On the anniversary of the so-called mythical "Genocide of Armenians in 1915". On April 24, 2021 unprecedented provocative actions of Armenian nationalists and "Javakhk" separatists were held in Georgia where the separatist flags of so-called "Artsakh" were applied. All this is not only blasphemy and mockery at the memory of tens of thousands of Georgians killed by separatists (including Armenian militants) in Abkhazia. It is also a mockery of the memory of hundreds of thousands of Georgian Muslims - Adjarians and Lazs - murdered by Armenian militants in 1914-1918.

The genocide of the Adjarian Georgians, whose only fault was their Muslim religion, was deliberately hushed up during the Soviet era. Only occasional literary works provide an indirect view of the horror that befell the Adjarian civilian population. Take, for example, an excerpt from the story "Emigrants" by the famous Russian writer Aleksey Tolstoy:

"To you, Leon, this name should especially do justice ... Yudenich, famous for the massacre of Adjarians near Batumi in the sixteenth year, when hundreds of auls were slaughtered in a few days ... The lands near Batumi and on Chorokhi he sold out for holiday homes."

In other words, we are talking about hundreds (!) of Adjarian villages being massacred. In essence, we are talking about the genocide of the majority of the Adjarian population. And alas, it is not the writer's imagination, but the brutal historical truth about which Kavkazplus has already written in part in the article "The Adjarian Genocide in winter of 1914-1915: why is it being hushed up?"( https://kavkazplus.com/news.php?id=27473#.YIxP5dUzbIU )

There are some other terrible data about the genocide of the Georgians of Adjara in 1914-1918.  Thus, there are documents indicating that after the return of Adjara and neighboring regions to the control of the Russian army, General V.P. Lyakhov gave an order to the Cossacks to exterminate the local Muslim population. Villages and mosques in Artvin and the Chorokhi River valley were to be burnt. Villages and mosques in Artvin and the Chorokh River Valley were to be burnt. Armenian formations also took part in the massacre. According to the Ottoman records, over 30,000 men were killed and thousands of women and children were left homeless during the winter period. D. Lang estimates that as a result of the punitive operations 45 thousand Muslims were killed and only 7 thousand survived.

By Vorontsov-Dashkov's order, about 10,000 Muslims from the border zone were deported, and later half of them were sent to Nargen Island. An investigation later revealed no hostile actions on the part of the deported Adjarians; on the contrary, they turned out to be victims of Cossack and Armenian pogroms. There were pogroms against Muslims in other territories as well. Thus, in January 1915, when the Cossacks captured Ardahan, they burned and looted the Muslim part of the city, slaughtering there all those who had not fled the city.

Even if one assumes that some 25,000-30,000 Adjarians managed to escape under the protection of the retreating Turkish army, it still turns out that Russian troops and Armenian fighters destroyed most of the Georgian Muslim population of Adjara and Artvin. It was regained in numbers in Adjara only thanks to the relatively high birth rate of the Muslim population in Soviet times. And anyway, if it were not for the genocide organized by the Dashnaks and Cossacks, there would be at least 1 million Georgians in Georgia today, and not about 400 thousand as it is now.

Historians are collecting more and more new data on the genocide of the Georgian-Ajars, who were exterminated in 1914-1918 for their Muslim faith and sympathy to Turkey. Here is, for example, an excerpt from Hasanly Jamil's research "Armenian Volunteers on the Caucasus Front (1914-1916) “( https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/armyanskie-dobrovoltsy-na-kavkazskom-fronte-1914-1916) chapter "The Armenian Trace in the Murders and Robberies in Kars and Adjara":

"The Armenian military units within the Russian army by their atrocities in Kars and Ardagan in the spring of 1915 have gone down in the history of world crimes. Professor J. Baberowski wrote that when the Russian army seized Kars, Erzerum, Trabzon and Erzincan, the Armenian "volunteer squads" committed many bloody crimes against the Turkish population.

