Shusha massacre

Background

At the end of the First World War, the ownership of the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh was disputed between the newly founded republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Shusha – the territory's largest settlement, its capital, and with a mixed population consisting mostly of ethnic Armenians (forming a majority) and Azeris – found themselves at the center of dispute.

The government of Azerbaijan proclaimed in Baku about the annexation of the disputed territory and, on January 15, 1919, appointed Khosrov bek Sultanov, the "owner of vast tracts of Karabagh ... an ardent pan-Turkist, a friend of the Ittihadists of Constantinople, and a terror to all Armenians", as governor-general of Karabagh. Britain (which had a small detachment of troops stationed in Shusha) agreed to Sultanov's appointment as a 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 pretense of Azerbaijan with regard to Armenian Karabagh, which said Assembly has declared an integral part of Armenia".

On April 23, 1919 the National Council of Karabagh met again in Shusha and rejected again Azerbaijan's claim of sovereignty, insisting on their right of self-determination. After this, a local Azerbaijani detachment encircled the Armenian quarters of Shusha, demanding the inhabitants to surrender fortress. Shots were fired, but when the British mediated, Armenians agreed to surrender to them.

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 Azeri 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 August 13, 1919. It concluded with the agreement of August 22, 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.

On February 19, 1920 Sultanov issued a demand that the Armenian National Council of Karabagh "urgently to solve the question of the final incorporation of Karabagh into Azerbaijan". The Council, at their eighth congress held from 23 February to 4 March, responded that Azerbaijan's demand violated the terms of the 22nd August provisional agreement and warned that "repetition of the events will compel the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabagh to turn to appropriate means for defence". Armenians of Karabakh prepared a revolt against the Azerbaijani power.

Revolt

According to Richard Hovannisian, the failure at Khankendi sealed the doom of Shusha. "As planned, the Varanda militia entered Shushi 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 Shushi by surprise. Several thousand fled under cover of the dense fog by way of Karintak into the Varanda countryside.

Audrey L. Altstadt writes, referring 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 to have murdered the Azerbaijani half during the latter's traditional Novruz Bayram holiday celebrations.

The Massacre

According to Richard Hovannisian, "Azerbaijani troops, joined by the city’s Azerbaijani inhabitants, turned Armenian Shushi 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, including Bolshevik Alexander Tsaturyan, were among the 500 Armenian victims".

According to the description of Azerbaijani communist Odzhakhkuli Musayev, "a ruthless destruction of defenceless women, children, old women and old men began. Armenians were exposed to a mass slaughter .... And what beautiful Armenian girls were raped and then shot. ... At an order of ... Khosrov-bek Sultanov, pogroms proceeded for more than six days, houses in the Armenian part were crushed, plundered and reduced all to ashes, everyone led women away whenever they wished, to musavatist executioners. During these historically "artful" punishments Khosrov-bek Sultanov, keeping speeches, talked to Moslems about holy war (Jihad) and called on to them to finish off the Armenians of city Shusha, not sparing women, children, etc."

According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Third Edition, 1970), these events contributed to the death of 2,096 of the city's population. Subsequently, only a few Armenian families remained.

Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about Shusha in the 1920s: "...in this town, which formerly, of course, was healthy and 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 downtown, in the market-square there were a lot of people, but there wasn't any Armenian among them, they were all Muslims."

On January 21, 1936, in the Moscow Kremlin, during the reception of the delegation from the Azerbaijan SSR, Sergo Ordzhonikidze remembers his visit to destroyed Shusha: "Even today I remember what I saw in Shusha in 1920, with horror. The most beautiful Armenian town was completely destroyed, and in the wells we saw corpses of women and children."

The former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Behbud Khan Javanshir, was assassinated during Operation Nemesis of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation for his involvement in these events.

Casualties

According to the latest statistical data published in Caucasus calendar in 1917, in 1916 just before the Russian revolution, the population of the town of Shusha was 43,869, of which 23,396 (53%) were Armenians, and 19,121 (44%) were Tatars (Azerbaijanis). Estimates of casualty figures are uncertain and varied: 500 to 20,000-30,000 Armenian victims - and destruction of many buildings in Shusha.

