07 May 2007
Azerbaijan's Jewish leaders reportedly want to erect a memorial honoring several thousand Mountain Jews allegedly murdered by Armenians in 1918. The ‘Baku Sun’ newspaper reports that the Jewish leaders made the request to the country’s president Ilham Aliyev at a meeting last month at the Human Rights Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan.
The Jewish leaders cited research saying that some 3,000 Mountain Jews, along with tens of thousands of Azeris, were murdered in the region of Guba by Armenian bandits and nationalists an incident marked on 31 March by the Azeris as ‘genocide’. Historians are still investigating the killings, which they say where were covered up by for decades by the Communist regime in the Soviet Union.
Some 40,000 Jews remain scattered about the remote passes of the predominantly Muslim Caucasus mountains.
