Azerbaijan: Remembering 1918 genocide

Since 1998 Azerbaijan commemorates March 31 as the Day of Genocide. On that day in 1918, Bolshevik forces in Baku together with Armenian militia massacred close to 12,000 Azerbaijanis. The British consul in Baku, Mac Dowell wrote: “There weren’t any Moslems in the town except corpses”. 

Following the resettlement policy of Armenians led by Tsarist and then Soviet Russia in the historical Azerbaijani provinces - Karabakh, Nakhchivan, Zangazur and others, the Azerbaijani inhabitants of those lands were deported gradually, in different periods of the XIX century and in 1905-1907, 1918-1920, 1948-1953, 1988-1993. Particularly, on March 1918 the Bolsheviks and Armenian nationalist groups under a banner of fight against counter-revolution slaughtered thousands of Azerbaijanis in Baku and other cities and regions of Azerbaijan. 

The policy of creating mono-ethnic state reached a high peak in 1988-1989, when 230,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union Armenia launched a full scale war against Azerbaijan and occupied about 20 percent of the territories of Azerbaijan. About one million Azerbaijanis became refugees and internally displaced persons. 

It is worth noting that the facts proving mass human annihilations committed with special brutality by the Armenians during March events in 1918 in Guba region have been revealed in the recent years. Countless human bones found in the massive grave in the region are visual evidence of the Armenian vandalism. It has already been identified that these bones belong to the local civilians brutally murdered by the Armenian armed groups during their assault on Guba city in 1918.  

ANN.Az