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Shusha massacre
Part of Armenian–Azerbaijani war (1918–1920)
Ruins of the Armenian half of Shusha after the city's destruction by Azerbaijani army in March 1920. In the center: defaced Armenian Ghazanchetsots Cathedral
LocationNagorno-Karabakh (disputed between Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and First Republic of Armenia)
DateMarch 1920
TargetArmenian civilians
Attack typeMassacre, riots, pogrom
Deaths500 up to 20,000 Armenians
PerpetratorsOttoman Army and Azerbaijanis

The Shusha massacre or Shushi massacre (Template:Lang-hy), also known as the Shusha pogrom, was the mass killing of the Armenian population of Shusha and the destruction of the Armenian half of the city in 1920. Starting in 1920, Azerbaijani and Ottoman armies killed thousands of Armenian civilians and started the process of “cultural de-Armenianization” in the region.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire, the ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh with its largest city of Shusha became hotly contested between the newly founded First Republic of Armenia and the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. The mediator's role was endorsed by the British who started to support the newly formed republics in an attempt to halt the Soviet advance in Caucasus. However, the authority of the British-appointed Azerbaijani governor general of Karabakh Khosrov bey Sultanov was undermined and a new armed struggle between Armenians and Azerbaijanis ensued. Sultanov managed to achieve a brief military and political advantage, but in late March 1920 fightings with Armenians resumed. The massacre in Shusha itself took place between 22 and 26 March 1920. According to Colonel J.C. Rhea, acting allied high commissioner, Sultanov, "countenanced a polity of extermination of Armenians". The number of deaths varies depending on source, with the lowest estimate being 500 and the highest estimate being 20,000.

Background

Shusha's Armenian quarters in the aftermath of their destruction by Azerbaijani army in March 1920. In the background: defiled Cathedral of the Holy Savior and Aguletsots church.
Ruins of the Armenian part of Shusha after the 1920 pogrom. In back is the church of the Holy Mother of God (Kanach Zham).
The Armenian quarter of Shusha after the massacre, with the Holy Saviour cathedral in the back.

At the end of the First World War, the ownership of the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh was disputed between the newly founded states of the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Shusha – the territory's largest settlement, its capital, and with a mixed population consisting mostly of ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis – found themselves at the centre of the dispute.

The government of Azerbaijan proclaimed in Baku the annexation of the disputed territory and, on January 15, 1919, appointed Khosrov bek Sultanov, as governor-general of Karabagh. The United Kingdom had a small detachment of troops stationed in Shusha and acceded to Sultanov's appointment as provisional governor, but insisted that a final decision on the territory's ownership should be decided only at a future peace conference.

In response to Sultanov's appointment, the General Assembly of the Armenians of Karabagh (Armenian National Council of Karabagh), meeting in Shusha on February 19, "rejected with legitimate indignation all pretence of Azerbaijan with regard to Armenian Karabagh, which said Assembly has declared an integral part of Armenia".

On April 23, 1919, the Karabakh Council convened in Shusha and again rejected Azerbaijan's claim of sovereignty, insisting on their right of self-determination. After this, a local Azerbaijani detachment encircled the Armenian quarters of Shusha and demanded that the inhabitants to surrender the fortress. Shots were fired, but by virtue of British mediation, the Armenians agreed to surrender to them instead.

On the 4 and 5 June 1919, armed clashes occurred in Shusha between the two communities and Sultanov began a blockade of the town's Armenian quarters. American nurses working in Shusha for Near East Relief wrote of a massacre "by Tartars of 700 of the Christian inhabitants of the town". A cease-fire was quickly organised after the Armenian side agreed to Sultanov's condition that members of the Armenian National Council leave the town. However, a new wave of violence then swept through neighbouring Armenian-populated villages: in mid-June Azerbaijani mounted "irregulars", about 2,000 strong, attacked, looted and burnt a large Armenian village, Khaibalikend, just outside Shusha, and approximately 600 Armenians lay dead.

The seventh Congress of the Armenians of Karabagh was convened in Shusha on 13 August 1919. It concluded with the agreement of 22 August, according to which Nagorno-Karabagh would consider itself to be provisionally within the borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan until its final status was decided at the Peace Conference in Paris.

Conflicts erupted again in Karabakh in early 1919 and 1920 due to the disputes between Armenians and the Sultanov, whose rule was characterized by violence and lawlessness. Armenians remained divided on their response and a stock of arms was built up on both sides and the Armenians decided to deter a Tatar attack by staging a rising which was mismanaged.

