scale of destruction and number of victims shall be attributed to very

limited potential of the AHIC investigation team in Guba comprising

A.F.Novatski, his assistant and interpreter Eyub-bey Khanbudaghov

and some service personnel provided by the municipality of Guba.

Acute shortage of investigators and pressing deadlines were among

the major challenges of the AHIC in general. This obviously affected

the output of the investigation teams operating in various regions of

the country. A letter by A.F.Novatski to the police superintendent of

Guba dating December 11, 1918, requested to provide names of 15-

20 local Muslim residents capable of advising the Commission details

of the Armenian gangs’ attack on the town. So it is far not by chance

that majority of persons interviewed by Novatski were honorable rep-

resentatives of the community, such as the town mayor, Shiite and

Sunni religious leaders, etc.

The list of interviewees also included some influential represen-

tatives of rural communities, such as Hassan-bey Shyhlarski (a repre-

sentative of Shykhlar landlord family), Shamsaddin Efendiyev, brother

of Hamdulla Efendi and the police superintendent of Davachi Pre-

cinct, Beybala Gayibov, landlord of Alpan village and others. Evidence

provided by them, as well as by other witnesses and victims, including

a seven-year-old boy and his mother, still create a comprehensive picture

of the tragic events that broke out in Guba in April-May 1918. Absence

of non-Muslim witnesses, the Jewish ones in particular, was already

mentioned above. Meanwhile, no Armenian residents of Guba ap-

plied to the Commission either. This could be hardly explained by the

fact that local Armenians had not returned to the town by that time.

The remark regarding absence of “representatives of other confes-

sions” made by the police superintendent of Guba’s Section 1 did not

apply to the whole of the town. It is also hard to assume whether this

was the result of Navatsky’s reservation regarding representatives of

other ethnic groups “not involved in violent actions towards the Mus-

lim population in general, and the population of the town of Guba

and Guba Uyezd in particular” as specified in his letter to the police

superintendent of Guba. (189)

This way or another, even if the version of absence of the Ar-

menian residents in town at that particular moment is true, it should

be noted that those Guba Armenians who had left for Baku before or

during these events were never denied a possibility to apply to the

Events of 1918 in Guba in the Context of Plans for Mass Extermination

of Azerbaijan’s Muslim Population