On the day of the launch of the Winter Session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), deputy of the Prosperous Armenia faction of the National Assembly of Armenia Naira Zohrabyan spoke about the Baku pogroms and called on the international community to give a legal evaluation of the genocidal acts that Azerbaijan committed 30 years ago, reports the press service of Prosperous Armenia Party.

In her speech, Zohrabyan particularly said the following:

“Dear colleagues,

These very days 30 years ago, the ethnic Armenians of Baku were murdered and massacred in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku for seven consecutive days. The Baku pogroms were actions that were specifically planned and organized by the Azerbaijani authorities, and the sole purpose was to kill and annihilate ethnic Armenians.

They killed them just because they were Armenian since Armenophobia is a state policy in Azerbaijan.

To this day, the international community has not given a political and, most importantly, a legal evaluation of the genocidal acts that were committed against the Armenians in Azerbaijan. There is no right to leave these crimes — committed on the ethnic ground three decades ago — as pages of the past that have been turned over. I assure you that the factual data regarding the massacres of Armenians in Baku, Sumgait, Maraga and other Armenian settlements in Azerbaijan and the documents of the memoirs of those who survived the abyss are not less than the crimes committed by the Nazis during WWII, and I assure you that the Fascism of the Azerbaijanis is no different from the Fascism of Hitler in terms of cruelty. One of the witnesses of the abyss in Baku said during those days of black January, bonfires were lit on several streets of Baku, people would be thrown into the bonfires alive, tortured to death and killed just because they were Armenian.

Dear colleagues, once, the Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance released a report stating that political leaders, educational institutions and media in Azerbaijan have continued using hate speech against Armenians; an entire generation of Azerbaijanis has now grown up listening to this hateful rhetoric. Unfortunately, besides this, there has not been a legal evaluation of Azerbaijan’s genocidal acts, and the gap of impunity has led and will lead to new crimes, to the birth of people like Ramil Safarov, to violent acts with the spirit of DAESH, just like during the first days of April 2016. Armenophobia in Azerbaijan has reached a point that it has become one of the main threats to stability and security in the region. Silence has always favored criminals. It is time to start Baku’s Nuremberg.”