Shushi is an indigenously Armenian city that the Azerbaijani authorities tried to ‘liberate’ from the Armenians in the 1960s and 1970. This is what Artsvik Sargsyan, ex-mayor of Shushi occupied by the Azerbaijanis, told reporters today.

According to him, in 1916, there were 43,863 people living in Shushi, of which 21,926 were Armenians, 18,641 — Tatars, 1,249 — Russians, and the rest were representatives of other nationalities.

“On the night of March 23, 1920, Turkish Musavats barbarically killed tens of thousands of Armenian residents,” Sargsyan said, adding that the fact that Shushi was a city with a 90% population of Azerbaijanis ‘became clear for everyone’ only in the 1960s and 1970s when Heydar Aliyev came to power in Azerbaijan and tried to ‘cleanse’ Shushi and Karabakh of the Armenians.

“Shushi was a historically Armenian city, and it is necessary to talk about this constantly and everywhere,” he said.

Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan recently declared in parliament that during the whole process of negotiations there has never been an option according to which Azerbaijani refugees weren’t going to return to Shushi and that Shushi had a population of 90 and more percent Azerbaijani population before the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and after the liberation of Shushi.