Joining U.S. Azeris Network (USAN) and Azerbaijanis around the world, Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) issued a message commemorating the 21st anniversary of "Black January," which marks the end of Soviet rule in Azerbaijan.
On the night of Jan. 19-20, 1990, sovereign Azerbaijan was invaded by 26,000 Soviet troops pursuant to a "state of emergency." A courageous resistance by Azerbaijanis to the Soviet invasion continued into February. Eventually, 170 Azerbaijanis were killed, 321 disappeared (their bodies never recovered), over 700 wounded, and still hundreds more were rounded up and detained.
In a report titled "Black January in Azerbaijan," Human Rights Watch put the events into a larger perspective: "The violence used by the Soviet Army on the night of Jan. 19-20 was so out of proportion to the resistance offered by Azerbaijanis as to constitute an exercise in collective punishment. The punishment inflicted on Baku by Soviet soldiers may have been intended as a warning to nationalists, not only in Azerbaijan, but in the other Republics of the Soviet Union."
The terrible event remembered by this commemoration was an atrocity - but it also gave birth to hope that led eventually to the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan, a brotherly nation of Turkey and friend and ally of the United States.
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