the Hreshtakapetats Church near the village of Garnaker (1816) was partially destroyed in 1986; the church of the village of Patishen (Badakend) (19th century) was dismantled for building materials.
Khanlar region
The Mrtsunis church of the Getashen village (17th century) is partially destroyed; the church and cemetery near the village of Murut (17th century) were completely demolished in the 1960s; the walls of the Yeghnasar monastery near the village of Ghetashen (17th century) were deliberately damaged.
Shahumyan region
The Mandur church and cemetery near the village of Kharkhaput (1252) were completely demolished; the church near the village Russkie Borisi (12-13th centuries) was razed to the ground; the church in the village of Verinshen (12th century) was razed to the ground, too as it “stood on the way where a railroad was intended to be laid”.
St. Sargis Monastery 4 km west from the village of Dash Salakhli in the Qazakh region.465
The monastery rose on the top of the mountain Surb Sargis and used to count among pilgrimage sites of the region. It was visited at Easter and on Sundays. According to archived documents and inscriptions on the wall of the monastery, its previous restoration was completed in 1851 by Yesai Nurinyants, an Armenian from Tiflis. Interestingly, some sources suggest that 736 believers made donations for the restoration totaling 2210 roubles and 23 copecks. As for the last restoration, it was carried out by Arzuman Khachaturovich Ter-Sarkisyants, a resident of the village Kot, Qazakh region. Today, the church is in ruins.
The St. Vardan Church in the city of Qazakh was consecrated in 1901. According to some sources, today, the church is used as a coffee shop.466 The other church in the city, a Russian church, is used as a sports facility. The church was looted during the Armenians pogroms of 1905–1906. It is known that in 1907–1912, the Armenians of Qazakh expressed their desire to restore the fence of the church. Later, the church was raided by Tatars in 1918.
Ganja (Gandzak):
The church Surb Astvatsatsin (The Holy Mother of God) dating to the 18th century was turned into a club; the church Surb Astvatsatsin Cholaga (The Holy Mother of God) dated 8-10th centuries was pulled down; the church Surb Gevorg of the 19th century was demolished; the church Surb Grigor Lusavorish (Zham) dating to 1869 was pulled down; the church Surb Kirakos dating to 1913 was pulled down; the church Surb Sargis (17-18th centuries) was turned into a museum.
In Azerbaijan, all the restoration works of Armenian monuments sought to completely erase any Armenian inscriptions and any traces of the Armenian architecture. Under the Soviet regime, no Armenian architectural monuments were restored (or at least categorized) in either Nagorno-Karabakh, or on the entire territory of Azerbaijan. This fact may by no means purport to reflect the religious intolerance and oppression of the communists, since all sparse monuments of Islamic culture (incidentally, all of them dated back to no earlier than the 18th century) on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh were fully restored.
The period of the Azerbaijani administration of Nagorno-Karabakh and the years of Azerbaijan’s armed aggression against the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh saw the destruction, blasting and complete demolition of 167 churches, 8 monastery complexes, 123 Armenian historical cemeteries and 47 settlements. Over 2,500 khachkars (cross-stone memorials) of high artistic merit and over 10,000 tombstones with epigraphs were dismantled for building material. 13 historical and archaeological sites were bulldozed to the ground. Monuments in the caves of Tsakhach, Mets Taghlar and Azokh were blown up. The khachkars, tombstones, churches and fortress walls (5-8th centuries) in the settlements of Mokhrablur, Sarashen, Aknaberd and Manadzor were ruined. Most of the wall of the unique fortress Mayraberd (16-17th centuries) was pulled down.467
The above examples are, regrettably, incomplete, but are illustrative of the terror tactics employed against the Armenian cultural heritage in the region aiming to completely erase any vestiges of their historical presence on the territory of today’s Azerbaijan.
15. Mythologization of «genocides»
The psychological warfare frequently includes the use of myths.
The myth is the information which accounts for the origins and further development of various phenomena based on real or fictitious events or facts, with subsequent exaggeration of distortion of the cause and effect relations.