Remembering

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

One of the Komsomol leaders of the Azerbaijan SSR, Olga Shatunovskaya, later wrote in her memoirs: "Azerbaijan didn't want to lose the power as Nagorno-Karabakh is a great region. It's autonomous but only nominally, during these years they ousted many Armenians, closed schools and colleges. Earlier, the main city was Shusha. When in the 1920s there was a massacre, they burnt all the central part of the town, and then they didn't even restore it."

Two prominent Armenian-Russian Communist activists, Anastas Mikoyan and Marietta Shaginyan, wrote about the massacres in their memoirs. Mikoyan, who was in the region, later remarked: "According to the reconnaissance information, at Azerbaijani Mousavatist government's disposal was army of 30-thousands, of whom 20 thousands deployed near the border of Armenia... The army of Azerbaijan shortly before that massacred the Armenians in Shusha, Karabakh."

Russian-Georgian writer Anaida Bestavashvili in her "The people and the monuments" publication compares the pogroms and the burning of Shusha to the tragedy of Pompeii.

Historian Christopher J. Walker wrote, in regard of Sultanov's activities, "The Karabagh affair was a grave one for the British. Accusations of direct British complicity in Armenian massacre cannot really be sustained; but the killings were a result of the almost unconscious British tendency to support 'our traditional friends' – the wealthy – and to disregard the wishes of the majority".

Research analyst Kalli Raptis wrote in her book Nagorno-Karabakh and the Eurasian Transport Corridor, "In July 1918, the First Armenian Assembly of Nagorno Karabakh declared the region self-governing and created a national Council and government. In August 1919, the Karabakh national Council entered into a provisional treaty arrangement with the Azerbaijani government in order to avoid military conflict with a superior adversary". Azerbaijan's violation of the treaty culminated in March 1920 with the massacre of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh's capital, Shushi (called Shusha by the Azerbaijanis)".

The Armenia, Armenia: about the country and the people from the biblical times to our days reference book considers the pogroms of Shusha as a part of genocide of Armenians practiced all over Eastern Armenia: "Shushi, the capital of Karabakh was seized by Azerbaijani nationalists on March 23, 1920, over 20.000 Armenians were killed and 7000 houses, libraries, churches, cemeteries and pantheons were leveled in three days and three nights."

Prof. Richard G. Hovannisian wrote about the massacres: "Finally, in August 1919, the Karabagh National Assembly yielded to provisional and conditional Azerbaijani jurisdiction. The twenty-six conditions strictly limited the Azerbaijani administrative and military presence in the region and underscored the internal autonomy of Mountainous Karabagh. Violations of those conditions by Azerbaijan culminated in an abortive rebellion in March 1920. In retribution, the Azerbaijani forces burned the beautiful city of Shushi, hanged Bishop Vahan, and massacred much of the population. It was the end of Armenian Shushi."

Modern journalist Thomas de Waal wrote in his book Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War about these events:

In Karabakh, the Armenian community was split between the age-old dilemma of cooperation or confrontation. There were those – primarily Dashnaks and villagers – who wanted unification with Armenia, and those – mainly Bolsheviks, merchants, and professionals – who, in the words of the Armenian historian Richard Hovannisian, “admitted that the district was economically with eastern Transcaucasia and sought accommodation with the Azerbaijani government as the only way to spare Mountainous Karabagh from ruin”. The latter group was mainly concentrated in Shusha, but both groups were killed or expelled when an Armenian rebellion was brutally put down in March 1920 with a toll of hundreds of Shusha Armenians. He also wrote that "In March 1920, an Azerbaijani army sacked the town, burning the Armenian quarter and killing some five hundred Armenians."

According to Tim Potier: Following the October Revolution, Karabakh became part of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan, although its control was hotly disputed by Ottoman and British forces, as well as, of course, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Eventually, however, the British re-affirmed Azerbaijani jurisdiction over Karabakh by appointing a Muslim governor at Shusha. Shusha had, by this time, come to be regarded by the Armenian people as an Armenian cultural center and it was not until 28 February 1920 that the Armenian elders of Shusha reluctantly agreed to recognise Azerbaijan's authority. The situation was to alter following the events of 4 April, when a mass exodus of Armenians from Shusha to nearby Khankendi (Stepanakert, today the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh), following an Armenian uprising put down by Azeri forces, transformed, almost overnight, Shusha into an Azeri city.

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.

Publications