Details added (first version posted on 14:25)
BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 31
Trend:
The Azerbaijani community of Nagorno-Karabakh has disseminated an appeal in connection with the Day of the Genocide of Azerbaijanis, Trend reports referring to the community on March 31.
"The ethnic cleansing, genocide and predatory policy, purposefully carried out by Armenian nationalists against the Azerbaijani people for the past 200 years, are the difficult stages of Azerbaijani history full of tragedies and bloody events,” the appeal said.
“The main goal of this chauvinist policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijanis from their historical lands and the creation of "great Armenia" fabricated by the Armenians on Azerbaijani territories,” the appeal said.
“At the beginning of the 20th century, Armenian nationalists expanded their activity to implement the idea of “great Armenia”, put forward in the program of the 'Dashnaktsutyun' party, having begun ethnic cleansing and the policy of genocide, systematically expelling Azerbaijanis living in their historical lands,” the appeal said.
Armenians committed massacres against Azerbaijani civilians in Baku, Ganja, Karabakh, Iravan, Nakhchivan, Ordubad, Sharur-Daralyaz, Zangezur, Gazakh and other areas in 1905-1906, people were brutally killed, the cities and villages were burned and destroyed.
After the February and October events in Russia in 1917, the Dashnaktsutyun party and the Armenian National Congress began to expand their activity. In December 1917, Stepan Shaumian, appointed temporary emergency commissioner for the Caucasus affairs, became the organizer and leader of the mass extermination of Azerbaijanis.
At the beginning of 1918, i.e., on the eve of the March bloodshed, there were about 20,000 Armenian armed people directly obeying Shaumian. The Bolshevik-Armenian formations opened fire on Baku from ships on March 30, 1918.
On March 31 and in the first days of April, thousands of peaceful Azerbaijanis were exterminated only because of their nationality. During those days, Bolshevik-Armenian formations killed 12,000 Azerbaijani civilians in Baku. During these bloody events, people were burned alive in their houses, as well as tortured.
More than 16,000 people were killed with special cruelty in Guba district, 167 villages were destroyed, 35 of which do not exist today as a result of the armed attack of the Armenians during the first five months of 1918.
In 2007, a mass grave was discovered in Guba city. During the exploration of the burial, it was revealed that during the attack of the Armenian armed forces on Guba, people were killed, subjected to all kinds of violence.
The Armenian military units, also exterminated the Jews along with the Turkic-Muslim population. As a result of the research, it became known that Armenians killed more than 3,000 Jews from 1918 through 1919 in Guba.
Moreover, the Armenians destroyed and burned hundreds of Azerbaijani settlements, including 157 villages in Karabakh, committed massacre against Azerbaijanis in Shusha city. During this period, 167 settlements were burned, destroyed and looted in Guba district, 110 settlements in Shamakhi district, 115 settlements in Zangezur district, 211 settlements in Iravan province.
Armenian Dashnaks tortured and killed about 50,000 people in Baku and other territories of Azerbaijan from March through April 1918. More than 10,000 were mercilessly killed in Zangezur district, 10,270 Azerbaijanis were killed in Shamakhi district.
From 1918 through 1920, as a result of the massacre committed by the Armenians in Baku, Guba, Shamakhi, Kurdamir, Lankaran, Shusha, Iravan province, Zangezur, Nakhchivan, Sharur, Ordubad and other regions, tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis were killed with special cruelty, more than 1 million people were expelled from their native lands.