Dr. Pat Walsh
History & Politics Analyst
Scientific Advisory Board Member, Research Institute for Mezalim
A common feature of Western accounts of conflict in both the former territories of the Ottoman Empire and Russian South Caucasus is an emphasis on, and indeed exaggeration of, Christian Armenian suffering and a corresponding downplaying, and often total absence, of atrocities committed against the Muslim population. Western accounts seem to be heavily influenced by the Armenian narrative which, for a number of reasons, have become the prevailing story in Europe and the United States. However, if we are to regard all the diverse varieties of humanity as equally deserving of a voice the balance needs to be fundamentally readdressed in this area. After all, these accounts of conflict and suffering have been shown to have been not only produced for the purposes of war propaganda but also as part of a system of racial hierarchy in which the sufferings of many parts of humanity are dismissed as immaterial against the experiences of those regarded as more worthy, purely because of skin color or religion.
Let us talk about the situation in the South Caucasus as an example of this. In doing so we shall divide our account into three periods – 1905-6, 1917-20 and 1988-94. What characterizes all three periods is a breakdown in political stability, involving the collapse or partial disintegration of Russian state structures, which Armenian nationalism attempted to take advantage of, to destroy or ethnically cleanse the local Muslim populations, in order to carve out a large Armenian state devoid of non-Armenians.
During the outbreak of revolutionary activity in Russia in 1905 what existed of Tsarist rule in the South Caucasus was largely withdrawn to deal with disturbances in strategically more important centers. However, the inter-communal violence between Armenians and the Muslim population, sparked off by the general instability, was the most serious event in the region. Up to 10,000 people perished in the conflicts of 1905-6 and casualties were certainly disproportionately higher among the Caucasian Muslims than among Armenian Christians.
Most accounts blame the Armenian revolutionary groups for instigating the inter-ethnic conflict. These groups had been raiding across the border into Ottoman territories for over a decade and had been a major source of instability in the region. The Georgian P. Goleishvili made the following point about the Dashnaktsoutun in his book on events at this time:
“Before the emergence of Armenian revolutionary activists, particularly the Dashnaks, Transcaucasia lived in peace and safety. No one remembers anything similar to what we witnessed in the Armenian-Tatar massacres. As the Dashnaks came with their propaganda of the creation of homogenous Armenian territory for the Armenian autonomy in the future, hatred and animosity penetrated the lives of Transcaucasian villages.” (“Karibi”/P. Goleishvili, Krasnaya kniga, pp. 49-50)
Firuz Kazemzadeh, the U.S./Iranian historian, writing about the events of 1905-6, commented:
“The Dashnaktsutiun… bear a major portion of responsibility, for it was… the leading force in perpetrating the massacres. The Dashnaks organized bands similar to those which operated in Turkey… Such bands would attack Muslims and often exterminate the populations of entire villages. The Azerbaijanis, on the other hand, did not have any organization comparable to the Dashnaktsutiun. They fought without coordination or plan.” (Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia 1917-1921, pp. 3-16)
It was undoubtedly the emergence of Armenian nationalist revolutionary groups in the 1890s which ignited the conflict of 1905-6 in the Southern Caucasus. The prominent Dashnak, Garegin Pasdermadjian, later boasted that “the admirable organization of the Armenians” had resulted in the large casualties among the Muslim population (Garegin Pasdermadjian, Armenia and her Claims to Freedom and National Independence, p.11).
