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Thirty years ago, during these very days in February 1988 anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in Azerbaijani Sumgait leaving numerous Armenians killed, maimed and deported, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said in his remarks delivered Tuesday at the 37th Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“They were perpetrated by the authorities of Azerbaijan with the aim to punish Armenians for the peaceful aspirations of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh for self-determination,” Nalbandian said.

“Regrettably, the masterminds and perpetrators of this crime were not duly punished. As it happened many times in the human history, impunity opened the door for new atrocities, including Armenian massacres and ethnic cleansing in Baku, Kirovabad (Gandzak), Maragha and many other places,” he added.

The top Armenian official reminded that the Sumgait massacre was widely condemned by the international community.

He said that Azerbaijan uses all efforts and means to conceal these atrocities, to avoid responsibility and to shift attention from them through fabricated accusations, including by the so-called Khojaly campaign, trying to portray themselves as victims and discredit Armenians as alleged perpetrators of the violence.

“It is a part of Azerbaijan’s xenophobic anti-Armenian policy. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, European Commission against Racism and Intolerance and many other organizations in charge of human rights expressed concern at constant cases of hate speech in Azerbaijan used against Armenians by political leaders, educational institutions and media and that an entire generation of Azerbaijanis has grown up listening to this hateful rhetoric. It is this kind of anti-Armenian propaganda that has incited continuous atrocities against Armenians, including the gross violations of international humanitarian law committed by the armed forces of Azerbaijan in April 2016 in Nagorno-Karabakh - killing of children, women, elderly people, mutilation of the corpses, beheadings of captured soldiers in the style used by notorious terrorist organizations,” Nalbandian explained.