French historian: ARF was allowed by Moscow to create cells in Karabakh by 1986

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) was allowed by Moscow to create cells in Soviet Armenia around 1970, then in Karabakh by 1986, French historian and researcher Maxime Gauin told Report.

“I presented the policy of ethnic cleansing by Armenia in 1918–1921, using French, British, American, Ottoman, and Armenian sources. I emphasized the too-little-known role of Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) leader Rouben Ter Minassian, Armenian Minister of Interior in 1920. Garegin Nzhdeh is well known for having organized massacres in Zanguezur, including in 1921, during the short-lived ‘Mountain Republic’, for his Aryanist racism, and for his collaboration with the Nazis. Ter Minassian had the same methods, but for somewhat different reasons. His memoirs do not justify the massacres and expulsions he ordered by invoking racist arguments, but primarily by the will to have a Republic of Armenia with an Armenian majority everywhere. Ter Minassian honestly writes in his Memoirs, ‘Armenia did not exist’ in 1919 if we consider the demography of the territories of this Republic: It was more a ‘Tataristan than an Armenia.

“One factual correction must be done to his memoirs, however: He claims that the understandable refusal of the Azerbaijanis to be Armenian citizens caused a security issue, yet massacres and expulsion took place also in parts of this country where the Azerbaijanis became a minority before 1918, for example between Yerevan and the Turkish boundary, where 4,000 of them were killed and 36,000 were expelled ‘with cannon shots’ in June 1920, according to the French High Commissioner in the Caucasus, Damien de Martel (by the way, de Martel imposed a four-year ban on all the Armenian groups in Lebanon and Syria by 1933, as High Commissioner in Beirut),” Maxime Gauin said.