Talk:Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic/Archive 3

message: Azerbaijan 'flattened' sacred Armenian site 
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article621782.ece
--Eupator 14:30, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It should mentioned using this link how so many Europeans tried to access the site but were denied each time by the Azeri government.--Eupator 22:38, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  That’s not entirely accurate. Azerbaijan insists that the fact finding mission should visit both countries and check the situation with protection of cultural monuments. As far as I know, such mission of PACE will visit both countries in the near future. I’m looking forward to that, it will put an end to this dispute. Grandmaster 06:05, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  More neutral sources 

message: World watches in silence as Azerbaijan wipes out Armenian culture
Ancient crosses smashed with sledgehammers
--Eupator 17:22, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I haven't read the latter yet, but the former is included and referenced in the article. -- Clevelander 19:33, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  More media links 

message: Hi Francis. Thanks for joining. You are right. We have a dispute over a historical fact. In 1604 during the war with Ottoman empire Persian shah Abbas I ordered resettlement of the entire population of Nakhichevan to Iran. The purpose of the resettlement was the scorched earth policy, and shah Abbas left to Ottomans lands with no population, so that they had no food and other supplies. Now Fadix claims that the resettlement targeted Armenian population and that the Armenian population constituted a majority before the resettlement. He fails to cite any sources on the population of Nakhichevan, specifying the number of Muslim and Armenian population. He cites some sources about the number of Armenian people resettled from Armenia and claims that this is a proof that Armenians were in majority in Nakhichevan as well. We only know for sure that Armenians living in the town of Julfa were resettled to Isfahan, but there’s no info about the population of entire Nakhichevan. Please see below my source about this event, this is the article about the Azeri Turkic tribe Kengerli from encyclopedia Iranica, which is considered one of the most authoritative sources about Iranian history:
Yet another important Kangarlu leader during Safavid times was Maqsáud Sultan Kangarlu, who is on Eskandar Monæi's list of the great amirs of the reign of Shah Abbas I (p. 1085). Shortly after the Persian capture of Erivan, in June 1604, he was appointed governor of Nakhjavan, north of the Aras river. But when, later that year, Ottoman forces threatened the area, Shah Abbas ordered Maqsáud Sultan to evacuate the entire population of the Nakhjavan region (including the Armenians of Jolfa, who, in the following year, were transplanted to Isfahan) to Qaraja Dag (Arasbaran) and Dezmar (Eskandar Monshi, pp. 656, 668).
Note: entire population including the Armenians of Jolfa, and not entire Armenian population, including Armenians of Julfa. And also:
Many Kangarlu settled north of the Aras river, probably in around 1500, when the Ustajlu moved into Azerbaijan. In 1809, J. M. Jouannin, described these Kangarlu as "a small tribe established in Persian Armenia, on the shores of the Aras, and numbering up to four or five thousand individuals" (p. 459). In 1921, M. H. Valili Baharlu wrote that there were Kangarlu around Gökchay, Javanshir and Shusha (pp. 61ff.). Many of these are undoubtedly the descendants of Kangarlu who were forced to move south of the Aras river by Shah Abbas I in 1604, and were then allowed to return to their original grazing grounds by Shah Abbas II (r. 1642-1666) in an attempt to repopulate the frontier regions of his realm.
Today, there is a clan of the Haji Alilu tribe of Qaraja Dag by the name of Kangarlu. In 1960, it comprised some 25 households (Iranian Army Files). There is also a village by the name of Kangarlu 24 kms to the north of Meshginshahr, in the same general area (Razmara, p. 429). These are probably the descendants of Kangarlu who were moved to Qaraja Dag in 1604 and remained there.  
As you can see from the above source both Muslim and Armenian population was resettled and nobody was specifically targeted. I suggested to include the compromise version that Shah Abbas ordered resettlement of the entire population of Nakhichevan, without going in detail if the majority were Muslim or Armenian. Fadix insists that we should say that Armenians were in majority in Nakhichevan before the resettlement. Grandmaster 19:50, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Grandmaster's perspective

message: Hi Francis. This is a very simple issue. First, I never requested to place that Armenians were a majority before Abbas deported the population, but that according to some authors the deportation was specifically directed against the Armenians and they were the prime targets and that this deportation contributed to the 'minorization' of the Armenian population in what is considered their historic homeland(Nakhichevan is on the Armenian plateau). Grandmaster has referred mostly to Iranian authors to support his point, as I see his main problem in Safavit article is what he considers as their biases, but here they automatically become the truth. But the fact is that only some Iranian authors consider that there was no indiscriminate deportation(and hardly any Western scholars), I would presume it is because of the crimes perpetrated against the Armenians and they don't want to make of it as a Muslim vs Christian thing. But another thing is sure and that it is that the very large majority of sources present this cases as the Armenians being the prime target. Ye'or the Israeli author reports. Arakel, the writer of the time reports ubduction of Armenian children, and condition of Armenian deportations in which a large part of the deportees died in the process. Only in 1604-1605, there is a recorded 250,000 to 300,000 Armenians(frpm Persian sources) having been moved, and I have seen sources that goes even as far as 350,000.
He  claims that the Tartars or other Muslims were targeted just as badly, this defy logic and is not documented in any works. Armenians were forcedly converted under Abbas to Islam to escape this deportation, and others were able to hide, so that only after Gulestan Treaty according to some sources had the Armenians become a slight minority.
Here are some sources I have provided and I have offered to provide more, and I think that I have provided enought so that info be preserved but Grandmaster will go on forever.
Taking Nakhichevan as a whole, in its pick, the population jumped to 150,000, it was its most important period, after the 13th century it was replaced, in 14th century, it droped to about half of its prior population, it lost its statue, at 15th century it was retaken over by Armenians from the vicinities of Van, and after the desertion of Ani, people moved there. Julfa alone represented a significant portion of the entire population. The closest to the Abbas period Grandmater came with with any referrence to the population was more than 200 years, while I provided data which covered that period. 
For the next four centuries, Armenians, who had begun their dispersion after the fall of Ani and the Seljuk Turkish invasions in the eleventh century, continued to emigrate. In the meantime, Persia ( Iran) experienced a revival under the Shi'i Safavids, who became the adversaries of the Sunni Ottomans. From 1501 until 1639, the two fought each other periodically in Armenia. Armenians were uprooted during these wars, and, in 1604, some 250,000 Armenians were forcibly transferred by Shah 'Abbas to Iran. By the seventeenth century, the Armenians had become a minority in parts of their historic lands. The merchants of Julfa in Nakhichevan were among those who were brought to Iran by Shah 'Abbas; he moved them to a suburb of Isfahan where they built the New Julfa community. The support of 'Abbas and subsequent shahs enabled the Armenians to expand Iran's trade with India, China, Russia, and Western Europe. These merchants helped to make the Persian Gulf an important trade center. An Ethnohistorical Dictionary of the Russian and Soviet Empires by James S. Olson, Lee Brigance Pappas, Nicholas C. J. Pappas. p. 44
The fact of the matter is that Grandmaster want me to 'prove' that most of the population in the Armenian Plateau pre-Abbas were Armenians, which is totally ridiculous. Even if we take the 250,000 Armenians deported from 1604 to 1605 alone, it clearly shows that Grandmasters claim doesn't make sense. According to the The Soviet Union: Facts, Descriptions, Statistics, published in 1929, there were during that period(the end of the 20s) 105,100 people living in Nakhichevan, while it is true that the Armenians were evacuated from there, Nakhichevan recieved its own flow of refugees from Armenia, but for the sake of taking the Muslim population alone to compare lets take this figure. A region mapping for pre-abbas distributing evenly the Armenian population in the Armenian plateau, only the 250,000 Armenians evacuated doesn't make sense when considering that Muslims too have been evacuated. There is no decree any such orders or records or reports of a discriminate deportation of Muslims too in the Armenian plateau. The most precise information Grandmaster came up with is the cases of the Kangarlu who were at the shore of the Arax. This is something pretty much known as Persia used the shores as a military camp and after the fall as his own source document they returned back anyway. If there was any such massive Muslim deportation as Grandmaster report, why is there no record about it? There are records for the Armenians, and even to a lesser extent of Georgians, but nothing other than few references about few tribs or some villages along the Arax river.
I have done my homework and documented this cases while Grandmaster presented few referrences from Iranica which himself in the past questionned its credibility. We can't just set the credibility of a source based on whatever or not they support our position.
I also claimed that just before Abbas, Nakhichevan population was mostly Armenian and claimed that its population was often equaled with 'Armenians.' This too, I have documented.
