Yerevan
“That’s Hampig Sassounian. The guy who killed the Turkish consul in California. wanna meet him?”
Sure!
“This is Mat. He’s a big fan of your work!”
We were on the streets, outside the Armenian National Assembly building, with Bagrat Galstanyan, the unlikely leader the resistance movement against the government of Nikol Pashinyan.
Hampig (“Harry”) Sassounian had done his time; 30-plus years in a Californian prison for the 1982 murder of Turkish Consul General to Los Angeles Kemal Arikan; a political assassination because the Turkish government refused (and refuses) to recognise the genocide of one and a half million Armenians in the Great War. Finally released in 2021, he now runs a restaurant.
Bagrat Srbazan (roughly, His Holiness) has spent the last several weeks leading protests against the policies of the Pashinyan administration. Archbishop of the Tavush region of Armenia (on the eastern border of the country with archenemies Azerbaijan), his movement is called “Tavush for the Homeland”. He is calling for the replacement of the Pashinyan government with a temporary one, which he would would lead for a year, following which fresh elections would be held. Border villages in his region are currently being given away to Azerbaijan, unilaterally, under a process of “delimitation” which only favours the aggressor. The archbishop led a march to the capital, Yerevan, followed by a series of peaceful protests packing the city’s main (and vast) Republic Square, and blocking roads around the parliament.
Armenia has undergone a series of devastating losses at the hands of Azerbaijan over the last four years. At the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the overwhelmingly Armenian Nagorno-Karabagh Autonomous Oblast declared independence from Azerbaijan as the Republic of Artsakh. The first war from 1991-1994 gained de facto independence, but not international recognition. Baku bided its time, whilst earning fat revenues from its oil and gas deposits in the Caspian. A 44-day war in 2020 smashed the Armenian forces with Turkish Bayraktar drones, and regained much of the territory before a Russian-backed ceasefire. The independence of Artsakh was finally crushed last year, simply by besieging the territory for nine months, then sending limited forces in and allowing the broken 120,000-odd population to pour over the border to Armenia in a textbook ethnic cleansing.
But after these losses, the current “border delimitation” debacle may break the regime. As bad as it would be to for the locals to give up their land under any circumstances, the strategic situation is much worse than this. Landlocked Armenia is a small place, Lake Sevan being only an hour-or-so drive from Yerevan. The eastern shores of the lake are close to the Azeri border, and are particularly sensitive since the effective buffer zone around Artsakh have been lost. Azerbaijan now occupies the heights surrounding the main road to the east of the lake - a vital supply line for both trade and defense purposes. The villages surrendered are on this road, between the lake and the Georgian border. Moving down to the lowlands presents a constant threat of strangulation of this route.
In addition to the land, the Aliyev regime in Baku seems set on requiring something of a ritual humiliation in any peace treaty, including the re-writing of the country’s constitution to renounce any territorial claims, and even dropping the national symbol of Mount Ararat from her coat of arms. Baku is demanding that Yerevan recognises the Azeri deaths at Khojaly in the first war as a “genocide” - without of course even recognising the Armenian Genocide by the Ottomans. Worryingly, too, Azerbaijan is asking for “rights of return” for Azeris who lived in Armenia in Soviet times, and is not beyond referring to all of Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan”. Also for negotiation is the idea of the “Zangezur Corridor”, a communications link in the far south of Armenia to link Azerbaijan to the exclave of Nakhichevan (and thus link the Turkic states from Istanbul across the Caspian), which could be anything from a railway to a land-grab of Syunik, Armenia’s border link with Iran and the wider world.
It’s hard to travel far in Armenia without being aware of the tangible threat of force from her neighbours. The Tavush resort town of Dilijan was home to the Soviet Composers’ resort; it was here that Benjamin Britten stayed with Miloslav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya, and composed his beautiful Pushkin settings “A Poet’s Echo” “to improve his Russian”. Now, walking in the hills from the town , intermittent gunfire and shelling from the direction of the border interrupts the peace.
Travel south from Yerevan towards the southern provinces of Vayats Dzor (translation: the Vale of Sorrows) and Syunik, the main road passes close by the fortified border with Azerbaijan’s western exclave, Nakhichevan. The “mother mountain” Mount Ararat appears to be within almost touching distance of Yerevan, but is now in the possession of Turkey. As is the 10th Century Armenian Bagratid capital of Ani, built above the river Arpa, forming the border; closed still, highlighted by a broken tenth-century bridge. Flipping only a few miles back across the border again, under Ararat, sits the monastery of Khor Virap, where St Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned for 12 years before converting King Trdat III and making Armenia the first country to adopt Christianity in 301 AD.
