Armenian forces' clearing of Muslim villages in Zangezur, 1918–21 §

Origin

Between 1918 and 1921, Armenian forces, under General Andranik Ozanian and, later, the local commander Garegin Nzhdeh, conducted military operations across Zangezur (modern Syunik) and parts of Nakhichevan that emptied the region of its Muslim, predominantly Azerbaijani and Kurdish, population. The events occurred in the chaotic interregnum between the collapse of the Russian Empire (1917), the brief existence of the First Republic of Armenia (1918–20) and the Soviet conquest of the South Caucasus (1920–21).

The Armenian rationale was three-fold. First, the Baku massacres (March 1918) and the September Days (15–19 September 1918, ~10,000–30,000 Armenians killed in Baku) had primed Armenian military leaders for retaliatory operations. Second, Zangezur was the geographic corridor between Armenia and the Armenian-populated parts of Karabakh, and clearing it of Ottoman-aligned Muslim militias was treated as a strategic necessity. Third, Andranik saw himself as conducting a continuation of his pre-war fedayeen campaign against the Ottoman state, the local Muslim population, in his framing, were Turkish auxiliaries.

Mechanism

Andranik's forces, about 20,000 men at peak, moved into Zangezur in summer 1918 after his refusal to recognise the Treaty of Batum (4 June 1918). His operations were directed at villages he or local commanders judged hostile or strategically positioned. Tactics, documented by contemporaneous Russian White officer reports, British observers and Armenian sources alike, included:

• Burning of villages judged hostile or strategically positioned.
• Forced displacement of inhabitants, who were typically driven south toward Nakhichevan and east toward Karabakh.
• Massacres in some villages where resistance was offered, particularly in the Sharur–Daralayaz corridor.

After Andranik's departure for Yerevan in 1919 (he had been deemed politically unreliable by Dashnaktsutyun leadership), Nzhdeh continued operations until the Sovietisation of Armenia in late 1920, declaring a short-lived Republic of Mountainous Armenia (April–July 1921).

Effects

According to de Waal (citing Russian-imperial census data and Hewsen), the Muslim population of Zangezur in 1916 was approximately 120,000 (~ 50% of the regional total). By the 1922 Soviet census, it had collapsed to ~5,000, a 95%+ reduction. Most of the loss was displacement; some fraction was death. Independent estimates of fatalities range from 10,000 (de Waal) to 30,000+ (Azerbaijani-state-leaning sources).

In parallel, the Muslim population of the Erivan uezd dropped from 240,000 in 1916 to 70,000 in 1922, and Armenian forces also conducted operations against Kurdish villages in the lower Zangezur (the so-called "Red Kurdish" district), the same territory which would later become "Red Kurdistan" (1923–29) under Soviet administration.

The Sovietisation of Soviet Armenia in late 1920 stopped the clearings but did not reverse them. The territory cleared in 1918–21 became the demographic basis for what is today southern Armenia, the Syunik province through which the disputed "Zangezur corridor" would, a century later, be demanded by Azerbaijan.

Reception and politics

The Andranik–Nzhdeh campaigns sit awkwardly in the Armenian historical narrative. Andranik is a national hero, equestrian statues stand in Yerevan and Gyumri; Nzhdeh is celebrated as the architect of tseghakron (a racialist national-defence ideology). The Armenian state position has been to deny that the campaigns constituted ethnic cleansing, characterising them as legitimate defence against pro-Ottoman irregulars who had themselves massacred Armenian civilians in Baku, Shamakhi and Karabakh (1918–20).

The Azerbaijani state position treats the Andranik clearings as a "first genocide" of Azerbaijanis and links it directly to March Days of 1918 (which Azerbaijan reads as the Armenian massacre of Azerbaijanis in Baku, a reading itself contested). Azerbaijani textbook revisionism since 1998 has established 31 March as a "Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis" by presidential decree.

The defensible reading is that demographic clearing of the Muslim population of Zangezur did occur on a vast scale, killing thousands and displacing roughly 100,000, and that calling this a war crime is consistent with the historical record (sourced opinion: de Waal; Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1951). It is also the case that contemporaneous Azerbaijani-Ottoman forces and irregular bands committed mass killings of Armenians, at Baku, at Shusha (March 1920), and across the Armenian villages of the Karabakh lowlands, on a comparable scale. Both sides' historical wrongs are real; framing either as the "first" of the cycle obscures the symmetry editorial.