Revolt

According to UCLA historian Richard G. Hovannisian, the failure at Khankendy (present-day Stepanakert) sealed the doom of Shusha. "As planned, the Varanda militia entered Shusha on the evening of March 22, supposedly to receive its pay and to felicitate Governor-General Sultanov on the occasion of Novruz Bairam. That same night, about 100 armed men led by Nerses Azbekian slipped into the city to disarm the Azerbaijani garrison in the Armenian quarter. But everything went wrong. The Varanda militiamen spent most of the night eating and drinking and were late in taking up their assigned positions, whereas Azbekian's detachment, failing to link up with the militia, began firing on the Azerbaijani fort from afar, awakening the troops and sending them scurrying to arms. It was only then that the Varanda militiamen were roused and began seizing Azerbaijani officers quartered in Armenian homes. The confusion on both sides continued until dawn, when the Azerbaijanis learned that their garrison at Khankend had held and, heartened, began to spread out into the Armenian quarter. The fighting took the Armenians of Shusha by surprise. Several thousand fled under cover of the dense fog by way of Karintak into the Varanda countryside."

Historian Audrey L. Altstadt writes, in reference to a British correspondent in Baku, that representatives of Allied Powers in the region decided that the police of Karabakh should be made up of equal numbers of Armenians and Azerbaijanis; however, in late March 1920, the Armenian half of the police murdered the Azerbaijani half during the latter's traditional Novruz Bayram holiday celebrations.

Massacre

According to Hovannisian, "Azerbaijani troops, joined by the city's Azerbaijani inhabitants, turned Armenian Shusha into an inferno. From March 23 to 26, some 2,000 structures were consumed in the flames, including the churches and consistory, cultural institutions, schools, libraries, the business section and the grand homes of the merchant class. Bishop Vahan (Ter-Grigorian), long an advocate of accommodation with the Azerbaijani authorities, paid the price of retribution, as his tongue was torn out before his head was cut off and paraded through the streets on a spike. The chief of police, Avetis Ter-Ghukasian, was turned into a human torch, and many intellectuals were among the 500 Armenian victims."

The former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Behbud Khan Javanshir, was assassinated during Operation Nemesis of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation as they suspected that he was involved in Shusha massacre.

Human toll

According to the 1917 publication of Kavkazskiy kalendar, there were 43,869 residents in Shusha on 14 January [O.S. 1 January] 1916—the city was composed of 23,396 Armenians who formed 53.3 percent of the population and 19,091 Shia Muslims (mainly Azerbaijanis) who formed 43.5 percent of the population. A conservative estimate by Hovannisian places the death toll of the massacre at 500 Armenians and the destruction of many buildings in Shusha. German historian Jörg Baberowski states that the Armenian quarter of Shusha was "wiped off the face of the earth" as indicated by only 25 of 1,700 homes surviving the pogrom. Marieta Shahinyan writes that 3–4 thousand or more than 12 thousand Armenians were killed and 7,000 homes were destroyed in three-days. At least several hundred, 500, 3,000–4,000, 8,000, 8,000–12,000, or more than 12,000 Armenians of Shusha were massacred in one night or three-days. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, "up to 20 percent of the population died" when the city was burned. 5,000–6,000 Armenians managed to escape by way of Karintak to Varanda and Dizak. By 11 April 1920, some thirty villages in Nagorno-Karabakh had been "devastated" by Azerbaijani forces as a result of the uprising, leaving 25,000 homeless (including nearly 6,000 refugees from Shusha). Another source writes that "20 percent of the region's residents perished as a result of Turkish-Azerbaijani aggression."

Memory

The prominent Russian poet Osip Mandelstam who was in Shusha in 1931 wrote a poem ("The Phaeton Driver") dedicated to the Shusha massacres:

So in Nagorno-Karabakh
These were my fears
Forty thousand dead windows
Are visible there from all directions,
The cocoon of soulless work
Buried in the mountains.

Visiting Shusha several years after its devastation together with Osip, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, "in this town, which formerly, of course, was healthy and endowed with every amenity, the picture of catastrophe and massacres was terribly vivid ... They say after the massacres all the wells were full of corpses.... We didn't see anyone in the streets or on the mountain. Only in the centre of town, in the market-square, there were a lot of people, but there wasn't any Armenian among them, they were all Muslims." Numerous other communist officials recalled the destruction of the town, including, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Olga Shatunovskaya, and Anastas Mikoyan and Marietta Shaginyan, Russian-Georgian writer Anaida Bestavashvili drew a comparison between the burning of Shusha to the destruction of Pompeii in her The People and the Monuments.

