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The Shusha pogrom of 1920     was a pogrom directed against the ethnic Armenian population of Susha, a town in the region of Nagorno-Karabagh. The event took place between 22nd and 26th March 1920 and had as its background a conflict due to competing claims of ownership of the region by Armenia and Azerbaijan. It resulted in the complete destruction of the Armenian-populated quarters of Shusha and the elimination of the town's Armenian population. Estimates of casualty figures are uncertain and varied: 500 to 30,000 Armenian   and 15,000 Azerbaijani deaths, and destruction of many buildings in Shusha. The Parliament in Baku refused even condemn the accomplishers of the massacres in Shusha and the war was started in Karabakh. Historian Giovanni Guaita wrote, the Azerbaijani and Soviet authorities "during the decades will deny and try to hush up the mass killings of about 30,000 Armenians"

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 and Azeri Tartars - found itself at the centre of the dispute.

The government of Azerbaijan proclaimed in Baku its annexation of the disputed territory and, on January 15th 1919, appointed Khosrov bek Sultanov, known as "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 23 April 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 4th and 5th 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 left 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 19th 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 23rd February to 4th 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".

Pogroms
Armenian forces simultaneously attacked Azerbaijani garrisons in Shusha, Khankendi and Askeran, and fighting soon spread to the neighboring districts of Tartar, Ganja and Nakhichevan. However, Armenian forces temporarily succeeded only in Askeran, while their attacks in Shusha and Khankendi were repulsed and Azerbaijani forces launched a counterattack.

According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Third Edition, 1970), these events contributed to the death of 2096 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 visual... They say after the massacres all the wells were full of dead bodies. ...We didn't see anyone in the streets on the mountain. Only at downtown- in the market-square there were a lot of people, but there wasn't any Armenian among them, all were 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 dead bodies of women and children."

The former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Behbut khan Javanshir, was assassinated during Operation Nemesis of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as ARF believed that he was involved in these events.

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

 So in Nagorno-Karabakh These were my fears Forty thousand dead windows Are visible there from all directions, The cocoon of soulless work Buried at the mountains.

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 pogroms 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".

On July 1 1997, in her speech in the British House of Lords Baroness Caroline Cox remarked, "Armenians have repeatedly suffered atrocities at the hands of Turks and Azeris, including the murder of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey in the genocide of 1915; the massacre of 20,000 Armenians in the ancient Armenian city of Shushi in 1920; and massacres in Sumgait and Baku in 1988 and 1990."

Another member of House of Lords, Lord Hylton, who traveled to Karabakh and Armenia under auspices of Christian Solidarity Worldwide together with its President Caroline Cox wrote in his report for the Committee on Foreign Affairs, that the activities of a joint Turkish-Azeri army in 1919-20 removed areas on the east side of Nagorno-Karabakh, and changed the ethnic majority in Shusha from Armenian to Azeri "forcing many of the former to move from Shushi to Stepanakert, and murdering Bisop Vartan and numerous others".

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)".

Modern Russian politologist Timur Polyannikov in his Vityaz na rasputie publication marks the pogroms in Shushi among other events in Armenian history, "organized by Azerbaijani Pan-Turkists of "Musavat" party."

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."

Modern journalist Thomas de Waal wrote in his book Black Garden about these events: "Terrible pogroms took place in Shusha in 1920 shortly after the Russians left the city because of the economic collapse and civil war. This time Azerbaijani forces crushed the higher, Armenian quarter of the city, burned whole streets and killed hundreds of Armenians... The ruins of the Armenian quarter stood untouched for more than forty years". In another place he wrote that the number of massacred people was 500.

According to the author Thomas de Waal:

In Karabakh, the Armenian community was split between the age-old dilemma of co- operation 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 centre 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 Khankende (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 Shushi pogroms.

Official naming
In addition to the name Shusha massacres, the Shusha pogrom is sometimes referred to by Armenian sources as "genocide". "'The massacre of Armenians in Shushi in 1920 is nothing but a genocide, Chairman of the parliamentary Commission for Foreign Relations of Karabakh, Vahram Atanesyan, said at a press-conference today. He said the massacre was perpetrated by Azerbaijan with the support of the Turkish expeditionary corps. Atanesyan stressed that Karabakh has never been a part of Azerbaijan and was de facto independent at that moment, its status being recognized by Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan'."

Publications

 * 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. P. 30-31.
 * В Нагорном Карабахе осудили погромы 1920 года в Шуши
 * М. Григорян, "Из 35 тысяч армян не осталось в Шуши ни одного...". "Голос Армении", 24 Марта 2007 г.,