Ranald MacDonell, who worked in the British Consulate in Baku when conflict began in the city, described events that led to the first outbreak of violence in early February 1905. There had already been hundreds of Dashnak attacks on Tsarist officials, after attempts at Russification of the Armenians, that disturbed the peace of the city. When the Russians left to deal with trouble elsewhere the well prepared Dashnak terrorist groups turned their guns and bombs on local Muslims: “The Dashnaks had done their job well… it was organized warfare that had been declared by the Armenian on the Tartar…” wrote MacDonell later. He noted that “arms were smuggled into the country and the whole of the Armenian community throughout the Caucasus became well armed.” (Ranald MacDonell, And Nothing Long, p.136)
An Armenian revolutionary, Ohanus Appressian, who was born in Khankendi, in Karabakh, and who later fought against the “Tartars” (Russian term for Azerbaijanis) recalled that “the Armenians had much the better of the fighting. Many of our men had served in the Russian Army, and were trained soldiers. We Armenians were rich and possessed arms. The Tartars had never received military training. They were poor, and possessed few arms beyond knives.” (Leonard Ramsden Hartill, Men Are Like That, p.23)
Tadeusz Swietochowski, the Polish historian and Caucasologist, concludes that the Azerbaijanis, whom the Tsarist authorities never had any trouble from, were the victims of the highly organized, and well prepared Armenian nationalists:
“the Muslims remained conspicuously inactive, as though insulated by cultural and psychological barriers from the turmoil… Yet they were soon to be shaken out of their passivity by an outbreak of inter-communal violence that was so extensive that it became known as the Tatar-Armenian war.” (Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan, p.37)
After large loss of life in Baku in August – most of it Muslim – trouble spread across the region to Nakhchivan, Irevan, Jebrail, Shusha, Ganja, Zangezur, Gatar, Gapan and Tbilisi. The killing went on sporadically until September 1906. It is well documented in a contemporary account, ‘Years of Blood’, by Mammad Said Ordubadi. It is clear that the events of 1905-06, instigated by the Armenian revolutionaries, had a very bad effect on inter-communal relations in the Southern Caucasus and set a dangerous precedent, producing hatred and scores that would be settled in the future when further political instability occurred. It was probably the main factor in rousing the largely passive Muslims of the Southern Caucasus into a more coherent force, as a necessity of self-defense.
In late 1917, as the Great War was going badly for the Russians, further destabilization occurred in the South Caucasus when the Tsarist armies holding that front began to collapse after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. A number of factors led to the subsequent Armenian attacks on Muslims. Firstly, in the situation of flux that had developed within the absence of state authority, the Armenian revolutionary bands saw a chance to carve out Magna Armenia, a great Armenian state spreading across the Southern Caucasus to the Mediterranean. Secondly, a large number of Armenians who had served in the crumbling Tsarist armies returned to the region with their weapons. Thirdly, both the British and Bolsheviks, for differing purposes, began to fund, arm, train and organize these Armenians to construct a new front against the Ottomans to replace the disintegrating Russian lines.
This situation presented a great danger to the Muslim population of the Southern Caucasus, and indeed, the eastern territories of the Ottoman Empire. Suddenly, heavily armed bands of poorly disciplined Armenians were let loose against poorly armed and largely defenceless Azerbaijani settlements. The Azerbaijani Turks were the most unmilitarized element in the whole region, excluded from the Tsar’s army before the Great War and refused enlistment in it, even during conscription. On the other hand, there were hundreds of thousands of Armenians under arms in both Tsarist regular and irregular forces with a long tradition of guerrilla warfare behind them.
In most of the region the Armenians were in the minority. However, they had the advantage of Dashnak leadership, with over two decades of experience of irregular warfare, military training, a great deal of weaponry and ammunition taken from Russian forces. The Armenian bands came up against villages that had little means of defense against these seasoned fighters. As a result, there was extensive ethnic cleansing and massacres of Muslim populations.
The British paymaster to the Armenians, Captain MacDonell, later admitted to the consequences of supporting these forces with British finance and resources:
“Shortly after… payment was made to the Armenian Formations certain Armenian Regiments ran amok in the conquered territory and cutting up several Kurdish villages massacred the inhabitants. When the incident was reported to Colonel Pike he requested the Russian Staff to refuse all further payments to these Armenians Formations.” (FO 371/3657/27502. L465. 5.12.1918)
By the end of 1917 the disintegration of the Russian Army of the Caucasus became a serious problem for those in the path of the Armenian bands. The Muslim population bore the brunt of the pillaging and destruction. In all, nearly 200 Muslim settlements were laid waste in the Erivan governate and their inhabitants put to the sword by these retreating forces. It is estimated that around 180,000 Muslims died or became refugees as a result during this period. In the Elizavetpol governate, in the area of Ganja, and in Karabakh province, large numbers of villages were partially destroyed, with around 100,000 people perishing or being forced out of their homes into the countryside.
There was, as a consequence of what what was happening on the Russian front, a temporary confluence of interest between British Imperialism and Bolshevik Russia in early 1918. Both the British and the Bolsheviks had a common use for the Armenians in this situation. The Bolsheviks brought back and armed 100,000 Armenians to resist the Ottoman advance that had been triggered by Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism. The Russian Army of the Caucasus, which had numbered around 320,000, left the vast bulk stores of its weapons and ammunition to the Armenians, under the command of General Andranik. The Armenians were never so well armed and equipped and able to independently assert their strength in the region.
Baku was the only major stronghold of the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia. Its possession was important because Baku’s oil was indispensable to the Soviet state. At the end of March 1918, the Baku Bolsheviks allied themselves with the Armenians to repress the Azerbaijani populace and the “March Events” were the result. Stepan Shaumyan, the Bolshevik who led the commune in Baku, was an Armenian who had an interest in pursuing a war against the Azerbaijanis. He had been appointed by Lenin to act as head of a provisional government of a future Armenian state as part of the Bolshevik ‘On Armenia’ Decree. He was also an admirer of Andranik, a Dashnak with a fearsome reputation for the ethnic-cleansing of Muslim villages, whom Shaumyan described as “a true national hero” in a letter. Bolshevism and Armenian nationalism became conjoined in Shaumyan, in lethal combination. Over two-thirds of the 20,000 strong Baku Commune’s forces were Armenian and this element from the Russian Caucasus Army was the best trained element in the city. The Armenian force was indispensable to the Bolsheviks who did not have the military or popular support necessary to impose themselves on the Muslim majority inhabitants, in order to hold Baku.
British Foreign Office reports note that the Armenians, availed of a Bolshevik assault on the Azerbaijani quarters of the city to kill 12,000 Azerbaijanis in Baku and then massacre 18,000 in Elizavetpol. A large proportion of the Muslim population were driven out of the city.
But Baku was not the only area in which massacres took place in late March/early April 1918. In Shamakhi city the mainly Armenian troops despatched by Shaumyan destroyed the Muslim quarter, killing over 3,000 people. Around 400 women and children were slaughtered, seeking protection in a mosque, one of 13 which were destroyed. A further 4,000 people were killed in other nearby settlements. In the Quba district 2,000 perished, including many of the Mountain Jewish community, at the hands of the Armenian forces.
The details of the March massacres were exhaustively investigated and documented by a Special Investigation Commission of the Azerbaijani Government, from June 1918 until April 1920. It resulted in 36 volumes and 3,500 pages of eyewitness testimony from survivors, documentation and harrowing photographs of the death and destruction visited upon the Muslim community. It was not war propaganda, like much of the massacre stories that made their way into the European Press, but factual evidence of real atrocities.
General Andranik had meanwhile taken his “Special Striking Division” of 3,500 Dashnaks into Nakhchivan, Zangezur and Karabakh to extend the territories of the Armenian state he did not feel was large enough under the Batum Treaty. An admiring Armenian biography, Andranik – Armenian Hero is quite frank about the ethnic cleansing this involved, that denuded Zangezur of Muslims to make it a future part of Armenia:
“Andranik’s irregulars remained in Zangezur surrounded by Muslim villages that controlled the key routes connecting the different parts of Zangezur… Andranik initiated the change of Zangezur into a solidly Armenian land by destroying Muslim villages and trying to homogenize key areas of the Armenian state. In late 1918 Azerbaijan accused Andranik of killing innocent Azerbaijani peasants in Zangezur and demanded that he withdraw Armenian units from the area.” (Patriot Publishing, Andranik, Armenian Hero, online edition, loc.191)
During the Spring and Summer these attacks continued unabated in the areas menaced by Dashnak units, including the regions of Nakhchivan and Karabakh. Andranik, attacked Khoy in Persia/South Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, where the majority population was Muslim, but which the Dashnaks wanted for their Greater Armenia. News started to circulate that the Dashnaks were massacring Muslims, looting property and burning villages. The same bands also organized attacks on the advancing Ottoman Army, heading to liberate Baku. By the Treaty of Batum, the Erivan Republic was supposed to demobilize its armed forces and disarm armed groups conducting raids outside the territory. However, Dashnak irregular forces under Andranik and others continued to act outside its provisions, and attacked Muslim settlements. After Andranik was repulsed by the Ottoman XII Division his forces went on a rampage of reprisal killings across Nakhchivan before he was finally driven out by Ottoman forces led by Kazım Karabekir, in July 1918.
