Decree of the President of Azerbaijan on the genocide of the
Azerbaijanis, issued on 26 March 1998
Azerbaijan's attainment of independence made it possible to
recreate an objective picture of our people's historical past.
Long years of secrecy about which the truth could not be told are
being revealed, and the true nature of facts that were falsified
at the time is coming to light.
The genocide that has been repeatedly committed against the
Azerbaijani people, which for a long time was not subjected to
proper political and legal assessment, is one of these unopened
pages of history.
The dismemberment of the Azerbaijani people and the division
of our historical lands began with the treaties of Gyulistan and
Turkmanchai, signed in 1813 and 1828. The national tragedy of the
divided Azerbaijani people was continued with the occupation of
its lands. As a result of the implementation of this policy, a
very rapid mass resettlement of Armenians in Azerbaijani lands
took place. The policy of genocide became an integral part of the
occupation of Azerbaijani lands.
Despite the fact that the Armenians installed in the territory
of the Erevan, Nakhichevan and Karabakh khanates were a minority
in comparison with the Azerbaijanis living there, they were able,
with the help of their protectors, to create an administrative and
territorial unit known as the "Armenian region". This artificial
territorial division in essence created the preconditions for
implementing the policy of expelling Azerbaijanis from their lands
and annihilating them. The concept of "greater Armenia" began to
be propagated. In order to "justify" the attempts to create this
artificial state on Azerbaijani land, large-scale programmes were
conducted for the purpose of creating a false history of the
Armenian people. The distortion of the history of Azerbaijan and
of the Caucasus as a whole was an important part of these
programmes.
Inspired by dreams of creating "greater Armenia", the Armenian
usurpers, not even caring to conceal their intentions, carried out
between 1905 and 1907 a series of large-scale bloody actions
against Azerbaijanis. The atrocities committed by the Armenians
began in Baku and then extended over the whole of Azerbaijan and
Azerbaijani villages in the territory of present-day Armenia.
Hundreds of settlements were destroyed and wiped from the face of
the earth, and thousands of Azerbaijanis were barbarically killed.
The organizers of these events, by preventing the truth of what
had happened from being revealed and subjected to a proper
political and legal assessment, and concealing their reckless
territorial claims, created a negative image of Azerbaijanis.
Taking advantage of the situation following the end of the First
World War and the February and October 1917 revolutions in Russia,
the Armenians began to pursue the implementation of their plans
under the banner of Bolshevism. Under the watchword of combating
counter-revolutionary elements, in March 1918 the Baku commune
began to implement a criminal plan aimed at eliminating
Azerbaijanis from the whole of Baku province. The crimes
perpetrated by Armenians in those days have imprinted themselves
forever in the memory of the Azerbaijani people. Solely because
of their ethnic affiliation, thousands of peaceful Azerbaijanis
were slaughtered. The Armenians set fire to homes and burned
people alive. They destroyed national architectural treasures,
schools, hospitals, mosques and other facilities, and left the
greater part of Baku in ruins.
The genocide of the Azerbaijanis was carried out with particular
cruelty in Baku, Shemakha and Guba districts and in the Karabakh,
Zangezur, Nakhichevan, Lenkoran and other regions of Azerbaijan.
In these areas, the civilian population was exterminated en masse,
villages were burned and national cultural monuments were
destroyed and obliterated.
After the proclamation of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic,
the events of March 1918 were at the centre of attention. To
investigate the tragedy, on 15 July 1918 the Council of Ministers
adopted a decision to establish a special commission of inquiry.
The commission investigated the March tragedy, studying first the
atrocities committed by the Armenians in Shemakha and the serious
crimes committed by them in Erevan province. A special unit was
set up in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to inform the
international community of the true course of events. In 1919 and
1920, the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic observed 31 March as a
national day of mourning. This was in fact the first attempt to
make a political assessment of the policy of genocide against
Azerbaijanis and of the occupation of our lands for over a
century. However, the demise of the Azerbaijani Democratic
Republic meant that this work could not be completed.
In 1920, taking advantage of the Sovietization of Transcaucasia
for their own foul purposes, the Armenians declared Zangezur and a
number of Azerbaijani lands to be part of the territory of the
Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Subsequently, new means came
to be used for the further expansion of the policy of deporting
Azerbaijanis from these territories. To this end, the Armenians
secured the adoption, on 23 December 1947, of a special decision
by the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the resettlement of
collective farm workers and other Azerbaijanis from the Armenian
SSR to the Kura-Araks lowlands in the Azerbaijani SSR, and between
1948 and 1953 were able to have mass deportation of Azerbaijanis
from our historical lands conducted at the State level.
