Deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia
Mass deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia took place several times throughout the 20th century, and sometimes some of them have been described by some authors as acts of forced resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
[5] [better source needed] The Tatar (i.e. Azerbaijani) population endured a process of forced migration from the territory of the First Republic of Armenia and later in the Armenian SSR several times during the 20th century.
Starting in the middle of 1918, Armenian paramilitary forces under the leadership of General Andranik Ozanian destroyed Muslim settlements in Zangezur (the southernmost part of modern-day Armenia).
[9] Soviet Armenian historian and Bolshevik politician Bagrat Boryan charged that the ARF had not established state authority for the administrative needs of Armenia, but for the “extermination of the Muslim population and looting of their property”.
[10] According to data from Caucasian Ethnographical Collection of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, "the settlements of Azerbaijani population in Armenia had become empty."
Nataliya Volkova writes that the ruling party of the First Republic of Armenia, the ARF-Dashnaktsutyun, followed a "policy of 'cleansing the country from outsiders'" which "targeted the Muslim population, especially those who had been driven out from Novobayazet, Yerevan, Echmiadzin and Sherur-Daralagoz districts.
[12] Results of All-Union census of 1959 show that this figure decreased to 107,748,[13] although Azerbaijanis had one of the highest birth rates in the Soviet Union.
These policies continued until 1953, and Stalin's decisions became the significant step of offering Armenians living in other countries to move to Soviet Armenia.
[20] According to Krista A. Goff, First Secretary of the Azerbaijan SSR Mir Jafar Baghirov and Arutinov worked together to facilitate Azerbaijani relocation.
The Armenian SSR Interior Ministry reported in 1948 that some Azerbaijanis would even visit cemeteries and pray to the souls of their ancestors "to help them stay in their lands.
[22] According to Arsene Saparov, more than 100,000 Azerbaijanis were forcibly resettled to Kura-Aras Lowland of the Azerbaijan SSR in three stages: 10,000 people in 1948, 40,000 in 1949, and 50,000 in 1950.
[24] According to a 2003 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report, Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia or fled out of fear following the anti-Armenian pogroms in Sumgait and Baku of 1988–89.
[30] According to Russian human rights defender Sergey Lyozov, the mass deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia in November 1988 was one of the factors that turned the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict into a "battle to the end" involving either physical extermination or total expulsion of an ethnic group.
[41][42] Prior to the Revolution, Azerbaijanis had made up 43 percent of the population of Erevan, but approximately 100,000 were deported from the Armenian SSR in 1948 (Dragadze 1990:166–7).