The human perception of the surrounding reality through myths is based on beliefs and opinions held by representatives of a specific culture, ethnic or social group rather than scientific knowledge.468
People usually resort to social myths, which are warped notions of the reality deliberately inculcated in the public mind to shape the required social responses. The most singular element about social myths is that the bulk of the society views them as a natural state of affairs rather than pieces of fiction. As a rule, under the impact of social myths, the history of origin and development of states and ethnic groups becomes distorted to such extent that its impartial analysis is possible only through critical juxtaposition of various sources.
Specialists consider that myths have the capacity to:
• affect simultaneously the intellectual and emotional aspects of the human consciousness. This makes people believe in the reality of the mythical content;
• turn a hyperbolic depiction of an individual case into an ideal model of the desired line of conduct. It is thanks to this peculiarity that the content of myths can affect the human conduct;
• rely on a specific tradition existing in the society.
Myths are an efficient tool for manipulating the consciousness. A myth taken alone has little meaning. However, when inculcated and deeply ingrained in the minds of the people, a myth can substitute (provided certain conditions are met) the reality for a long time. As a result, the recipient perceives the reality in line with how the myth is interpreted and therefore acts based on such perception. The convenience of the myth resides in its capacity to simplify the reality relieving the recipient of any need for intense (and frequently painful) thinking to comprehend the surrounding world.469
In the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:470
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
March 26, 1998 marked the official starting point for mythologization of the “Azerbaijani genocide” as the Azerbaijani ex-president Heydar Aliyev officially instituted the ‘day of genocide of the Azerbaijanis’.
On March 27, 2003, Aliyev, Sr. stated in his speech:
The massive settlement of Armenians on our historical lands after the division of Azerbaijan between Russia and Iran, the massacre of Azerbaijanis perpetrated by Armenian Dashnaks in 1905 and 1918, handing over Zangezur to Armenians in the 1920s, the creation of an Armenian autonomy on the territory of Karabakh, the deportation of our compatriots from Armenia in 1948–1953… new territorial claims of Armenia to Azerbaijan in the late 1980s – all led to a full-scale war, occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijani lands by the Armenian armed groups and made about 1 million of our compatriots refugees and internally displaced persons.471
The “genocide of 1905 in Baku”, the “genocide of 1918 in Baku and Guba”, the “genocide of 1988–1990” and the “genocide of Khojaly” are the four major “genocides” intensely trumpeted by the Azerbaijani propaganda. There are also other secondary and minor “genocides”: purported to have been perpetrated in Zangezur, Karabakh, Shemakh, Kyurdamir, Salyan, Lankoran, Kafan, Gugark, Sisian, Agdaban, Baghanis-Ayrum, Masis, etc.472
The geography of the Azerbaijani genocides is quite extensive, with matching time frames. Only one thing remains without change: perpetrators and organizers. This role is traditionally reserved for Armenians. Let us examine the psychological prerequisite for the mythologization of “Azerbaijani genocides”.
The scholar Yuri Lotman in his article on semiotics and typology of the culture notes that each culture creates a mythologized image as its ideal self-portrait.473 In his turn, W. Wundt notes that the language, myths and customs represent common spiritual phenomena so closely fused together that one is unthinkable without the other. <…> The customs express through deeds the same views on life that rest on myths and become public through language. These deeds in their turn further enhance and elaborate the perceptions that they stem from.474
It must be pointed out that the mythologization of genocides is a cultural product of today’s Azerbaijani society and is a manifestation of latent aggression.
“Aggression is the consequence of such conduct that has for objective as its targeted response the infliction of a damage to the person it is aimed against. The aggression may not always be exhibited openly; it can manifest itself through fantasizing, dreaming or even through a thoroughly deliberated retaliation plan; it can be directed against the purported cause of frustration, be redirected against a completely innocent target or even own self”.475
Besides, another psychological phenomenon can be at play here termed ‘mirroring’ and amounting to reproduction with varying degrees of adequacy the traits, structural characteristics and relations of other objects. This comes to say that in this case, the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide called for an “Azerbaijani genocide of their own” to match Armenians.