Beginning in the 1950s, the Armenian nationalists, with
the aid of their protectors, began a frenzied campaign of
psychological warfare against the Azerbaijani people. In books,
magazines and newspapers disseminated periodically in the former
Soviet Union, they sought to prove that the most treasured
masterpieces of our national culture and the classical legacy of
our architecture belonged to the Armenian people. At the same
time, they stepped up their efforts to spread a negative image of
Azerbaijanis throughout the world. Creating the image of the
"unfortunate, unhappy Armenian people", they deliberately
falsified the events that took place in the region at the
beginning of the century: having perpetrated genocide against
Azerbaijanis, they portrayed themselves as victims of genocide.
Our persecuted compatriots were driven en masse from the town
of Erevan, most of the population of which at the beginning of the
century comprised Azerbaijanis, and from other districts of the
Armenian SSR. The Armenians grossly violated the rights of
Azerbaijanis, made it difficult for them to be educated in their
mother tongue, and pursued a policy of repression. The historical
names of Azerbaijani villages were changed; old toponyms were
replaced with modern names on a scale unprecedented in the history
of toponymy.
The falsification of Armenian history, the purpose of which
was to create a basis for raising Armenian youth in a spirit of
chauvinism, became State policy. Our rising generation, brought
up in the spirit of the great humanistic ideals of Azerbaijani
literature and culture, was targeted for persecution by this
extremist Armenian ideology.
The policy of slandering the spiritual values, national
honour and dignity of the Azerbaijani people formed the
ideological basis for political and military aggression. In the
Soviet press, Armenians distorted historical facts, misleading
public opinion.
The leaders of the Azerbaijani Republic did not conduct a
proper and timely assessment of the anti-Azerbaijani propaganda
waged by Armenians taking advantage of the opportunities afforded
to them by the Soviet regime. In the mid-1980s, this propaganda
began to intensify.
The Azerbaijani Republic also did not give the correct
political assessment of the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of
Azerbaijanis from their historical lands that took place in the
initial phase of the so-called "Nagorny Karabakh conflict", which
began in 1988. The anti-constitutional decision of the Armenians
to incorporate Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region of Azerbaijan
into the Armenian SSR, thereby removing the Autonomous Region from
Azerbaijani jurisdiction by means of the Special Administering
Committee, established by Moscow, was met by our people with
indignation, and Azerbaijanis were faced with the prospect of
taking serious political action. In spite of the fact that the
policy of seizing our lands was resolutely denounced at rallies,
the Azerbaijani leaders remained passive. This resulted in the
movement of troops into Baku in January 1990 in order to suppress
the growing popular movement. Hundreds of Azerbaijanis were killed
or wounded, mutilated and subjected to various forms of physical
pressure.
In February 1992, the Armenians committed the unprecedented
massacre of the population of the town of Khojaly. This bloody
tragedy, which became known as the Khojaly genocide, involved the
extermination of thousands of Azerbaijanis; the town was razed
from the face of the earth.
As a result of the adventurist policy pursued by Armenian
nationalist-separatists in Nagorny Karabakh, today more than one
million of our citizens have been expelled from their homes by
Armenian aggressors and forced to live in tents. During the
Armenian occupation of 20 per cent of our territory, thousands of
our fellow citizens have been killed or disabled.
All of Azerbaijan's tragedies, which took place in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were accompanied by the
seizure of land, and represented various stages of the Armenians'’
deliberate and systematic policy of genocide against Azerbaijanis.
Only one of these events - the March 1918 massacre -resulted in an
attempt to give a political assessment of what was taking place.
The Azerbaijani Republic, heeding the behest of history, perceives
the need to give a political assessment of such acts of genocide
and to bring the decisions that the Azerbaijani Democratic
Republic did not manage to implement fully to their logical
conclusion.
In commemoration of all the tragic acts of genocide perpetrated
against the Azerbaijani people, I hereby decide:
1. To proclaim 31 March as the Day of Genocide of the
Azerbaijanis;
2. To recommend that the Milli Majlis (Parliament) of the
Azerbaijani Republic consider holding a special session devoted to
the events involving genocide of the Azerbaijanis.
Heydar ALIYEV
President of the Azerbaijan Republic