The geography of Armenia is squeezed to the west and east by the Turkic neighbours.
The “realists” of the pro-Pashinyan side of the argument have a simple mantra: we cannot choose our neighbours - we cannot pretend they are Italy and Switzerland - therefore we must reach a point of being able to live in peace with them. But there is a different sort of “realism” too: a realism that recognises that (certainly for the foreseeable future) Armenia is and must be at risk from her neighbours, and must always be prepared to fight.
The Pashinyan regime has (of course) tried to smear Bagrat Srbazan as an agent of Russia - ironic as he has spent time in both England and Canada. In terms of the geopolitical pivot of the South Caucasus, the region has always been subject to the pulls of the three major powers surrounding it: Turkey (and before that, the Byzantines) to the west, Russia to the north of the Great Caucasus range, and Persia/Iran to the south-east. Anyone with even the faintest knowledge of the region knows that Armenia can at best neutralise Turkey, and that will not change. Russia’s double games have favoured Azerbaijan in recent times, and it would be foolhardy for Armenia to look to northwards to guarantee security as it has since independence. But alienating Russia entirely, as Pashinyan seems set on, is foolhardy too.
Pashinyan is setting forth a simplistic Russia versus the West narrative in Armenian politics; but this ignores the third player in the region: Iran. With the Nagorno-Karabagh question off the table for the time being its interests are clear: to keep the borders as they are (in particular, not to allow a “hard” Zangezur corridor to cut links to Armenia); to keep Western interests out of the South Caucasus; and to protect the status quo whilst increasing its influence. Iran always plays the long game. It is even possible that, should Georgia continue to be pulled away from the NATO/EU path, an alternative land route connecting Iran and Russia could open up, bypassing Azerbaijan.
Yet Pashinyan seems to be ignoring this as strategic possibility, instead relying on as-yet very early stage overtures from the West, backed by warm words from Washington about “democracy”, and arms deals with Paris. EU “monitors” patrol the borders with Azerbaijan, with no clear remit. Would the US or France ever commit forces were Azerbaijan to invade? Could they even do so on any reasonable timescale?
Bagrat Srbazan clearly does not think so. In this interview he speaks compellingly about his belief in the high value of martyrdom, and his admiration of the fact that most streets in Tehran are named for Shahids (martyrs) for the Islamic Republic - including Christian ones. “Which is preferable”, he says, “to die with meaning, or without meaning?” And, “Life is not a value; life is a gift.”
It is also a message that stresses Armenia’s agency, dignity even. Not that he is arguing for war: far from it; but the unilateral concessions to an adversary who would (should circumstances allow) erase Armenia as a separate state entirely are not a path of peace, but piecemeal capitulation.
Pashinyan disagrees, and is banking on the population being behind his appeasement. “We don’t want to fight anymore, we don’t want to survive, we don’t want to suffer, we don’t want to be sacrificed, we just want to live.”1
The tactics of the Pashinyan government in the face of the “Tavush for the Homeland” movement are simply to ignore it: to play for time whilst continuing the negotiations with Azerbaijan (and giving away more territory), all the while further re-orienting Armenia towards the West. Without enough MPs from the opposition to force an impeachment vote, as the ruling Civil Contract party holds, resistance in parliament is going nowhere. The police (some who now are having US training) have on occasions resorted to brutality against protestors, but as a whole the protests are relatively calm; allowed by the regime in the hope their fires burn out.
Grass-roots protests tend invariably to fail, unless backed by outside forces, or unless violence gets to the point that the army steps in - and refuses to fire on its own citizens. Neither seems imminent. In which case, the hope for the resistance must come down to a rival faction - possibly from within the army - becoming increasingly unhappy with Pashinyan and allying with the protesters. Given the sensitive nature of the land being ceded, this cannot be dismissed - but equally there is as yet no visible sign of it.
Pashinyan is capitulating to a Carthaginian peace without even trying to fight the war. What is clear is that if Bagrat Srbazan’s movement is to succeed, it will need not only the spiritual strength of the Church, but also the force of arms and the willingness to deal with some characters - like Sassounian - beyond the pale of Western sensibilities.
https://www.azatutyun.am/a/33007340.html