Thirty Years On: Recalling the Birth of the Karabakh Movement

Thirty years ago, in February 1988, the birth of the Karabakh Movement caused tectonic shifts in the entire Soviet Union leading to the bloody Armenian-Azerbaijani war of 1991-1994.

The first protests happened in the towns of Hadrut and Askeran of the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Region with a demand to rebroadcast Soviet Armenia’s television there. The demonstrations grew to demands to secede from Soviet Azerbaijan and reunite Karabakh with Soviet Armenia.

CivilNet’s Tatul Hakobyan and our team spent a week in Nagorno Karabakh talking to a host of people from those days and recalling the events of 30 years ago.

Gagik Avanesyan and Margarita Sargsyan tell CivilNet how the Movement started in Hadrut, the southernmost town of Nagorno Karabakh.

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