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NKR Shahumian District
On September 2, 1991 the Joint Session of Soviet People's
Deputies of NKAR and the Shahoumian Region proclaimed the establishment
of the Republic of Nagorno Karabakh within the boundaries of NKAO and
the Shahoumian region, based on the Constitution and the laws of the
former USSR, granting the peoples of the autonomous regions and ethnic
groups the right to decide independently the issue of their statehood,
in the event when a Union Republic secedes from the USSR.
In July 1921, the regional body of the Bolshevik leadership
issued an illegal decision, by which Nagorno Karabakh was handed over
to Azerbaijan, and they were entrusted with the task of establishing
an autonomous region. However, during the creation of the Nagorno Karabakh
Autonomous Oblast, the Azerbaijani leadership excluded almost half of
the original territories of Nagorno Karabakh, including the Gyulistan
province, later called the Shahoumian region.
Up to 1988, that is up to the commencement of the
new phase of the Karabakh movement, the Armenians made up more than
80 % of the total population of the region, i. e. over 20 thousand.
Already during the period of the Karabakh conflict, the Azerbaijani
authorities abolished the Shahoumian region as an administrative entity
with the aim of changing its demographic picture, and included it in
the newly created Geranboy region. In summer 1992, the Shahoumian region
was entirely occupied by the Azerbaijani armed forces, which, to the
present time, continue to control it. Moreover, the occupation was accompanied
by acts of an unprecedented violence. There is a documentary testimony
about it by the Deputies of the Russian Parliament, members of the human
rights organization "Memorial".
After the establishment of the cease-fire in May of 1994, the Azerbaijani
authorities began implementing an intensive settlement policy in the
Shahoumian region, in order to change the existing demographics. Moreover,
the international organizations, which received inaccurate information
from the Azerbaijani leadership regarding both the pre- and post-war
conditions, in effect became a tool in this settlement policy implemented
by Azerbaijan.
Specifically, the International Charity Corps, on
the request of the USAID, developed a program of assistance to the liberated
territory of the Geranboy district, aimed at settling 18,000 Azerbaijanis
in that district. In addition, the statistics used in the said program,
in reference to the ethnic composition of the villages in the Shahoumian
region are inaccurate: only three of the 20 villages in the said region
were mostly populated by Azeris, and not seven villages as the program
documents claim. One village was Russian, and all the others were predominantly
Armenian.
On August 22, 2001, the Azerbaijani President
signed a decree, according to which the various state agencies were
ordered to settle Azerbaijanis in the Shahoumian region on a permanent
basis, providing them with homes and farmland. As a result of these
measures, currently not only the Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia are
living in the Shahoumian region, as it is stated in the International
Charity Corps reports, but also the residents of other regions of Azerbaijan,
as well as Turks-Meskhetins and Chechens are settled there.
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