"I lost my 16 year-old brother. I had three brothers. Two were able to pass themselves off as Azerbaijanis but they didn’t believe the third. They took him and demanding ever larger sums of money. We were waiting for the call to set up the transfer of cash. The next day we found his corpse. They had beaten him to death." This is the personal story recounted today by Edita Altunova, an eye-witness to the pogroms of Armenians in Baku that began twenty years ago to the day. Estimates of the number of Armenians killed during the pogroms in the Azerbaijani capital reach as high as three hundred. Eleonora Avanesova, an eye-witness to the pogroms of Armenians in Sumgait says they fled to Armenia, leaving all their belongings in Sumgait. "They were throwing people on bonfires. We came to Spitak and then the earthquake hit. Two disasters in a row. We had been living in the same building for over ten years but they never forgot that we were Armenians." Mrs. Avanesova stated that there had always been discrimination against Armenians but that they never expected the spilling of blood. "Panic reigned. People were in hiding, afraid to come out in the open. It was worse than the earthquake. We left behind all we had. They had lists of where Armenians lived. They came and killed. They had been preparing for this for a year. Things got worse when Aliyev came to power. Then Karabakh erupted." Another eye-witness, Robert Khachatryan recounts how Azeris returning from Armenia would incite their countrymen in Baku with tales that Armenians were murdering Azeris back in Armenia and that racial hatred was fuelled, leading to the pogroms that he calls genocide. He said that many of the refugees from Azerbaijan still do not possess Armenian citizenship or a permanent domicile. "We continue to live in dormitories where the conditions are very poor, but our government doesn’t seem to care," said Khachatryan. "I remember the interview given by former President Kocharyan to a Slovak radio station. They asked him how refugees were faring in Armenia. He answered that there were no refugees in Armenia; that these were Armenians who had returned to the homeland."