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The Black January
THE BLACK JANUARY: 
24th ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOVIET INVASION OF BAKU Each year the people of Azerbaijan commemorate the Black January and pay tribute to the memory of the victims of this tragedy. May the souls of the martyrs of the Azerbaijani freedom rest in peace! 24 years have passed since the Central Soviet Authorities perpetrated an atrocious crime against the people of Azerbaijan. On 20 January twenty six thousand strong Soviet troops invaded the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, in a desperate, brutal and yet futile attempt to strangle the growing independence movement and to prevent the fall of the Soviet Communist regime in Azerbaijan as well as to punish ordinary people that rallied on the streets to voice their legitimate protest against violations of the territorial integrity of their homeland. The invasion was launched at midnight and committed with ferocity and no mercy for children, women and elderly. The Human Rights Watch reported that ‘among the most heinous violations of human rights during the Baku incursion were the numerous attacks on medical personnel, ambulances and even hospitals’. As a result, more than 130 civilians were killed and 700 wounded, hundreds of people were arrested and subjected to various forms of physical pressure. Among the victims were a seven year-old boy, sixteen year-old girl, an eighty year-old man, a young doctor shot in ambulance while helping another victim, and many other innocent civilians whom the Soviet Politburo, in a desperate attempt to conceal its crime, cynically called ‘hooligans, extremists and terrorists’. Hundreds of other civilians have been detained, harassed and tortured by the Soviet army in the days and weeks that followed. This massacre entered the history of Azerbaijan as the ‘Black January’.