The head of the Assistance to Development of Public Relations NGO, Shelale Hasanova in her interview to the Day.az information agency pointed out the mainstays of the Azerbaijani propaganda: “We suffered through four genocides in a single century and we remained unbroken; we survived and we gained independence and we now become integrated into the world community. This is what we must speak and write about not only on the Genocide Memorial Day but during the history classes in schools, at international conferences and during various political actions. I shall remind you these four genocides: the genocide of Azerbaijanis in 1905–1907 in Western Azerbaijan476 and in Baku, the genocide of 1918–1920 perpetrated by Dashnaks in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the genocide of 1988 when militant nationalists of the Soviet Armenia banished Azerbaijanis from the lands of Oghuz Turks by torturing and burning them alive. And finally, the forth genocide was perpetrated by Armenian armed bands in Khojaly”.477
This anti-Armenian propaganda campaign enlists the assistance of all political and civil institutes. For instance, Elmira Suleymanova, the Azerbaijani Ombudsman, stated that “as a result of a deliberate genocidal policy, ethnic cleansings and deportations perpetrated by Armenians and their supporters against Azerbaijanis over the past two centuries, our people had to endure dreadful ordeals… A total of some 700 thousands of our compatriots were killed”.478
There is no need to dwell in detail on every single attempt at falsification of historic events of the region by the Azerbaijani propaganda. It will suffice to focus on the two most circulated examples, that of Guba and Khojaly.
“The genocide of Guba”
In 2007, during drilling works for the renovation of a stadium in Guba, a mass grave of unknown origin was found on the site of a trash dump. Only 35 human skeletons could be lifted to the surface in their entirety. To this day, no result of any archaeological research or expert appraisal on the origin of these remains has been published. Also, no concomitant evidence has been made available.
Meanwhile, on December 30, 2009, the president Ilham Aliyev issued a decree on creation of a “genocide memorial complex” in Guba. Depending on the interests currently at stake, the remains are attributed to Jews or Lezgins or simply Muslims. However, Armenians are invariably cast in the role of the perpetrators.
The text of the decree reads as follows:
At the outset of the past century, as a result of a policy of mass ethnic cleansings and aggression perpetrated by armed bands of Armenian Dashnaks on Azerbaijani lands – in Baku, Guba, Karabakh, Shemakh, Kyurdamir, Salyan, Lankaran and other regions, tens of thousands of innocent Azerbaijanis were killed; one of the most tragic genocidal acts of the 20th century was committed against our people. In April-May 1918, in the Guba uyezd only, 122 villages were completely destroyed. The mass grave in the city of Guba revealed that as a result of the genocide, along Azerbaijanis slain with boundless ferocity and extreme cruelty, thousands of Lezgins, Jews, Tats and representatives of other national minorities were exposed to violence.479
What did really happen in Guba? Immediately upon the discovery of the grave in Guba, the speaker of the Azerbaijani parliament Oktay commissioned the director of the History Institute, member of the parliament, Yagub Mahmudov to retain foreign anthropologists and compile an official document “on the mass killing of Azerbaijanis by Armenians at the outset of the past century”. However, foreign experts never showed up in Guba, and the remains discovered there were not given any independent appraisal at least to determine their temporal dimension.480
The late president of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Mahmud Kerimov, did not exclude that the remains of Guba might both stem from a mass killing and a mass epidemic.481 Meanwhile, Gahraman Agayev, the head of the expedition mounted by the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, stated in relation to the discovery of about 200 skulls: “The researchers concluded that the grave is a result of a genocide perpetrated by Armenians in Guba. A phantom letter by Stepan Shahumyan addressed to Hamazasp which has never been published by the Azerbaijani side is quoted by Agayev as a “compelling” piece of evidence.
Agayev’s claim that the time of the death was accurately established (“The massacre occurred between May 3 and 10”) is equally preposterous. The same can be said about his assertion that “it has been established based on anthropological investigation of skulls that apart from Azerbaijanis, Jews and Lezgins suffered physical extermination in 1918”. Agayev also passed over in silence the revolutionary method that must have been contrived by the Azerbaijani scientists for unraveling the precise ethnicity of the remains.
