The Voice of Mirza Xazar

March 31 - A century-long Day of Sorrow

Azerbaijan By Adil Baguirov, Ph.D.

In Azerbaijan, the March 31 is known as the Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis, referring to the tragic events that started on March 30, 1918, and continued until April 1.

It is widely recognized, that the 20th century is the most violent, vicious and turbulent 100 year period of history, indeed known as the Century of Genocides.

It has been estimated, that some 200 million people have died due to the inhumanity of men towards each other. The word “genocide”, coined only after the WWII, has forever entered our daily lexicon, to give the legal definition to the worst crimes against humanity, massacres, slaughters and ethnic cleansing. Certainly, genocide represents a policy, a campaign carried out against a group of people over a period of time and consisting of otherwise seemingly isolated massacres and bloodshed.

In Azerbaijan, the March 31 is known as the Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis, referring to the tragic events that started on March 30, 1918, and continued until April 1. A Yale University history professor F. Kazemzadeh, in one of the first comprehensive scholarly studies of the region in the US, wrote: “This three-day massacre by Armenians is recorded in history as the “March Events” and thousands of Muslims, old people, women and children lost their lives” (“The Struggle for Transcaucasia”, New York, 1951, p. 69).

Another distinguished professor of history at the University of Louisville, was even more blunt: “From 30 March to 1 April 1918, the Tatars [as Azerbaijanis were sometimes called] were attacked. Almost half of the Muslim population of Baku was compelled to flee the city.… Between 8,000 and 12,000 Muslims were killed in Baku alone.…” (Justin McCarthy, “Death and Exile. The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821-1922”, Darwin Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p. 214).

“The truth is that the Armenians, under the guise of Bolshevism, rushed on the Muslims and massacred during a few frightful days more than 12,000 people, many of whom were old men, women, and children,” – continues Kazemzadeh. “The March Events, as this episode became known to history, touched off a series of massacred all over Azerbaijan. Brutalities continued for weeks…. Every Azerbaijani whom the Dashnak bands could catch was killed. [T]he “civil war” degenerated into a massacre, the Armenians killing Muslims irrespective of their political affiliation or social and economic position.”

For more scholarly accounts of the events, one might turn to the books by Tadeusz Swietochowski, professor of history at Manmouth University (“Russia and a Divided Azerbaijan”, Columbia University Press, 1995), or Michael Smith, professor of history at Purdue University (“The Russian Revolution as National Revolution: Tragic Deaths and Rituals of Remembrance in Muslim Azerbaijan (1907–1920),” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 49, 2001).

However, some estimates put the number of massacred Azerbaijani victims in this particular event as high as 30,000. There are a multitude of other references, shocking us with the extent of the mass-murder of the days: from the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, where he briefly mentions the March 1918 events, by saying that the commissar S.Shaumyan, an ethnic Armenian leader of the Bolshevik and Dashnak forces, and the chief architect of the genocide throughout Azerbaijan, “turned Baku into an Armenian operated henhouse [slaughterhouse]”, to a letter from a British officer serving in Baku during the massacres of 1918 to his Whitehall superiors in which he refers to “river of blood” flowing down the streets and bodies dumped from ships into the Baku Bay by Armenians.

In his recent book, researcher R.Mustafayev writes that on August 31, 1918, for the first and last time the Armenian government itself has declared that only in one year Armenians killed 400 thousand Azerbaijanis, 120 thousand Georgians, 15 thousand Turks and others – all just in South Caucasus. In spite of the fact that government of Armenia has probably reduced the statistical data, this self-incriminating evidence bears a lot of weight (“Crimes of Armenian terrorist and bandit formations against the humanity {XIX-XXI centuries}”, Baku, 2002).

In reference to various attempts to downplay or even conceal the slaughter, Kazemzadeh notes, “No matter how obvious historical facts may be, there are always means of twisting them to suit a particular theory. The March Events are exactly such case. The facts are generally known, - there are enough of them to satisfy the most exacting historian, - and yet there is hardly a book which gives an impartial account or an objective evaluation of the great massacres.”

