Editor,
I joined Azerbaijani-Americans, members of the Pax Turcica Institute, to commemorate the 96th anniversary of the March Days of 1918, also known as Soyqirim, or the Azerbaijani Genocide. From March 30 to April 3 in 1918, the armed Armenian nationalist groups, aided by Russian Bolsheviks, organized brutal massacres of over 12,000 Azerbaijani civilians in the city of Baku and its suburbs.
March Days became a starting point of the extermination campaign carried out by the Armenian nationalists with an intention to carve out their state in the South Caucasus and Anatolia. Consequently, over 2.5 million Turks, Azeris, Kurds and other ethnic groups were killed or expelled from their lands throughout the 20th century.
In 1948 and 1964, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis were displaced from Soviet Armenia. In 1987-1989, the remaining 250,000 Azerbaijanis were deported from their historical homeland, turning the present-day Armenia into the only mono-ethnic post-Soviet state. In the course of the 1991-1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War, over 600,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from the fifth of Azerbaijan currently occupied by the Armenian military. The most recent episode of this ethnic cleansing was the 1992 Khojaly Massacre of 613 Azerbaijani civilians, including 106 women and 63 children, by the Armenian armed forces.
In 2012, the New York Senate Resolution 3784 designated March 31 as Azerbaijani Remembrance Day. On this solemn anniversary for Azerbaijani people, I ask our elected officials to properly recognize victims of the 1918 March Days by way of legislative resolutions and public statements.
Pari Howard
San Francisco
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