Azerbaijan observing Black January today against USSR invasion

ISLAMABAD: Azerbaijan is observing “Black January” Thursday (today) against the invasion of its capital Baku, Sugmait and other cities under orders from the defunct USSR leadership.

According to the Azerbaijan Embassy on the night of Jan 19 to 20, 1990, by the order of the USSR leadership, 26,000 Soviet troops invaded Baku, Sumgait, as well as other cities of Azerbaijan. As a result of this military intervention, 147 civilians were killed and 744 were seriously injured. This event went down in the history of modern Azerbaijan as "Black January".

Before these tragic events, the groundless territorial claims of Armenia against Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, the aggressive separatist activities of Armenian radicals in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region of the former Azerbaijan SSR and the Soviet leadership's support to this illegal activity, as well as the violent and brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis from Armenia spurred the expansion of the movement against the Soviet government in Azerbaijan. The Soviet Army deployed to the country to prevent the national movement and break the will of the Azerbaijani people for independence, committed massacre against the peaceful population, violating the norms of international law, the Constitutions of the former USSR and the Azerbaijani SSR. The former Soviet leadership is directly responsible for this crime.