The genocide cases perpetrated by Armenians against the Muslim population in the first months of the war became so large-scale that the major-general of the 1st Corps of the Caucasian Army Alexei Podgursky sent a telegram to Colonel Grigolia and the heads of the Ardagan, Oltyn and Kagyzman districts in Sarykamysh which noted: "Take the most decisive measures to stop robbery and looting by the Christian population over the Muslim population. Announce military trial and threatened severe punishments; detain, disarm, and bring all the guilties to justice.".

"Iqbal" newspaper published in Baku informs in the issue of 19 February, 1915: "We were informed that Muslims suffered a lot of troubles at the battle fields near Ottoman borders: men were killed, women were kidnapped, children disappeared in the mountains and forests, the whole region was in the ruins.... The refugees, naked and hungry, are immensely impoverished. Our poor co-religionists, our unfortunate countrymen have suffered so much misery and grief that if we were able to describe all this in our newspaper, our readers would prepare not for the approaching holiday, but for mourning.

The massacre committed by Armenian militants in Kars caused great disquiet in Azerbaijan. As soon as it became known about the massacres of Muslims, including Azerbaijanis in Kars by Dashnak militants, Ali Mardan-bek Topchibashev, Agabala Guliyev from Baku, as well as prominent representatives of Ganja and Iravan provinces immediately went to Kars. The purpose of their trip was to reveal the facts of crimes, bring them to the attention of the ruling bodies "and ask them to protect Muslims from Armenians, craving for a bloody clash with them". The delegation of Muslims headed by Ali Mardan-bek intended to ask the authorities " to permit the collection of money in favor of the families of the Tatars who died at the hands of the Armenians in the Kara region". They approached General Myshlaevsky, who listened to them and allowed the collection of money, "and promised to take appropriate measures against the arrogant Armenians".

The shooting of the peaceful Muslim population of Adjara in the spring of 1915 raised a new wave of protest against the anti-Turkic policy of the Russian Empire. This event aroused strong feedback in the Muslim community, the Muslim fraction of the State Duma made a statement, which caused concern in the ruling circles of Russia. However, the government found the only solution to this tragedy that was available to it, but far from the best: the 78-year-old governor of the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov, known for his pro-Armenian orientation, was dismissed. On August 23, 1915 he was succeeded in this position by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. He became the last governor and at the same time served as commander of the Caucasus Front. To investigate the circumstances of the execution of the Muslims of Adjara, Ali Mardan-bek visited Tiflis, Kutaisi and Batum in 1915, where he collected documents revealing the whole truth.

Based on the above documents, he was firmly of the opinion that the unfortunate Adjarians had become a victim of Russia's anti-Turkic policy. Ali Mardan-bek wrote that on the tip of his Armenian neighbors thousands of Adjarians were imprisoned on charges of treason, hundreds of villages were destroyed, thousands of old people, women and children became refugees in Batumi region. He had prepared a report on this tragedy and sent it to the governor of the Caucasus, and the facts laid out in it were so awful that the governor was forced to order the creation of a special commission to investigate them. An inspection confirmed atrocities committed by the Russian army, especially Cossacks against Adjarians; facts of barbarism were also confirmed. In addition, it became clear that at the core of all the atrocities were false information and slander of Armenians against Muslims."

The genocide of Georgians-adjarians (the most terrible part of which took place before the notorious date of April 24, 1915) was just the beginning of the terrible genocide of Muslim population of Eastern Anatolia, during which, according to different estimates, from 2.5 to 3 million Muslims - Turks, Kurds, Lazs died (because we should consider the Muslim refugees who died of hunger, cold, typhus and other illnesses):

It is sad that in Georgia the genocide of Georgians-Adjarians in 1914-1918 has not yet been officially acknowledged, no monument to the victims of this genocide has been built, no mass graves of the victims of the massacre organized by the Armenian fighters have been found. In Soviet times, it was forbidden to raise the subject of the genocide of Adjarians. But now, in independent Georgia, nothing prevents the establishment of the historical truth.

Kavkazplus