave of anti-Armenian rallies
    throughout Azerbaijan, were never adequately prosecuted by Azerbaijan
    authorities. Many who organized or participated in the bloodshed have
    gone on to serve in high positions on the Azeri government. For
    example, in the days leading up to the massacre, a leader of the
    Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Hidayat Orujev, warned Armenians in
    Sumgait: ``If you do not stop campaigning for the unification of
    Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia, if you don't sober up, 100,000 Azeris
    from neighboring districts will break into your houses, torch your
    apartments, rape your women, and kill your children.'' In a cruel
    twist, Orujev went on serve as Azerbaijan's State Advisor for Ethnic
    Policy and later as head of State Committee for Work with Religious
    Organizations.

    The Sumgait massacres led to wider reprisals against Azerbaijan's
    ethnic minority, resulting in the virtual disappearance of
    Azerbaijan's 450,000-strong Armenian community, and culminating in the
    war launched against the people of Nagorno Karabakh. That war resulted
    in almost 30,000 dead on both sides and created more than one million
    refugees in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

    In the years since the fighting ended, the people of Artsakh, the
    region's ancestral name, have struggled to build a functioning
    democratic state in the midst of unremitting hostility and threats
    from Azerbaijan, as well as sniper fire and other incursions across
    the Line of Contact between the two sides. Hatred towards Armenians is
    both inculcated and celebrated in Azeri youth, as exemplified by the
    case of Ramil Safarov, an Azerbaijani army captain who had confessed
    to the savage 2004 axe murder of Armenian army lieutenant Gurgen
    Margaryan, while the latter slept. At the time, the two were
    participating in a NATO Partnership for Peace exercise in Budapest,
    Hungary. After the murder, Safarov was sentenced to life in prison by
    a Hungarian court and imprisoned in Hungary.

    Last August Safarov was sent home to Azerbaijan, purportedly to serve
    out the remainder of his sentence. Instead of prison, he was greeted
    as a hero by the Azeri government and promenaded through the streets
    of Baku carrying a bouquet of roses. President Ilham Aliyev
    immediately pardoned Safarov and he was promoted to the rank of major
    and given a new apartment and eight years of back pay.

    In recent weeks, 75-year-old Akram Aylisli, one of Azerbaijan's most
    celebrated writers, has been subjected to a campaign of hatred.
    According to a report in the BBC, '[h]is books have been publicly
    burnt. He has been stripped of his national literary awards. And a
    high-ranking Azeri politician has offered $13,000 as a bounty for
    anyone who will cut off his ear. Aylisi's 'crime?'-- in his short
    novel Stone Dreams, he dared to look at the conflict between Azeris
    and Armenians from the Armenian perspective.

    With these disgusting acts, the Azeri state reminded the whole world
    why the people of Artsakh must be allowed to determine their own
    future and cannot be allowed to slip into Aliyev's clutches, lest the
    carnage of Sumgait a quarter century ago serve as a foreshadowing of a
    greater slaughter.

    For more information please visit: http://thomas.loc.gov/

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