Following the Mudros armistice and the withdrawal of the Ottoman Army from the Southern Caucasus, Armenian attacks were directed toward Nakhchivan. In December 1918, Dashnak bands stormed the villages of Uluhanlı, Gemerli, Vedibasar, and Sederek and began advancing towards Nakhchivan city, only to be stopped again by Turkish forces which had not as yet been demobilized and who remained as a protecting force.
Sir Alfred Rawlinson, an Englishman who was sent to the area to monitor the disarming of Turkish forces, later recorded:
“British troops were completely withdrawn, and Armenian occupation commenced. Hence all the trouble; for the Armenians at once commenced the wholesale robbery and persecution of the Muslim population on the pretext that it was necessary forcibly to deprive them of their arms… Armenian troops have pillaged and destroyed all the Muslim villages in the plain. Caravans of refugees were constantly arriving from the plain, from which the whole Muslim population was fleeing with as much of their personal property as they could transport, seeking to obtain security and protection… In those Muslim villages… not only had many Muslims been killed by the Armenian Army, but horrible tortures had been inflicted in the endeavor to obtain information as to where valuables had been hidden, of which the Armenians were aware of the existence, although they had been unable to find them.” (Sir Alfred Rawlinson, Adventures in the Near East, 1918-22, pp. 175-8)
Ohanus Appressian, an Armenian officer based in Kars, who conducted operations against Muslim villages during this period, later gave an honest account of the type of warfare that the Armenians waged, to the American, Leonard Hartill:
“We Armenians did not spare the Tartars. It is all a circle of hatred and revenge, an endless chain plunging ever farther into the depths and bringing forth the worst there is in human nature. If persisted in, the slaughtering of prisoners, the looting, and the rape and massacre of the helpless become commonplace actions expected and accepted as a matter of course… This war quickly developed into one of extermination. Horrible things happened, things that words can neither describe nor make you understand. The memory of scenes I witnessed and of incidents in which I participated still makes me feel sick… We proceeded to solve the Tartar problem in Armenia. We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the Tartars, and then proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stones and dust, and when the villages became untenable and the inhabitants fled from them into the fields, bullets and bayonets completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped, of course. They found refuge in the mountains, or succeeded in crossing the border into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole length of the borderland of Russian Armenia from Nakhichevan to Akhalkalaki, from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain plateaus of the north, is dotted with the mute mournful ruins of Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for the howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the scattered bones of the dead… We Armenians did not spare the Muslims. I have been on the scenes of massacres where the dead lay on the ground, in numbers, like the fallen leaves in a forest. Muslims had been as helpless and as defenceless as sheep. They had not died as soldiers die in the heat of battle, fired with ardour and courage, with weapons in their hands, and exchanging blow for blow. They had died as the helpless must.” (Leonard Ramsden Hartill, Men Are Like That, pp.24-9)
The British occupation from December 1918 temporarily stabilized the situation in the Southern Caucasus. The military governor, General Thomson, sent Andranik packing on a tour of Europe to calm the area. The Armenians were warned that their activities would reflect badly upon them at the Peace Conference in Paris. However, the British decided to withdraw their forces from the region in mid-1919 and a further period of Armenian aggression against the Muslim population ensued.
