To leave the mountains is to find an ignominious death in the gorges and forests. Far, far away from the gorges that could easily become your grave.
Garegin Nzhdeh (1886-1955)
Recognizing the boundaries beyond which another living organism begins is a requirement for every living organism, including a nation. Usually this “another one” is well known and familiar. However, when it poses a mortal danger, the border becomes not merely an additional attribute of self-identity, but a frontier (frontline). The frontier may shift, but what remains constant are those outside it, even if they are not Ottomans anymore but Young Turks, not Transcaucasian Tatars but Bolsheviks, not a sworn enemy but a bosom friend of the “eternal peace” era. It is at the frontier where the true wealth and symbolic capital of a nation are concentrated.
In the centers of the nascence and prosperity of the Armenian nation in Artsakh, Syunik and Western Armenia, only one thing was known about those on the other side of the line: they would do anything to exterminate or at least expel the Armenians. The great sons of the Armenian people: Monte Melkonyan, Movses Gorgisyan, Leonid Azgaldyan and many others who fought for Artsakh, following their predecessor Garegin Nzhdeh, stated that the loss of Artsakh would expose Syunik – the “backbone” of Armenia. That was the fateful significance of closing the last page of Armenian history if Artsakh was surrendered.
Western Armenia remained Armenian until the Genocide and mass deportation, while Artsakh and Syunik, in addition, maintained at least semi-independent status throughout all their history. It was in these two regions that the Armenian Apostolic Church was born and the cultural and educational life of the Armenian communities was concentrated. After its fall, Western Armenia, Nakhijevan, the Northern part of the Artsakh and then the entire region brought Syunik to the “backbone” of the struggle for the Armenian world, with only “plains” in its rear, unable to protect it either spiritually or physically. As a hundred years ago, Syunik remained the last wedge on the way of territorial unification of the Turkish world. Armenians never lost control neither over Syunik nor over Artsakh until quite recently – and we are only beginning to reap the bitter fruits of such an unprecedented loss in the life of the Armenian world.
Syunik, as part of today’s Republic of Armenia, was the last of the provinces inherited from Greater Armenia that remained almost entirely under the control of the Armenian world (in Armenia and Artsakh). Symbolically, the provinces of Greater Armenia were also called “Ashkhar” – “the world”.
Syunik is the cultural, religious and educational source of entire Armenian world, the place where its future is being decided, and the last obstacle to the otherworldly – Turkish world.
It is not by chance that Syunik has remained Armenian throughout history. This province became a place of triumph of the Armenian spirit and, at the same time, a concentration of betrayal and false hopes for external centers of power. The mountains serving as a natural barrier and providing a certain angle of view on the enemy, the harsh climate, the constant raids of invaders, hostile groups infiltrating and settling in the territory – Syunik became the quintessence of the trials of the Armenian world. The people who, despite the hardships of living in a remote mountainous region, remained to cultivate the stony soil and ride the mountain wind, especially those who had been doing so for generations, became the “salt of the earth” of the Armenian people, the very people from whom the future elite was to be born in the liberation movements of the 18th century and in the 20th century.
The statesman Nzhdeh at the moment of the mortal threat of the loss of Syunik believed that the spirit of the fallen heroes had not left the province even after 200 years, that the monuments of former glory had not lost their sanctity for the Armenian people, and he turned out to be right. He was also right that courage is more important than good iron. Thanks to the heroic battles under his command in 1920-1921, by keeping Syunik Armenian, it was possible to avoid the dismemberment of Armenia, raise the morale of the nation and inspire another spark of resistance to the colonizers, and despite the subsequent occupation of Armenia and Mountainous Armenia, to remove the issue of Syunik as a “disputed territory” along with Nakhijevan and Artsakh and ensure the evacuation of Armenian intellectuals to Iran.
The latter should be emphasized separately, since a few years earlier the entire intelligentsia of Western Armenia had been annihilated. The question of the possibility of transformation of such intellectuals, who first allowed the extermination of their own people and themselves in the Ottoman Empire, and then became refugees from their own independent state and were stuck in Iran for an indefinite period of time waiting for a change in the tailwind, into aristocracy remains open. Either way, liberation of Syunik made it possible to save the lives of Armenians supporting independence, who would have faced reprisals from their new “brothers” and masters otherwise.
Had it not been for the moral superiority of the Armenians, which determined the outcome of the years-long battle for Syunik, as the heroic military leader and statesman Nzhdeh recognized, Syunik would have turned into “a bridge of the dead between the western and eastern parts of the Turkic world”. Soviet Armenia would definitely lose not only Nakhijevan and Artsakh, but also Syunik. No more generation of Armenians would have had a chance to see Artsakh and realize its value transmitting it to their descendants. “Second Republic” would become the last form of political usage of the words “Armenia” and “Armenian”.
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Today, despite the fact that the government and its henchmen divert public attention to the surrender of Tavush, and further to petty squabbling, Syunik remains the strategic goal of the enemies of Armenian statehood. The extraterritorial corridor, the gradual seizure of territories and heights with the subsequent depopulation of surrounding settlements are only the tip of the iceberg that is looming over the Armenian world. Underneath it, there is the missed development of the region, which causes young people to leave it, the sale of land plots to foreign “investors” and local influence agents, ignoring the problems with the environment, healthcare and transportation accessibility, and, of course, the maintenance of an atmosphere of constant threat primarily by the leadership of Armenia itself.
The loss of Syunik continues to mean the loss of the keys to Artsakh, the loss of border with Iran, and the absorption of Armenia by its remaining neighbors. