Op-ed: Armenia’s paramount challenge — oblivion

On the night of December 31, 2023, an unprecedented New Year’s fireworks display lit up Republic Square in Yerevan. Just two months earlier, more than 100,000 people had been forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh, leaving behind their homes, the graves of their ancestors and sons, their biographies, their homeland.

Many parents fled after having just buried their sons, or after exhuming them to rebury them in Armenia.

As a result of Azerbaijan’s September 19-20, 2023, attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, more than 220 Armenians were killed, and around 250 were wounded. On September 25, an explosion at a fuel depot near Stepanakert killed another 220 people and injured about 300. Seventy people died on the road while fleeing.

No day of mourning was declared in Armenia. No symbolic act followed.

Moreover, the day of Nagorno-Karabakh’s fall was declared the day of “real independence” for Armenia. The authorities began constructing new narratives by presenting as opposing ideas that had never been opposites:

– real Armenia vs historical Armenia
– state vs homeland
– sovereignty vs Karabakh
– Aragats vs Ararat
– Armenia’s western regions vs Western Armenia
– history of Armenia vs Armenian history
– state vs church

These narratives were accompanied by a transfer of responsibility onto the victims themselves: claims that the people of Karabakh did not fight, that prisoners of war were to blame for their own captivity, and that regarding the 1915 Genocide, “we must understand what happened and why it happened.”

Armenia’s current authorities describe this approach as realism, as realpolitik, as the necessity of looking to the future.

Geopolitical constraints are real. Defeat is real. The shift in the balance of power is real. Why and how this happened are separate topics of discussion.

But a state cannot speak about the future while consigning its past to oblivion. It cannot demand rationality while eroding the historical continuity on which that future rests. It cannot promise stability by hollowing out national memory.

This does not have to mean revanchism or militarism. The alternative is simpler: truth, memory, accountability. Accountability not to external actors, but to one’s own citizens and to one’s own history. Truth without euphemism.

Oblivion does not heal. It merely postpones collapse.

Read the article in Armenian.