Western Zangezur: A chronicle of ethnic cleansing that Armenians are trying to erase

March 31 marks the tragic date - the Day of the Genocide of Azerbaijanis. It is timed to coincide with the massacre of the Dashnaks in Baku, but in reality the genocide of the Azerbaijani people began much earlier. As soon as the Armenians appeared in the South Caucasus, they began to clear their living space for themselves. The aliens not only began to settle the Azerbaijani lands, they set a goal to take possession of them and own them individually.

Earlier, at a meeting on transport issues, touching upon the issue of the Zangezur corridor, President Ilham Aliyev stressed that Armenia must fulfill our demands, and it should be taken into account that in November 1920, the Soviet government took Western Zangezur from us and committed a crime against the Azerbaijani people. "This was not the first and not the last crime... We have not forgotten and will not forget Zangezur," the Azerbaijani leader said.

The Armenians have accumulated a huge amount of debts to the Azerbaijani people. The Zangezur corridor would be a chance for the neighbors to at least partially repay them. The Zangezur land preserves the memory of the terrible deeds of the Armenian nationalists, who left a bloody mark in the history of the Caucasus. This is probably why the Armenian people do not have a normal life on this land, where thousands of crimes against humanity have been committed. At that time, it was not yet called the word "genocide," but it was a real, true genocide committed in the name of a delusional war "from sea to sea."

Let's take a brief look into the tragic history of Western Zangezur. The archives have preserved enough evidence of the Zangezur genocide.

Since the spring of 1906, the Zangezur district has become one of the hotbeds of large-scale Armenian terror against the Azerbaijani population. In this regard, the prosecutor of the Tiflis Judicial Chamber, Kukuranov, noted in his report: "...Many villages have been turned into ruins, some of the inhabitants have fled, and some have been killed, and their bodies are being buried by troops, with traces of Armenian brutality everywhere on the corpses." In the summer of the same year, the Zangezur massacre, as historians write, took on enormous proportions. By unleashing terror in Zangezur, the Dashnaks aimed to destroy Muslim villages located between Zangezur and Nakhchivan in order to unite their armed groups operating in these two regions.

The massacre of Azerbaijanis in Zangezur began in September 1905, when thousands of armed Armenians carried out a "raid" on ten Azerbaijani villages. Villages were completely burned, the villagers' property was looted, and the surviving residents took refuge in forests and mountains. The authorities intervened only when the Azerbaijani population, without waiting for justice, began attacking Armenian villages. The result of the government's intervention did not help restore justice. Rather the opposite. Their property was returned to the Armenians, and the Azerbaijanis who were considered guilty were arrested. At the same time, not a single Armenian was punished, nor was the property looted by Armenians in Azerbaijani villages returned.

The tragic story of the Azerbaijani village of Qatar, which was home to copper mines and which the Armenians had long been eyeing, can only be described as a betrayal of the tsarist authorities. On August 1, 1906, the Armenians surrounded the village and began shelling. The tsarist officials who were in Qatar moved to a nearby Armenian village and watched the tragedy from the sidelines, leaving civilians alone with armed Dashnak gangs. After ten days of heroic resistance, the village was captured and its population massacred. According to historians, Cossacks also took part in the capture of the village of Qatar.

According to archival sources, from August 2 to August 24, 1906, many Azerbaijani villages of the Zangezur district were devastated and destroyed by the Armenians. In total, about 50 Azerbaijani villages have become victims of Armenian robbery in two years. By the time of the Sovietization of Armenia, Zangezur had been thoroughly "cleansed" of the indigenous population.

Having fled Nakhchivan from the Turkish troops in 1918, the bloody Andranik shifted his activities to exterminate the indigenous population of the region in Zangezur and Karabakh. His appearance inspired the local Armenians, who launched terror against the Azerbaijani population. In September of the same year, dozens of Muslim villages were destroyed in Zangezur and more than 500 people were killed. After the arrival of Andranik's gangs in Gerus on November 22, 1918, 30 Muslim villages were destroyed here.

The British mission, which was in charge of the region at that time, pretended to want to reconcile the parties. However, as a member of the ADR parliament, Jalil bek Sultanov, wrote, "the British, under the guise of providing assistance to the Andranik detachment, pay salaries to all armed Armenian detachments operating in the Zangezur district." As you can see, what began in the late 80s, and what happened in the next thirty years, was only a continuation of the script that the powers wrote, snatching the pen from each other.

According to archival documents, during the attacks on the Azerbaijanis of Zangezur, the Armenians "brutally slaughtered them without distinction of gender and age, mocked the corpses." ADR Prime Minister Fatali Khan Khoysky noted that Andranik's goal is to "cleanse" Zangezur and Shusha from the Muslim population and tear these "pieces" from the living body of Azerbaijan.

The main results of the bloody actions of Andranik's gangs in the region were reflected in the materials of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, established in July 1918 and operating until April 1920. Based on the testimony of witnesses and official documents, the commission found that only in the late summer and autumn of 1918, 115 Muslim villages were destroyed and destroyed in the Zangezur district. In all the listed villages, 3257 men, 2276 women and 2196 children were killed and maimed. About 50,000 Azerbaijanis were left homeless and became destitute.

In December 1920, an agreement was signed between the RSFSR and Armenia, according to which Zangezur was assigned to the Armenian SSR. It should be noted that Azerbaijan itself was not invited to participate in the division of its territories. Completing the work of their predecessors, the Nzhdeh units took measures to fully Armenize Zangezur by massacring and expelling the Azerbaijani population. Having captured Zangezur, the Nzhdeh gangs destroyed the remnants of the Armenian population, those who survived the genocide committed by Andranik.

At the beginning of 1916, despite the massacre of Azerbaijanis, the Azerbaijani population was still the majority in Zangezur. Of the total population of 226,398 people in the county, Azerbaijanis accounted for 119,705 (52.8 percent), Armenians - 101,055 (44.6 percent). Andranik and then Nzhdeh "corrected" the situation. According to the agricultural census of 1922, the population of the part of the Zangezur district that had been ceded to the Armenian SSR numbered 63,533 people, including 56,886 (89.5 percent) Armenians and 6,464 (10.2 percent) Azerbaijanis, who were referred to as "Turko-Tatars" in the document...

As the President of Azerbaijan said in one of his speeches, "We have not forgotten this, the Azerbaijani people have not forgotten this. We have not forgotten and will not forget Zangezur. Once again, we have no territorial claims against Armenia. However, Armenia must fulfill its obligations by providing unhindered passage from Azerbaijan to Azerbaijan."

It would be frivolous to expect remorse from the neighbors. No one expects this. Even if they ask for forgiveness for their crimes, guided by fear or profit, this repentance will not be sincere. Unfortunately, the Armenian people are still driven by hatred and myths. The neighbors will have to find a cure for this scourge on their own and within themselves.