Shah Abbas devastated his frontier areas, which included parts of Armenia, as a defensive measure and so displaced nearly all the population. [from it] He settled some 13,000 families in the silk-growing northern provinces of Gilan and Mazanderan bordering on the Caspian. (Source: The Armenians and the East India Company in Persia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries by R. W. Ferrier, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1973), p. 39)
Why is there no report of such a discriminate resstling of Muslims too, like I said, there are records of Georgians so we can not call this Armenian biases in some way or another. Linda K. Steinmann in her work Shah 'Abbas and the Royal Silk Trade 1599-1629, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1987), pp. 68-74 covers the evacuation of the Armenians, and to a lesser extent elsewhere of Georgians, but nowhere does she say anything about any evacuation of Tartars. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe covers the evacuation in her work The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750), I don't see anything about Tartars being evacuated or an undiscriminate evacuation, or any reference of an important Tartar population in Nakhichevan. Josepho Barbaro while visiting the devastation reports destruction of Armenian towns and its desertion, not Tartars. Sir William Ouseley during his visit in 1812 has only discribed the destruction of the Armenian city during the evacuation.
Here again another documentation on my claim that population was often equaled with 'Armenian' just before Abbas.
In 1603 Shah 'Abbas, the great Safavid ruler of Persia, sent an expedition into Armenia in answer to the appeals of the inhabitants for assistance against the Turks. The death of the Sultan Mahmud III in December 1603 and the succession of his son Ahmed, a boy of twelve, opened the way to an easy conquest in the course of which both retreating Turks and invading Persians plundered the Armenians. The Persian victory was followed by a forced emigration of the population to the Shah's capital of Isfahan. « That dragon of hell, Shah Abbas, nourished from the beginning in the ways of the serpent, saw with an eye of envy the prosperity of the Christians. » So Arakel of Tauriz, the seventeenth-century Armenian historian, puts it, and it was indeed the skill of new... Armenia was left desolates... (A Seventeenth-Century typological cycle of paintings in the Armenian cathedal at Julfa, T. S. R. Boase, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 13, No. 3/4 pp.323-324)
D.M. Lang writes that one of the two major reasons of the deportation was: ...he desired to make use of the industrial and commercial talents of the Armenians... (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1969) p. 622) Julfa population was so important that he separate it from Nakhichevan as a different entity.
How does this apply to nomadic tribs?
Another one: In order to secure his peripheral western frontiers from possible Armenian-Ottoman collusions, Shah Abbas found it expedient in 1604-5 to depopulate those areas and distribute the Armenian population through Iran. ...Shah Abbas had still another reason for moving Armenians to his real: he hoped to benefit from their great artistic and commercial skills. (The Status of Religious Minorities in Safavid Iran 1617-61, Vera B. Moreen, Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 40, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp.128-129)
Where does it say anything about other groups, and how the reasons given applied to Muslims?
I have documented about up until Gulestan: The Treaty signed at Gulestan (in Karabakh) was not the optimum in Russian eyes: Moslem khans, vassals of Persia, retained Nakhichevan and Yerevan with their predominantly Christian-Armenian populations. (Alexander the First, a Reappraisal A Reappraisal Second book by Ludmila Evreinov p. 252) This might be wrong, but it is documented that after Gulestan many Muslim were restled, even one of Grandmaster sources document it for Erivan. Those of course for him are exclude materials, but when the contrary happens later, it is of course include material.
Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani-populated enclave within Armenia that is administratively part of Azerbaijan, from which the Armenian inhabitants had been expelled in 1604. (Democracy and Nationalism in Armenia, Peter Rutland, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 46, No. 5 (1994) pp. 841-842)
Where does it say anything about the expulsion of the Muslim population? Besides, one of his points doesn't make sense at all, at least for Julfa, it had the only bridge north of Tabriz and the other was controled by Armenians too, even considering those, can there have been no indescriminate decision.
And I have more sources about those, and I offer to present them. Grandmaster continious attempt to exclude the word Armenian from this article is in my sense distruptive. Fad (ix) 21:53, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Fadix' perspective

message: Ok, here are your two versions. I think both could do with a copyedit, but first, just for my benefit, could you line up the sources, yes I know you've cited them above, but it would help clarify things here. Note, this is not an endorsement of either version, they both have their flaws, which will be ironed out as we continue... - FrancisTyers · 22:46, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sourcing hour