When the British departed from the Caucasus in August 1919 ethnic cleansing and massacres commenced in Nakhchivan and within the Armenian Erivan Republic against its remaining Muslim population. Hundreds of Muslim inhabited villages in the Erivan, Echmiedzin, Surmalu and Novobayazet districts were destroyed, tens of thousands killed and 150,000 of the non-Armenian population driven out. Later in the year, 62 villages were devastated by Dashnak units with large numbers of innocents dying of starvation, and for want of shelter, in the countryside.
During February 1920 Oliver Wardrop, the British Commissioner in Tbilisi, reported to his government how the Armenians were marching toward Shusha in Karabakh, laying waste Muslim settlements in Zangezur and killing their inhabitants. It was recorded in Admiral Bristol’s information to the U.S. Secretary of State, that:
“Four days ago, Armenian guerrillas, helped by regular troops, began an offensive in the Zangazur area with the assistance of cannons and machine guns. There was a huge number of victims… The Turkish population is fleeing in panic while asking for assistance… The tens of thousands of women and children who are refugees from Zangazur are now at Cebrail without any shelter. The district of Zangazur has been entirely destroyed by those who came from Erivan armed with hundreds of cannons and machine guns. More than ten thousand Armenians are attacking. From the hills between Hocagane and Zebuh, the Armenians have destroyed all the villages… the Armenian Government attacked ten or more Tartar villages… destroying these villages, pillaging the houses and carried off all the cattle. The villages were bombarded by artillery and part of the population killed while a large number of those remaining died of exposure and cold. Further it is claimed that the Armenian Government is carrying on a policy of extermination towards the Tartar population in the district of Kars and the Armenian troops are proceeding to a final extermination of the Tartars in this district.” (FO E1097/155, 29.2.1920, and FO E1029/134, 4.3.1920)
An examination of the British archives covering this period reveals many reports of Armenian atrocities committed against the Muslim population and Armenian leaders were warned of the negative implications of such. However, there was also a concerted effort to supress such information before it reached the Allied Press. Only a small number of independent journalists, like Robert Scotland Liddell, were able to publish news of these events, which ran contrary to the necessities of war propaganda.
One of Admiral Bristol’s officers, Lt. Robert Dunn, spent time with General Dro (Drastamat Kanayan) during his campaign in Zengezur and wrote up an account of his experiences in a book, ‘World Alive’. It contains shocking descriptions of the surrounding and sacking of Muslim villages and the massacre of women and children without mercy, which Dro’s men engaged in enthusiastically. The killing and depopulating of Western Zangezur continued for another year, even after Soviet occupation, and was conducted by Garegin Nzhdeh, who later departed with Dro and went to fight for the Nazis with a large Armenian Legion, during Hitler’s invasion of the USSR.
The Southern Caucasus was stabilized by Soviet rule from the early 1920s until the 1980s. The settlement, much to the annoyance of Armenian nationalism, retained Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan, in the form of the autonomous oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh. But when the Soviet state began to disintegrate, under Gorbachev’s reform program during the late 1980s, this was the signal for Armenian nationalism to reassert itself and for the Azerbaijanis and other Muslims to suffer again from its expansionary objectives.
Ethnic violence was sparked off after the bodies of murdered Azerbaijanis from Armenia were brought to Baku in refrigerated railway carriages by the Soviet authorities in February 1988. This sparked off the tragic events in Sumgait. Greater killing and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis occurred in the latter part of 1988 when hundreds died and many villages were entirely emptied of their inhabitants by the Armenian paramilitaries which had emerged in early 1988. The new paramilitary forces were an indication that Armenians had decided on the path of armed force to wrest control of Karabakh away from Azerbaijan. From September 1991 Armenian forces advanced into positions, cutting off Azerbaijani settlements in Karabakh. During early 1992 the Armenians went on the offensive, capturing Azerbaijani village after village, expelling their inhabitants as they advanced. The Armenians proved very adept at irregular warfare and this enabled them to quickly terrorize much of the Azerbaijani civilian population into flight. Fedayeen fighters from Armenian met no equivalent from Azerbaijan.
