In late February 1988, large-scale massacres because of ethnicity were committed in Sumgait, Azerbaijan.

On February 27 of that year, the situation went out of control in this town, which is just 25 kilometers from the Azerbaijani capital city of Baku.

Several thousand Azerbaijani nationalists started burning the homes of the local Armenian population and killing the homeowners.

According to official data alone, 32 Armenian residents of Sumgait were killed, and hundreds of others suffered severe injuries and became disabled.

The February 27-29, 1988 Sumgait pogroms, about which Azerbaijan is silent to this day, were the first harbingers of the Azerbaijani neo-fascism

These massacres were followed by the Azerbaijanis’ pogroms of the Armenians in Kirovabad—today’s Ganja—and in Baku, deportation of the entire Armenian population in Shahumyan Region, and incitement to war, all in response to the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) people’s demand to exercise their right to self-determination.