Nonetheless, revelations directly from Armenian sources abound, with the most typical self-confession being: “I killed Muslims by every means possible. Yet it is sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The best way is to gather all of these dogs and throw them into wells and then fill the wells with big and heavy stones, as I did. I gathered all of the women, men and children, threw big stones down on top of them. They must never live on this earth” (A. Laloyan, “Revolutsionniy Vostok” (Revolutionary East), No 2-3, Moscow, 1936. Quoted from Richard Hovannisian, “Armenia on the Road to Independence”, Berkeley, 1967, p. 41-42). Additional accounts could be found from Agop Zahoryan, Mikael Kaprilian, Ohanus Appressian, Sahak Melkonian, K. S. Papazian, and Leonard Ramsden Hartill, to name a few.

“As the Armenians found support among the Reds (who regarded the Tartars [Azerbaijanis] as a counter-revolutionary elements) the fighting soon became a massacre of the Tartar population” (W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, “Caucasian Battlefields”, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 481).

Writes the Rear-Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner (Ambassador) in Istanbul, “While the Dashnaks [Armenian extremist party] were in power [1918-1920] they did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling by attacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars [Azerbaijanis]; by committing outrages against the Moslems; by massacring the Moslems; and robbing and destroying their homes. During the last two years the Armenians in Russian Caucasus have shown no ability to govern themselves and especially no ability to govern or handle other races under their power” (U.S. Library of Congress, “Bristol Papers,” General Correspondence Container #34). The Rear-Admiral continues, “I have it from absolute first-hand information that the Armenians in the Caucasus attacked Tartar (Muslim) villages that are utterly defenseless and bombarded these villages with artillery and they murder the inhabitants, pillage the village and often burn the village” (“Bristol Papers”, General Correspondence: Container #32: Bristol to Bradley Letter of September 14, 1920).

After the proclamation of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic (ADR) on 28 May 1918, the “March Massacre” was investigated into by the Government. In 1919 and 1920, the ADR observed 31 March as a national day of mourning. This was the first attempt to make a political assessment of the policy of genocide against Azerbaijanis and of the occupation of the Azerbaijani lands for over a century.

Being unable to commemorate the tragedy during the Soviet years, the March 31 has been re-established in 1998, exactly 80 years after the bloodbath, to commemorate not just that particular massacre, but the policy of genocide carried out since the 19th century and throughout the entire 20th century, with the final act being the Khojaly Massacre (see BT op-ed, http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=2945

The official position of Azerbaijan is that close to a million Azerbaijanis have been massacred in the 20th century as the result of Armenian genocidal campaign. This makes for a total of 2,5 million Azerbaijanis, Turks, Kurds, Georgians and other people who fell victim to the Armenian policies of cleansing the Caucasus for the creation of their state, which was supposed to stretch from the Black sea to the Caspian to the Mediterranean.

Today, Azerbaijan takes serious steps on the path of researching and preventing genocide, educating and outreaching about the history of extermination of its population. The basis is the March 26, 1998 presidential decree re-designating March 31 as the official day of commemoration, on the top of already separately commemorated recent tragedies, such as the Khojaly Massacre (February 25-26) and Black January (January 19-20). Next step has been the recently initiated process of collection of the relevant documents for pursuing the case in the court of The Hague. Moreover, a declaration has been circulated and signed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), entitled “Recognition of the genocide perpetrated against the Azeri population by the Armenians” (PACE Doc. 9066 2nd edition, Written Declaration No. 324, 14 May 2001).

Aside from the obligation by the Azerbaijani state to carry on the political assessment of the policy of genocide against Azerbaijanis and of the occupation of the lands, the genocidal campaign can stop only after the Armenian aggression is stopped and all the currently illegally occupied lands of Azerbaijan are liberated.

Adil Baguirov is the founder of Zerbaijan.com -- Virtual Azerbaijan Resources (VAR) website (since 1995), Come.to/Khojaly -- first Khojaly Commemoration Website (since 1997), Habarlar-L Caspian Distribution List, Yeni Dostlar Network, and a frequent contributor on Azerbaijan-related matters. Javid Huseynov, a co-administrator of Habarlar-L and Yeni Dostlar, as well as a Ph.D. candidate, also contributed to this article.

URL: http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=8480