Yet, his colleague, Maisa Rahimova, the director of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, seems to be in the same boat as she claims that “anthropological research confirmed that these people were Muslims”482 Notice must be taken of the fact that a participant of the same expedition, Asker Aliyev, Candidate of Historical Sciences, clearly states: “Only 35 skeletons could be identified from among a multitude of skulls and children’s bones. No hair, vestiges of clothes or objects were found in the wells”. This means that any assertion about the religious affiliation of the persons, whose remains were found, is not only unprofessional but downright fatuous.
In January 2012, professor Levon Yepiskoposyan, Doctor of Biology, addressed a letter to the president of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, academician Mahmud Kerimov offering to carry out a qualified international expert appraisal of the human remains found in Guba in order to discover scientifically the truth about the mass graves of Guba. In February 2010, the professor came up with another proposal to allow Armenian specialists to take part in a joint anthropological and genetic expert examination of the remains found in Guba; however, his letter remained unanswered.483
Meanwhile, Hayk Demoyan, the director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, notes that there are archive materials proving that the Armenian population of Guba was exposed to violence from the local Tatar bands in 1918, and the number of Armenian victims corresponds to the number of skeletons found at the burial site.
Here is one such testimony. In the late April 1918, Gelovani, the commissar of the city and the region of Guba, sent a telegram to Korganov, the chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee, containing the following: “Today, on April 24, I released 115 Armenians who were jailed in the prison of Guba. They all were divested of their property. I took measures to have their property restituted. They are asking for financial assistance from the Armenian National Counsel. Please, send it to my address as soon as possible. The pecuniary situation is critical… apart from the city of Guba, Armenians are held captive also in other places. I am taking measures towards their liberation”.484
It is of note that the same testimony is confirmed in the series published on the Day.az website under the heading Historical Prism: 1918: how the mass killing in Guba was carried out”. The article says that a member of the Ganja District Court, Andrey Novatski, who came to Guba to investigate the events of April-May 1918, addressed an inquiry to the head of the municipality Ali Abbas Alibekov to clarify the situation in Guba in the period concerned. In his response dated December 12, Alibekov wrote that Guba had a population of about 20 thousand, of which some 500 were Armenians whose residences were scattered in different parts of the town.
“According to the evidence collected by A. Novatski commission, in April 1918, as the power in Baku was in the hands of Bolsheviks, David Gelovani, representative of the Bolshevik party, arrived in Guba with an international detachment of 187 armed soldiers and set about forming a Bolshevik administration in the town. However, the first attempt was not successful. Nine days after, armed Lezgins from the neighboring settlements managed to chase away the first team of Bolsheviks from the town after three days of fierce fighting. Both sides sustained casualties: 200 Lezgins and another 70 non-combatants were killed,” says the publication.485
It is probable that the 200 people killed in the clashes between the population of Guba and the international detachments of Bolsheviks were buried in the accidentally discovered ditch pits. These can be just as well Armenians who were killed in the clashes. However, nothing can be unequivocally asserted without an international scientific expert appraisal.
Thus, the Azerbaijani side, without any scientific expert appraisal, designates the ethnicity and the religious affiliation of the persons whose remains were found as well as pinpoints precise dates of the killings. Why to this day, the local population was not aware of a mass grave of their relatives whose burial site was on a trash dump? What was the method, unknown to the modern science, employed by the Azerbaijani specialists to determine that the discovered skulls belonged to Azerbaijanis, Lezgins, Mountain Jews or Tats? Was there any concomitant evidence discovered that could provide an exhaustive answer to questions of chronology and ethnicity of the persons whose remains were found?
And finally, what is the historical document that reliably reports a burial site of “Azerbaijanis brutally murdered by Armenians” in Guba? All these questions from the Armenian side remained unanswered.