On February 26th, 1992, Armenian armed groups in alliance with troops from the Soviet 366th regiment from Khankendi, whose officers were 80 per cent Armenian and who were being funded by the separatists, assaulted Khojaly. Heavy artillery and around 40 armored vehicles were employed in the attack and this overwhelming firepower quickly broke down resistance. Khojaly with a pre-war population of around 6,000 and the site of the region’s airport, served as a railway and road transport hub for the wider area and was considered a hindrance to further Armenian territorial expansion. Khojaly was put under siege and blockade from early September 1991. Around 2,500 people were trapped when Armenian forces surrounded the town in early 1992. The outgunned and outnumbered defenders were largely defenceless against the forces which were ranged against them. In one night they massacred at least 613 innocent people, including women, children, and infants. More than 480 were wounded and 1,200 people were taken hostage. The fate of 150 others is still unknown today. Khojaly town was completely annihilated, and it is difficult to find any trace of it. The massacre at Khojaly in which people were done to death in the most brutal fashion was the most devastating of the operations conducted by the Armenian paramilitaries against the Azerbaijani population.
The Armenian writer Zori Balayan, author of ‘The Hearth,’ which inspired the Karabakh “Miatsum” (union with Armenia) movement in the mid 1980s, later made the following extraordinary confession of his part in the atrocities at Khojaly:
“When I and Khachatur entered the house, our soldiers had nailed a 13-year-old Turkish (Azerbaijani) child to the window. He was making much noise so Khachatur put his mother’s severed breast into his mouth. I skinned his chest and belly. Seven minutes later the child died. As I used to be a doctor I was a humanist and didn’t consider myself happy for what I had done to a 13-year-old Turkish child. But my soul was proud for taking 1 per cent of vengeance for my nation. Then Khachatur cut the child’s body into pieces and threw it to a dog of the same origin as Turks. I did the same to three Turkish (Azerbaijani) children in the evening. I did my duty as an Armenian patriot. Khachatur had sweated a lot. But I saw the struggle for revenge and great humanism in his and other soldiers’ eyes. The next day we went to the church to clear our souls from what had been done the previous day. But we were able to clear Khojaly of the slops of 30,000 people.” (Zori Balayan, Revival of our Souls, p.260-1)
There is little doubt that there were ideological factors which motivated the atrocities at Khojaly and other places. Armenian nationalism has a strong supremacist impulse which regards Armenians as a superior race and “Turks” as inferior people. The supremacist ideology, which was given traction by Westerners during the late 19th Century, cultivated notions of a special people – the most ancient nation, the original Christians of the region, and masters of a great empire, among the Armenians. This instilled in Armenian nationalism a feeling of racial superiority and a consequent despising of “lesser forms of humanity” that they lived among and who were considered inferior. While this biological racism, which was all the rage within Social Darwinist Imperialism before the Great War of 1914, went into disgrace after the revealing of the Nazi death camps in 1945, it had deadly effects during the 1990s because it still persists within Armenian nationalism.
In 2003, the then Armenian President, Serzh Sargsyan, admitted that the massacre at Khojaly served the effective purpose of the mass intimidation of Azerbaijani civilians from Karabakh. In an interview with the journalist Thomas De Waal, published in his book ‘Black Garden’, Sargsyan stated that the Khojaly massacre laid down a marker to the Azerbaijani population of Karabakh and was meant as a warning to them – leave or perish:
“Before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population. We were able to break that. And that’s what happened. And we should also take into account that among those boys were people who had fled from Baku and Sumgait.” (Thomas De Waal, Black Garden, p.172)
Monte Melkonian, an international terrorist in ASALA, which had conducted assassinations and anti-civilian bombings across Europe, led the Armenian irredentist campaign in Karabakh. Melkonian, a national hero among Armenians, “was one of the key architects of the victories in Karabakh and... played an instrumental role in organizing the Karabagh Army and turning it into a first-rate fighting force.” (Joseph Masih and Robert Krikorian, Armenia at the Crossroads, p.44)
Melkonian led a 4,000 strong unit and was joined by hundreds of other Armenians, from the US, French, Lebanese and Syrian diasporas, many with similar backgrounds in terrorism. Considered the most efficient detachment of the Armenian separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh, the “Arabo” unit, was formed in 1989 in Yerevan on the initiative of the Dashnaktsutyun party from among its members who had acquired combat experience in the Lebanese civil war. Arabo gained notoriety for its participation in the terrible events that befell the inhabitants of the village of Garadagly, where dozens of civilians were killed in cold blood in February 1992, and at Khojaly.
