AZERBAIJAN: OUTCRY AT COMMISSARS’ REBURIAL
By Magerram Zeinalov

Institute for War and Peace Reporting
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Feb 5 2009
UK

Armenia furious over move as some of the communists were Armenians.

The Baku authorities’ removal of a monument commemorating 26 murdered
communists, who included Armenians, and the reburial of their remains,
has sparked fury in Armenia.

The 26 Baku commissars were honoured as martyrs by the Soviet
government, which reburied them in a central Baku park in 1920,
having brought them back from Central Asia where they were murdered
by the Bolsheviks’ British-backed rivals.

But independent Azerbaijan has had an ambiguous relationship to the
commissars, only two of whom were Azeri, and many blame them for
involvement in Armenian pogroms against their ethnic kin in 1918.

They were reburied for the second time on January 26 with Jewish,
Muslim and Christian religious leaders in attendance.

"Having a monument to the 26 commissars, who were mainly Armenians
in the very centre of Baku is the same as if there was a monument to
the SS in the middle of Tel Aviv," said Khikmet Gadzhizade, a former
ambassador to Russia and a senior member of the Musavat party, which
is in opposition to the government but which supported the removal.

"The people who were buried there were participants in terror against
the population of the country, and guilty of the death of thousands
of Azerbiajanis," he said.

In fact, only eight of the commissars were Armenians, the rest being
Georgians, Jews, Latvians and Greeks, besides two Azeris. But their
leader Stepan Shahumian, a communist legend and ally of Bolshevik
leader Vladimir Lenin, was Armenian, casting an ethnic light on the
group as a whole.

They ruled Baku between March and September 1918, when the city was
taken over by the communists’ political enemies, forcing Shaumian and
his colleagues to flee. They headed to Astrakhan in southern Russia
but were diverted to what is now Turkmenistan where they were shot.

Armenia and Azerbaijan, as independent states, have tense relations
largely because of the status of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
a majority Armenian part of Azerbaijan, which has unilaterally
declared independence.

"Shahumian…. gave his life in the first place for today’s
Azerbaijan. And now this degradation of his memory is complete
madness," said Ruben Tovmasian, first secretary of Armenia’s communist
party.

"We see this act as the worst kind of vandalism from Azerbaijan. They
are trying to destroy everything connected to Armenia. And what’s more,
now they are even starting to destroy the remains of Bolshevism."

Tovmasian said he had spoken to Azerbaijan’s communists about the
reburial to register his protest, and they shared his anger.

"The Azerbaijan communist party did not hide its indignation," he said.

His view that the reburial was anti-Armenian is widely held in Yerevan,
and Khachatur Dadaian, author of a book called "Armenians in Baku",
said the fact that Shahumian was a Bolshevik was just an excuse for
the Baku authorities to remove the monument.

He said that Shahumian was not even an Armenian nationalist, since
his Bolshevik movement was attempting to represent the international
proletariat.

"All the same he is taken as part of Armenia. He is a son of
the Armenian nation, as well as part of both Azerbaijan’s and our
history," the writer, who is also an expert from Armenia’s Noravank
think tank, said.

And another scandal may well be brewing over the affair. According
to the Azerbaijani online newspaper , only 23 bodies were
found buried in the park, raising questions about the location of
the other three.

According to the paper, Shahumian and two other Armenian commissars
managed to escape their murderers and hide out in the desert, whence
the British occupying force sent them to India.

The story caused a stir of interest in Azerbaijan, although it was
quashed by Shahumian’s granddaughter Stepana, now living in Moscow,
who told the Russian daily Kommersant it was nonsense.

"It is impossible to believe that they weren’t all buried. There is
a film in the archives of 26 bodies being buried," she was quoted as
saying. "Apart from this, my grandmother was present at the reburial."

Most historians agree with her, saying that the local Armenian
community in India would have noticed Shahumian if he had been sent
there. They add that the British, who were at the time trying to
smash the nascent Bolshevik state, would hardly have gone to so much
trouble to save their political enemy anyway.

"Why on earth would the English release Shahumian, the most important
communist, and shoot the rest? On what grounds?" asked Historian
Yuri Hovespian.

Another commissar’s descendant was more concerned with protesting
the decision to remove their remains. Aslan Azizbekov said he and
his relatives had many times appealed to the government asking them
not to do this.

"In parliament now, they say a lot of bad things about the
commissars. But if my ancestor Mashadi Azizbekov is an enemy, then
why is his name still used for a metro station, a street and a region,
and why does he have his own museum?" he asked.

But he did not gain much support on the streets of Baku, where
passers-by agreed with the city government’s decision.

"No one can be certain that none of the commissars had relations to
the bloody events of 1918, which means the monument had to be removed,"
said 64-year-old pensioner Aliaga Mamedov.

Rustam, a 25-year-old lawyer, agreed. "There should be no place in the
middle of our city for a monument to people who conducted communist
terror. It is just strange that it wasn’t taken away before," he said.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress