96 years since the March events in Azerbaijan

96 years ago, on March 31, 1918, the struggle for power in Azerbaijan, in the truly troubled time of the collapse of the Russian Empire after the October Revolution, quickly turned into a massacre of civilians on ethnic grounds. This is a mournful date in Azerbaijani history, commemorated since 1998 by the decree of President Heydar Aliyev as the Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis, as well as one of the bloodiest episodes of the Revolution.

In those days, in early 1918, a kind of "power vacuum" formed in Baku: part of the city was controlled the Baku Commune led by Stepan Shaumyan (Lalayants), and it was opposed by the Muslim party "Musavat". The forces were approximately equal by the time former Russian troops, who had fought in Turkey during World War I and were forced to Baku by Anatolian Turks, appeared in the city. The atmosphere in the city had already been tense, as the Armenian part of these troops, being under the significant influence of the nationalist ideology of the party "Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF)", considered the Muslim, predominantly Azerbaijani, population of Baku as a "fifth column" of the advancing Turkish army.

On March 31, 1918, using one of the minor skirmishes between the Bolsheviks and the Musavat, the Baku Commune provoked anti-Muslim pogroms in order to get rid of the opposition "Musavat" and finally assert its authority in Azerbaijan. What was a short victory for the Bolsheviks in political terms turned into national riots against the ordinary people of Baku, and also Shamakhi and Kuba, when the Dashnaks, embittered by the war, robbed and killed people just because of the Turkic blood flowing in their veins.

Thus, the supporters of the ARF's ideology, in fact, took revenge for the tragic events of 1915, and the defeat of Russian troops on the Turkish battlefield, shifting the blame from the Turks of the Ottoman Empire to their relatives by blood, the Azerbaijanis, absolutely unrelated to the extermination of the Armenians in Van. In Baku alone 3 to 12 thousand people were killed, and thousands fled the city to escape the killers. According to the testimony of the British vice-consul in Baku, Major McDonnell, by April 5, when the pogroms ceased, "not one important Muslim had been left in the city."

"Musavat" could not give an immediate rebuff to the Baku commune, since in tsarist times Muslims were not recruited to the army on a regular basis: the mobilization of the Muslim population was only voluntary, and only from the senior class. As a result, in the troubled times after the October Revolution the Azeris did not have troops which could be thrown at the Dashnaks in the first day of the riots. After the proclamation of Azerbaijan's independence in Tiflis on May 28, 1918, the forces of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic, which consisted, in fact, of the people's militia, with the help of the Caucasian Islamic Army, established by a treaty of friendship with the Ottoman Empire, drove the Bolsheviks and Dashnaks out of Baku.

Alas, the victims of this tragedy, on whose blood the Bolsheviks established their power just for four months, became no lesson for succeeding generations, and in the future the Azerbaijanis belonging to the Turkic peoples -despite the fact that the latter also include Kazakhs, Uighurs, Balkars, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks - were many times used by Armenian nationalists to justify aggression towards their eastern neighbors. Unable to return to the land from which they were once expelled by the Ottoman Turks, the descendants of the Dashnaks continue to fight against Azerbaijanis who do not have any relation either to Ararat or Van or to the national policy of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.