Stepanakert residents commemorate victims of Baku pogroms

At the service in the Stepanakert temple, parishioners have prayed for the repose of victims of pogroms of Armenians in Baku. There are about 30,000 refugees from Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh; up to 500 families need housing, a member of the Union of Armenian Refugees has stated.

On January 13, a liturgy was held for the repose of the victims of the Armenian pogroms in Baku in 1990, Ruzanna Avakyan, an activist of the NGO "Artsakh Union of Armenian Refugees from Azerbaijan", told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Ms Avakyan said that she herself is a refugee from Azerbaijan. According to her story, her entire family came to Karabakh when pogroms began in Sumgait.

According to Ruzanna, during the missile attack on Stepanakert, a shell hit their apartment, destroying all the property. The family survived because they were in the shelter. During the 1990s war, a shell hit the same apartment, she said.

"If we count what we've lost in Sumgait and what we've lost in the two Karabakh wars, then, my family has to rebuild its life from scratch for the third time," said the refugee.

Prior to the start of the Karabakh liberation movement, Svetlana Petrosyan's family lived in Baku. She remembers how they threw stones at their house and then tried to break into it.

The problem of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan has become the subject of political speculations, David Karabekyan, a Karabakh sociologist, has stated. This led to a relapse of the tragedy of 1988-1993 in the war of 2020, when tens of thousands of Karabakh residents moved from their settlements that came under Azerbaijan's control, he said.