Tuesday, December 24 2019 18:49

ArmInfo. The Azerbaijani public raised the issue of the monument to Garegin Nzhdeh in Yerevan some time ago. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev announced this on December 24 in an extensive interview with local journalists.

"The Azerbaijani public, including veterans, sent letters to the  heads of the CIS states in connection with the erection of a monument  to the fascist Nzhdeh in Armenia. At the same time, similar letters  were sent to the parliaments of the CIS countries, and today in the  CIS there is a fundamentally unanimous opinion about the Second World  War. There are no differences in official statements about the  historical results of the war and the main role of the Soviet Union  in achieving Victory>, the head of the Azerbaijani state said, having  forgotten to recall the facts of his own history.

It should be noted that in 1992, one of the central streets of Baku -  Japaridze Street was renamed into the street of one of the founders  of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Mammad Rasulzadeh. It was  Rasulzadeh who took an active part in the formation of the  Azerbaijani Legion, one of the units of the Wehrmacht. It was then  that in the most difficult war of the Soviet Union in 1941, a huge  part of the prisoners of war of Azerbaijanis sided with the Nazis.

Official Baku feeds the world community with rotten cabbage,  assuring that such a large number of defectors is Stalin's fault, who  signed on August 16, 1941 a decree on the destruction of commissars  and commanders who deserted from the battlefield or tore off insignia  before being captured. Other defectors, again according to official  Baku, saw in the creation of the Azerbaijani legion the possibility  of restoring the independence of Azerbaijan.

It was on the basis of the Azerbaijani main body that in November -  December 1941 Hitler ordered the formation of the Unified  Caucasus-Mohammedan national legion, consisting of Azerbaijanis and,  to a small extent, Dagestanis, and on April 15, 1942 he personally  authorized the use of these people in the fight against partisans and  at the front as "equal allies".

This status was enshrined in the first . Due to the increase in the number of  Azerbaijanis, whose number in the Wehrmacht reached up to 40 thousand  people, the Caucasian-Mohammedan Legion was renamed Azerbaijan, and  representatives of other nationalities were withdrawn from it.  The  formation of the legion took place with the participation of the  "Azerbaijani government" created by emigrants, among whom were Mammad  Rasulzadeh, Khalil Khasmamedov, Shafi Rustambeyli, Nagy Sheikhzamanli  and other national figures and fascist heroes of Azerbaijan. Even a  newspaper called "Azerbaijan" was published, the editor of which was   former major of the Red Army, Medzhit Karsalany.  The centers for  picking the legion were the Polish and Ukrainian cities of Yedlino  and Priluki.

It is also worth considering Ilham Aliyev and the so-called the  public of Azerbaijan, walking along a street named after the fascist  Rasulzadeh, whose official biography in modern Azerbaijani sources  ends in 1920, although he died in Ankara in 1955, and in honor of  which official memorial events are constantly held in Baku, calling  it historical heroic figure.

That is the question of why it was necessary to exchange Japaridze  for a fascist, and then so "worry" about Garegin Nzhdeh, organizing  cheap PR actions around his personality in the post-Soviet space.