Today sees the 92nd anniversary of the killings of thousands of Azerbaijanis as Armenians went on the rampage at the end of March 1918.
The massacre of about 20,000 innocent people, including the elderly, women and children, started during the night of 30-31 March 1918. Bolshevik troops led by ethnic Armenian Stepan Shahumyan massacred thousands of people in Baku, burnt Muslim holy sites and caused 400m manats worth of damage.
Teze Pir mosque was fire bombed and the Ismailiyye, the building of the Muslim Charitable Society, was ravaged by fire.
The attacks on Azerbaijanis were not limited to Baku. Supporters of the nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation - Dashnaktsutyun, known as Dashnaks for short, killed 8,027 Azerbaijanis, including 2,560 women and 1,277 children in 53 villages in Shamakhi District on 31 March, while 16,000 Azerbaijanis were murdered in 162 villages in Guba District. The Dashnaks burnt villages in Lenkoran, Mughan and Nagorno-Karabakh, killing thousands.
The Emergency Investigation Commission set up by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic on 15 July 1918 gathered a large number of documents which were submitted to the government. The Azerbaijani parliament passed a decision to mark 31 March as the Azerbaijani Genocide Day in 1919.
Though this date was forgotten during the Soviet period, many investigations into the tragedies of 31 March 1918 have been carried out since Azerbaijan regained its independence.
President Heydar Aliyev issued a decree on 26 March 1998 that 31 March should be marked as the Azerbaijani Genocide Day.
The date is being marked in different countries with commemorations and conferences.
Azerbaijan's ambassador to Georgia, Namik Aliyev, attended a conference on the genocide at Tbilisi State University. 'Dangerous processes are under way in the Caucasus. Ethnic cleansing is extremely dangerous and everyone should understand this,' the ambassador said.
The conference concluded with the adoption of an appeal to diplomatic representations in Georgia. 'Georgian and Azerbaijani students call for an end to Armenia's aggressive policy,' the document says.
'We, the citizens of Azerbaijan, have no right to forget those bloody crimes that were committed by Armenians against our people,' the rector of the Azerbaijan University of Languages, MP Samad Seyidov, told a university round table on the genocide.
Work should be done to ensure a legal assessment of the bloodshed and to make information about it available in a variety of languages, Seyidov said.
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