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On the eve of the anniversary of Sumgait pogroms, Armenian  Assembly of America (AAA) issued a statement in which was said that Azerbaijani government is trying to divert attention from the anniversary of the Sumgait events by its hostile agitating campaign.

“The Azeri government, which has been spreading a virulent disinformation campaign agitating for war by condoning the slaying of Armenians, as with the pardon of the murderer Ramil Safarov who axed to death an Armenian officer in his sleep at a NATO Partnership for Peace training exercise in Hungary, and ramping up tensions along the ceasefire line, is aiming to distract attention from the upcoming 25th anniversary of the atrocities that mark the beginning of the pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan and Nagorno Karabakh,” the statement says.

Twenty-five years ago, in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait (Sumgayit), longtime Armenian residents were brutally targeted on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected to unspeakable crimes. According to a March 1988 article in The Economist, "reports of atrocities, including the murder and mutilation of pregnant Armenian women and newborn babies in a maternity hospital, have not been denied. Other reports speak of gangs of young Azerbaijanis hunting down Armenian families and committing murder, rape and robbery." The Azeri government never saw to the punishment of the perpetrators, the AAA states.

The Assembly mentions that February 28, 2013, marks the 25th anniversary of the pogroms committed by the Azerbaijani authorities against its Armenian population and the beginning of the escalation of violence against the Armenian minority across the entire country of Azerbaijan and against Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh, culminating in the violent expulsion of 200,000 Armenians from the Azeri capital city of Baku in January 1990.

“Despite the Azeri government's assertion that the violence was due to spontaneous riots, the pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovabad (now Ganja), Baku, and elsewhere, were a retaliatory attempt to silence and thwart the rights of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh who lawfully approached their government on the basis of a new openness in Soviet society ushered in by President Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika,” the statement says.

It says that, instead of respecting the legal rights of Armenians, Azeri mobs targeted Armenians as a group and subjected them to gross human rights violations reminiscent of practices and policies resulting in the attempted annihilation of the Armenian population in neighboring Ottoman Turkey earlier in the century.

“The Sumgait pogrom was widely reported and roundly condemned, but the violence was never contained. Increasingly anti-Armenian forces acted with impunity and the pogroms spread across Azerbaijan leading to the military campaigns of the late 1980s to 1994 to deport the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh until a ceasefire agreement was signed by Azerbaijan, Nagorno Karabakh, and Armenia,” the Assembly reminds.

The statement notes that Hidayat Orujev, a leader of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, days before the massacre of Armenians in Sumgait, stated in an address to the governing Council of the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Region: "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."
The Organization says that Mr. Orujev was appointed State Advisor for Ethnic Policy by the late President Heydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan and head of Azerbaijan's State Committee for Religious Affairs by current President Ilham Aliyev.

“The Sumgait pogroms are a reminder of the need to respect the ethnic and cultural identity of all people without discrimination and violence,” concluded the Assembly in its report.