Monte Melkonian blamed out of control irregular forces for the massacre and the atrocities that were perpetrated. His brother wrote:
“The Arabo fighters had unsheathed the knives they had carried on their hips for so long, and began stabbing. Now, the only sound was the wind whistling through dry grass, a wind that was too early yet to blow away the stench of corpses. Monte crunched over the grass where women and girls lay scattered like broken dolls. ‘No discipline’, he muttered.” (Marker Melkonian, My Brother’s Road: An American’s Fateful Journey to Armenia, p. 213)
Prior to the attack, the Armenian forces had surrounded the town from three sides, purposely leaving the fourth open as a funnel for civilians to go through. The fleeing civilians were, however, ambushed and killed in brutal fashion in woods and open ground, often with the use of knives. Journalists captured the shocking scenes of carnage in video footage that was aired on TV. The footage showed the mutilated corpses of civilians, including those of small children scattered on the ground. Many had been scalped, decapitated, or had their eyes gouged out, with some pregnant women having been bayoneted in their stomachs. Many women and children also perished when they fell from exhaustion and were frozen to death during their escape across the mountains.
In another instance, 4,000 people who were driven across the high Murov mountains in mid-winter by the Armenian forces who captured Kalbajar in April 1993 are still missing, presumed dead. In July 1993 the city of Aghdam, with a population of 50,000 was completely destroyed by Armenian forces, and left looking like Hiroshima to this day. To the south of Karabakh the 300,000 Muslim population of Qubadli, Jabrayil, Fizuli and Zangilan were driven out, during September/October 1993, with many Azerbaijanis perishing in the Aras River in their attempted escape to Iran. The remaining 50,000 Muslims in areas close to Karabakh were expelled by Armenian forces in early 1994.
The Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report on the war accused the Armenians of conducting a “scorched earth policy” in Karabakh including the “forced displacement of the Azeri population by means of indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations… the taking and holding of hostages… and the likely summary execution of prisoners of war.” Armenia was condemned by 4 UN Security Council Resolutions in 1993. As a result of the war Armenia lost around 6,000, mainly combatants, whilst over 15,000 Azerbaijanis perished, the majority being civilians.
With the Muslim population terrorized into flight and the Azerbaijani government in meltdown at the shock of the situation, the Armenians achieved an extravagant victory in 1994, capturing not only Nagorno-Karabakh but 7 adjoining, largely Azerbaijani-populated, districts. This meant that the area of Azerbaijan under Armenian control was nearly 20 per cent of the national territory. Around 800,000 Azerbaijanis were ethnically cleansed by Armenian forces from their homes in these territories and became internally displaced persons. This was one of the greatest ethnic cleansings since World War II but it is largely unknown about in Europe and the US. Only with the liberation of the Armenian-occupied territories in November 2020 do these people have the chance to return home one day, when the extensive minefields are cleared and infrastructure and settlements rebuilt again for human habitation.
Very few people in the West are aware of all these events and the extensive atrocities committed against the Muslim population of the Southern Caucasus, over the course of a century or more, by forces inspired by expansionary Armenian nationalism. Only a handful of Western writers have ever had the courage to write about them and have found a media all too unwilling to publicize. Unfortunately, these voices have become drowned out by the vociferous campaigns launched by the Armenian diaspora projecting biased, exaggerated and one-sided accounts, playing on former racial and religious sympathies. Today, however, it surely should be the case that Muslim lives matter too.