One hundred years ago, on March 23, 1920, the authorities of the newly created Azerbaijani Democratic Republic massacred the Armenian population of Shushi, the then administrative and cultural center of Artsakh, the Foreign Ministry of the Artsakh Republic said in a statement.
As a result of this heinous crime, thousands of
Armenians were killed, tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes and
the Armenian part of the city was looted, burned and completely destroyed. The
surviving Armenian residents of Shushi, who made up the majority of the city’s
population, were completely expelled. Most of the once beautiful Armenian city
was in ruins for many years. The enormous cultural heritage of Shushi was
destroyed.
“The scale and
cruelty of this crime struck the contemporaries who visited Shushi immediately
after the massacre and noted that the wells were filled with the bodies of
women and children. The tragedy left such a deep mark on the city and its
atmosphere that even after 10 years it caused gloomy impressions and heavy
feelings, which one of the prominent Russian writers of the twentieth century,
Osip Mandelstam, reflected in his poem ‘Phaeton Driver’,” the Ministry said.
“The Shushi
massacre became the apotheosis of the two-year-long attempts of the Azerbaijani
authorities to seize and subjugate Artsakh. These irrepressible and
unreasonable territorial claims on Artsakh by Azerbaijan, which was created as
a result of the Turkish invasion in the South Caucasus, laid the foundation for
the Azerbaijan-Karabakh conflict in its modern sense. The Azerbaijani
authorities tried to achieve their goal through the direct support by the
Turkish troops. Subsequently, the Turkish officers and emissaries continued to
assist the Azerbaijani armed forces, including in organizing the Shushi
massacre of 1920, attempting to continue the Genocide of Armenians, now in
Eastern Armenia,” the statement read.
The forcible
inclusion of Artsakh in the structure of Soviet Azerbaijan, following the
Sovietization of the Republics of the South Caucasus, did not solve the issue,
as the policy of the Azerbaijani authorities towards the Armenian population of
Artsakh changed only in form, but not in content, the Ministry added.
“The beginning of
the process of collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s
once again actualized the issue of physical security of the Armenian population
of Artsakh. In response to the peaceful demands of the people of Artsakh for
reunification with Armenia, a wave of mass killings and pogroms of Armenians
swept throughout Azerbaijan. Thousands of Armenians were killed and maimed,
hundreds of thousands were deported. The Armenian pogroms of the 1988-1990s were the
continuation of the Shushi massacre of 1920 and clearly demonstrated that even
after 70 years neither the goals nor the methods of the Azerbaijani authorities
had changed,” the Foreign Ministry said.
“Only thanks to the
self-organization of the people of Artsakh, which created a capable state with
all the necessary institutions, including an efficient army, as well as the
support of the Armenians worldwide, it was possible to repel the armed
aggression of Azerbaijan in 1991-1994 and to prevent the repeating of the Shushi scenario in
Artsakh, but on a larger scale,” the statement continued.
Today, the
authorities and people of Artsakh are exerting every effort to revive Shushi
and to restore, the cultural heritage of the city destroyed by the Azerbaijani
authorities.