On March 20, 2000, a memorial stone was laid in Shusha on the site of the planned monument to the victims of the pogrom. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic government introduced a proposal to the National Assembly to establish March 23 as a day of memorial of the victims of the Shusha pogroms.

See also

Notes

  1. Hovannisian also writes of a "Melkumian report" that claims that 5,000–6,000 were "left behind" during the massacre whilst 8,000 escaped.
  2. 2,200 of this number included women and girls.

References

  1. ^ Hovannisian 1996a, p. 152.
  2. Smele, Jonathan (2015). Woronoff, Jon (ed.). Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 137. ISBN 9781442252813. Archived from the original on 2022-11-08. Retrieved 2022-11-08. …local Azeris attacked the Armenian community at Shusha, the number of deaths resulting remaining a matter of bitter dispute (with estimates ranging from 500 to 20,000).
  3. Tölölyan, Khachig (1995). "National self‐determination and the limits of sovereignty: Armenia, Azerbaijan and the secession of Nagorno‐Karabagh". Nationalisim and Ethnic Politics. 1 (1). United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis: 86–110. doi:10.1080/13537119508428422. Archived from the original on 6 November 2022. Retrieved 6 November 2022. …the Azeri burning of Shushi/a and the massacre of some 20,000 Armenians on 23 March 1920.
  4. ^ Geldenhuys 2009, p. 97.
  5. (in Russian) A. Zubov, Политическое будущее Кавказа: опыт ретроспективно-сравнительного анализа (Political future of the Caucasus) Archived 2019-03-25 at the Wayback Machine,"Znamiya" journal, 2000, #4 "Британская администрация почему-то передала населенные армянами уезды Елизаветпольской губернии под юрисдикцию Азербайджана. Британский администратор Карабаха полковник Шательворт не препятствовал притеснениям армян, чинимым татарской администрацией губернатора Салтанова. Межнациональные трения завершились страшной резней, в которой погибла большая часть армян города Шуши. Бакинский парламент отказался даже осудить свершителей Шушинской резни, и в Карабахе вспыхнула война."
    "The British administrator of Karabakh, Colonel D.I. Shuttleworth did not interfere with the discrimination of Armenians by Tatarian administration of governor Saltanov. The national clashes ended by the terrible massacres in which the most of Armenians in Shusha town perished. The Parliament in Baku refused even condemn the accomplishers of the massacres in Shusha and the war was started in Karabakh."
  6. Chorbajian, Levon (1994). The Caucasian Knot: The History & Geopolitics of Nagorno-Karabagh. London: Zed Books. p. 141. ISBN 9781856492881. The city of Shushi, formerly the third largest city in Transcaucasia, saw its Armenian population decimated by the massacre of March 1920.
  7. ^ Амиран Урушадзе. ""Сорок тысяч мертвых окон…"". Kommersant (in Russian). Archived from the original on 3 January 2021. Retrieved 8 November 2022.
  8. Lieberman 2013, p. 56.
  9. ^ "Armenia: The Survival of a Nation", revised second edition, 1990, by Christopher J. Walker, page 270
  10. ""letter from Avetis Aharonian, president of the delegation of the Republic of Armenia, addressed to the presidents of the delegations of Italy, France, England, and the U.S."". Archived from the original on 2007-09-14. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
  11. "Nurses Stuck to Post Archived 2021-08-15 at the Wayback Machine," The New York Times, 4 September 1919.
  12. ^ Wright 2003, p. 98.
  13. The Armenian People from ancient to modern times, ed. by Richard G. Hovannisian, USA, 1997, Vol. II, p. 318.
  14. Audrey L. Altstadt. Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule. Hoover Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8179-9182-4, ISBN 978-0-8179-9182-1, p. 103
  15. "Помимо лидеров младотурок руководство операции "Немезис" приняло решение о ликвидации некоторых деятелей мусаватистского правительства Азербайджана, виновных, по их мнению, в организации резни армян в Баку в сентябре 1918 г. – бывшего премьер-министра Фатали хана Хойского (июнь 1920 г.), а также бывшего министра Бехбуд хана Дживаншира (июль 1921 г.), организатора резни армян в Шуши (Карабах)." I. P. Dobaev, V. I. Nemchina: И.П.Добаев, В.И.Немчина. Новый терроризм в мире и на Юге России: сущность, эволюция, опыт противодействия (Ростов н/Д., 2005)
  16. Кавказский календарь на 1917 год [Caucasian calendar for 1917] (in Russian) (72nd ed.). Tiflis: Tipografiya kantselyarii Ye.I.V. na Kavkaze, kazenny dom. 1917. pp. 190–192. Archived from the original on 4 November 2021.
  17. ^ Bagdasaryan, Gegam (March 2015). "Три нераскрытых обстоятельства резни армян в Шуши" [Three unsolved circumstances of the massacre of Armenians in Shushi]. theanalyticon.com (in Russian). Stepanakert. Archived from the original on 14 November 2022. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  18. ^ Baberovski, Yorg (2010). Враг есть везде. Сталинизм на Кавказе [The enemy is everywhere. Stalinism in the Caucasus] (in Russian). Moscow: Rossiyskaya politicheskaya entsiklopediya (ROSSPEN) Fond «Prezidentskiy tsentr B. N. Yeltsina». p. 171. ISBN 978-5-8243-1435-9. Archived from the original on 8 October 2022.
  19. ^ "1920 թվականի Շուշիի կոտորածը" [The Shushi Massacre of 1920]. Republic.Mediamax.am (in Armenian). Archived from the original on 19 July 2022. Retrieved 19 November 2022.
  20. Cory D., Welt (2004). Explaining ethnic conflict in the South Caucasus: Mountainous Karabagh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia (PDF). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 77. OCLC 59823134. Archived (PDF) from the original on 11 September 2022. Out of a population of approximately 20,000, at least several hundred were killed; the rest were forced to flee. In the fighting that followed, several nearby villages were also razed.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  21. ^ "Шушинская резня 1920 года" [Shusha massacre of 1920]. lazarevsky.club. 13 March 2020. Archived from the original on 14 November 2022. Retrieved 15 November 2022.
  22. Saparov, Arsène. From conflict to autonomy in the Caucasus: the Soviet Union and the making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh. p. 94. ISBN 978-1-317-63783-7. OCLC 1124532887.
  23. Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Vol. 17. New York: Macmillan. 1973. p. 301.
  24. Hovannisian 1996a, pp. 157–158.
  25. Bassiouni, M. Cherif, ed. (2010). The Pursuit of International Criminal Justice A World Study on Conflicts, Victimization, and Post-conflict Justice. Vol. 2. Antwerp: Intersentia. p. 839. ISBN 978-94-000-0017-9. OCLC 497573622. Archived from the original on 2023-01-13. Retrieved 2022-11-15.
  26. Osip Mandelstam, "Faetonshchik," "Мандельштам Осип | Классика.ру - электронная библиотека классической литературы". Archived from the original on 2007-08-13. Retrieved 2007-08-29.
  27. Osip Mandelstam. Sochineniia. 2 vols. (Moscow, 1990) 1: pp. 517–519.
  28. (in Russian) N. Ya. Mandelstam. Kniga tretia. Paris: YMCA-Ргess, 1987, pp. 162–164.
  29. Partizdat TsK VKP (b), 1936, pp. 60–63.
  30. (in Russian) Шатуновская О. Г . Об ушедшем веке. Рассказывает Ольга Шатуновская / сост.: Д. Кутьина, А. Бройдо, А. Кутьин. – La Jolla (Calif.) : DAA Books, 2001. – 470 с., c. 71
  31. "Here during the 3 days in March 1920, 7000 houses were destroyed and burnt, and the people are marking different numbers of that who were massacred...". (in Russian) Marietta Shaginyan, "Soviet Transcaucasus", Armgiz, 1947, p. 254
  32. Anaida Bestavashvili, Lyudi i pamyatniki (in Russian) Archived 2022-11-29 at the Wayback Machine // Армянский вестник, # 1–2, 2000
  33. Nagornyy Karabakh marks 80th anniversary of 1920 Armenian pogroms, Noyan Tapan, 24 Mar. 2000

Bibliography

  • Lieberman, Benjamin (2013). Terrible Fate Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9781442230385.
  • Geldenhuys, Deon (2009). Contested States in World Politics. Vol. 3. Berkeley: Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 9780230234185.
  • Smith, J. (1999). The Bolsheviks and the Nation Quesstion 1917-23. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 9780230377370.
  • Wright, John (2003). Transcaucasian Boundaries. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-0805079326.

Further reading

External links

Anti-Armenian sentiment
Events
See alsoList of massacres of Armenians

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