Ambassador: Different memorials teach similar lessons

There, in the garden in Oklahoma City, I remembered the hilltop memorial in my hometown of Baku, Azerbaijan, half a world away. Although the memorial in Baku commemorates victims of a different time of violence, both gardens testify to the enduring impact on the events in Oklahoma City and Baku on their respective communities.

On Jan. 20, 1990, Soviet leadership ordered a full-scale surprise military attack on Azerbaijan's capital, committing an indiscriminate mass murder of about 150 unarmed civilians, including women, children and elderly. Later, the Human Rights Watch described the Soviet army's actions as “an exercise in collective punishment” and “a warning to nationalists, not only in Azerbaijan, but in the other Republics of the Soviet Union.''

On Jan. 20, 1990, the majority of our people, me included, lived through a personal transformation of abandoning their Soviet identity and becoming citizens of the independent Azerbaijan at the time when such independence still seemed unreachable. Symbolically, the faces of tragedy, from a newlywed couple and children shot by soldiers, to bullet-ridden ambulances and doctors dying as they protected their patients, represent my people and their dedication to freedom and one another. Victims of that night also speak of Azerbaijan's diversity, as they include a young Azerbaijani boy, a teenage Jewish girl, an elderly Russian man and many others from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The tragedy united the people of Azerbaijan into a community of citizens of an independent nation and strengthened their resolve to achieve that independence.