Azerbaijanis in Armenia - History

History

In the first quarter of the 19th century the Khanate of Erevan included most of Eastern Armenia and covered an area of approximately 7,000 square miles. The land was mountainous and dry, the population of about 100,000 was roughly 80 percent Muslim and 20 percent Christian (Armenian)

After the incorporation of the Erivan khanate into the Russian Empire in 1828, many Muslims left the area and were replaced with the tens of thousands of Armenian refugees from Persia. By 1832 Muslims in what had been the Erivan khanate were already outnumbered by the immigrating Armenians. According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, by the beginning of the twentieth century a significant population of Azeris still lived in Russian Armenia. They numbered about 300,000 persons or 37.5% in Russia's Erivan Governorate (roughly corresponding to most of present-day central Armenia, the Iğdır Province of Turkey, and Azerbaijan's Nakhchivan exclave).

Most lived in rural areas and were engaged in farming and carpet-weaving. They formed the majority in 4 of the governorate's 7 districts, including the city of Erivan (Yerevan) itself where they constituted 49% of the population (compared to 48% constituted by Armenians). At the time, Eastern Armenian cultural life was centered more around the holy city of Echmiadzin, seat of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Traditionally Azeris in Armenia were almost entirely Shia Muslim, with the exception of the Talin region, as well as small pockets in Shorayal and around Vedi where they mainly adhered to Sunni Islam. Traveller Luigi Villari reported in 1905 that in Erivan the Azeris (to whom he referred as Tartars) were generally wealthier than the Armenians, and owned nearly all of the land.

See also: Deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia

For Azeris of Armenia, the twentieth century was the period of marginalization, discrimination, mass and often forcible migrations resulting in significant changes in the country's ethnic composition, even though they had managed to stay its largest ethnic minority until the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In 1905–1907 Erivan Governorate became an arena of clashes between Armenians and Azeris believed to have been instigated by the Russian government in order to draw public attention away from the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Tensions rose again after both Armenia and Azerbaijan became briefly independent from the Russian Empire in 1918. Both quarreled over where their common borders lay. Warfare coupled with the influx of Armenian refugees resulted in widespread massacres of Muslims in Armenia causing virtually all of them to flee to Azerbaijan. Andranik Ozanian and Rouben Ter Minassian were particularly prominent in the destruction of Muslim settlements and in the planned ethnic homogenisation of regions with once mixed population through populating them with Armenian refugees from Turkey. Relatively few of the evicted Azeris returned, as according to the 1926 All-Soviet population census there were only 78,228 Azeris living in Armenia, comprising 8.8% of the population. By 1939 their numbers had increased to 131,000.

In 1947, Grigory Arutyunov, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia, managed to persuade the Council of Ministers of the USSR to issue a decree entitled Planned measures for the resettlement of collective farm workers and other Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR to the Kura-Arax lowlands of the Azerbaijani SSR. According to the decree, between 1948 and 1951, the Azeri community in Armenia became partly subject to a "voluntary resettlement" (called by some sources a deportation) to central Azerbaijan to make way for Armenian immigrants from the Armenian diaspora. In those four years some 100,000 Azeris were deported from Armenia. This reduced the number of those in Armenia down to 107,748 in 1959. By 1979, Azeris numbered 160,841 and constituted 5.3% of Armenia's population. The Azeri population of Yerevan, that once formed the majority, dropped to 0.7% by 1959 and further to 0.1% by 1989.