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.