Shusha Pogrom (1920)

The Shusha massacre or Shushi massacre ( hy, Շուշիի ջարդեր, translit=Shushii jarder), 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.

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. The number of deaths varies depending on source, with the lowest estimate being 500 and the highest estimate being 20,000.

Background

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,"Armenia: The Survival of a Nation", revised second edition, 1990, by Christopher J. Walker, page 270 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.

On 19 February 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 Azerbaijani authority.The Armenian People from ancient to modern times, ed. by Richard G. Hovannisian, USA, 1997, Vol. II, p. 318.

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 the ', there were 43,869 residents in Shusha on —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 f Shushadied" 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 agorno-Karabakhregion'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.Nagornyy Karabakh marks 80th anniversary of 1920 Armenian pogroms, Noyan Tapan, 24 Mar. 2000

See also

*List of massacres in Azerbaijan

Notes

References

Bibliography

*

Further reading

* Armenia, Armenia: about the country and the people from the Biblical times to our days, a reference-book, by V. Krivopuskov, V. Osipov, V. Alyoshkin and others, ed. V.V. Krivopuskov, Third ed., revised and expanded. Moscow, Golos-Press, 2007. pp. 30–31.
*
В Нагорном Карабахе осудили погромы 1920 года в Шуши

External links

Shoushi Massacres of ArmeniansShushi- Armenian city of sorrow and triumph

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Persecution of Oriental Orthodox Christians
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Conflicts in 1920
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Mass murder in 1920
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Military history of Shusha
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