Baku, March 29 (AZERTAC). Azerbaijan`s embassy to the South African Republic (SAR) has issued a statement on March 31 - Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis. 

According to the embassy, the statement says that the events of March 1918 took place in Baku, Shamakhi, Guba, Karabakh, Zangazur, Nakhchivan, Lankaran and other regions. The members of the Armenian Dashnak Party together with the Soviet Bolsheviks massacred about 50,000 innocent Azerbaijani people, including the elderly, women and children. In Baku, Armenian Bolshevik troops led by Stepan Shaumyan massacred thousands of people, and burnt Islamic shrines. In addition to massacres in Baku, Armenian dashnaks killed 8,027 Azerbaijanis, including 2,560 women and 1,277 children in Shamakhi; the Armenian dashnaks burnt thousands of villages and brutally murdered thousands of Azerbaijanis in Lankaran, Mughan and Nagorno-Karabakh.

“The largest massacre was committed in Guba province. The archaeological evidence of the Armenian atrocities against Azerbaijanis in the beginning of the 20th century was found in 2007, in Guba, during the construction of a stadium. Human skulls and torsos found in the ground showed that victims were beheaded and body parts were buried separately. The Dashnak troops, led by Hamazasp, burned 122 villages in the province. 16,000 Azerbaijanis were massacred in Guba. Armenians scratched the people’s eyes out and made “amulets”. The Armenian forces, in addition to Muslim Azerbaijanis, also targeted Jews residing in various regions of Azerbaijan. As a result of the genocide around 3 thousands of Jews were assassinated,” the document says.

The statement is available at (http://azerbaijan.org.za/index.php/history/44-1918-genocide-of-azerbaijanis-by-armenian-forces).

The article also gives links to the Presidential Library where one can get additional information about the genocide.