“The genocide of Khojaly”
According to the Azerbaijani version, it is a “genocide perpetrated by Armenian Armed Forces with participation of the 366th Motor Rifle Regiment on the night of February 25–26, 1992 against ethnic Azerbaijanis during the seizure of the town of Khojaly”. However, the reality is that on February 26th 1992, during the hostilities at the approaches to the Azerbaijani-controlled city of Aghdam, under obscure circumstances, between 200 and 300 persons were killed, according to the international advocacy organization Human Right Watch (600 persons, according to the version of the Azerbaijani propaganda), who were deliberately held in the thick of the fighting by the Azerbaijani authorities. Notwitshtanding insistent warnings from the Armenian side, the population of Khojaly, being one of the five weapon emplacements bombarding the blockaded Stepanakert, was forcibly held there and willfully not evacuated for months by the Azerbaijani authorities to be subsequently used as a human shield.
The residents of Khojaly who left the settlement through the humanitarian corridor opened by the Self-Defense Forces of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic enjoyed unhindered passage of over 10 kilometers and reached the Azerbaijani-controlled city of Agdam. Later, in the immediate vicinity of the Azerbaijani lines, bodies of the dead residents of the settlement were found. The exact number of the killed remains unknown as the official Baku keeps publishing self-contradictory figures. The Parliamentary Commission of Azerbaijan assigned to investigate the tragic demise of the civilians near Aghdam was disbanded on Heydar Aliyev’s orders, and all evidence was classified.
More details about the Aghdam events can be found on www.Xосаli.net or by watching the documentary Between Hunger and Fire: Power at the expense of lives.486
However, the Azerbaijani side would not stop there. After counting some 20 Azerbaijani genocides at the hands of Armenians in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, the Azerbaijani propaganda decided to expand the geography of their “genocides”.
In autumn 2012, during the construction of a school in the Iranian city of Urmia an unidentified burial site was discovered.487 “The mass grave discovered during the excavations in the city of Urmia in Iranian province of Western Azerbaijan488 may not be destroyed. It must be preserved and protected as a proof of genocide against Azerbaijanis,” stated Professor Govhar Bakhshaliyeva, Member of the Parliament and director of the Institute of Oriental Studies after Z. Bunyadov of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. According to her, “Iran’s wish to wipe out the grave is an indication of a policy and unjust position in respect of the Azerbaijani people from some chauvinists and paniranists to a single end of aiding Armenians”.489
Bakhshaliyeva asserted that “on the territory of today’s province of Western Azerbaijan, presently a part of Iran, Armenian and Assyrian armed bands perpetrated a monstrous genocide against Azerbaijanis in 1918”. Bakhshaliyeva even announced that an international conference on “the Azerbaijani genocide in Iran” would be held in the following year in Baku.490
Her colleague, Musa Guliyev, the deputy chairman of the Social Policy Committee of the Azerbaijani parliament, went even further and declared that “it is possible that together with Azerbaijanis, Persians, Kurds and representatives of other nations perished because actually they were killed because of their devotion to Islam”.491
The position of the official Baku on the subject was voiced by Ali Ahmedov, the executive secretary of the ruling party Yeni Azerbaijan: “I condemn the destruction of the burial site in Iran which testified to genocide against Azerbaijanis,” stated Ahmedov.492
The reaction from the Iranian side came quick and harsh. “By distorting the history and exploiting ethnic problems, Azerbaijan seeks its own benefit,” stated the Organization for Cultural Heritage of the Iranian province of Western Atrpatakan (Western Azerbaijan). The Organization also noted that groundless claims made by Musa Guliyev, the deputy chairman of the social policy committee of the Azerbaijani parliament were false as research had revealed that the burial site discovered during the renovation works of the historical school in Urmia relates to the events of the World War I when the Ottoman Empire, Russia and England launched an assault to seize north-western regions of Iran leading to a massacre of about 9 million Iranians”.493
This story was rounded off by Mohsen Pak Ayeen, the Iranian ambassador in Azerbaijan, who stated in his interview to SalamNews agency that a law was passed in Iran prescribing that construction works could be authorized at the burial sites dating over 100 years. He confirmed the information that human remains had been found during the construction of a school in Urmia. “Some believe that these are remains of Muslims killed by Armenians. However, there is no evidence to this effect,” stated the Iranian ambassador.494