NKR NATIONAL ASSEMBLY CALLS ON INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO QUALIFY
MASSACRES IN SHUSHI IN 1920 AS GENOCIDE COMMITTED BY AZERBAIJAN

STEPANAKERT, MARCH 24, NOYAN TAPAN. The NKR National Assembly condemns
the massacres of the Armenian population of Shushi and adjacent
areas on March 23, 1920, and calls on the international community to
qualify this bloody event of ethnic annhilation as a crime committed
by Azerbaijan against humanity – a genocide. In a statement adopted
on the 85th anniversary of the tragic event, the Artsakh parliament
underlines that “this heinous crime that took over 30 thousand lives
was organized and committed by the legal predecessor of the current
Republic of Azerbaijan – the authorities of the Democratic Republic of
Azerbaijan with the direct assistance of a Turkish dispatch corps.” The
NKR National Assembly notes that this mass crime was perpetrated in
breach of a provisional agreement between the Armenian National Council
of Karabakh that became an independent administrative and political
unit and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, according to which
an acceptable solution of the problem of the territory’s legal status
must be solved by the countires that won in World War I at the Paris
Peace Assembly. The NKR parliament points out that as a matter of fact,
“the the March, 1920, massacre of the Armenian population of Shushi was
continued, in various forms and by various means of ethnic cleansing,
in all subsequent years of Nagorno Karabakh’s forced existence as
part of Azerbaijan and ended with a mass displacement of the remaining
part of the city’s Armenian population in 1988.”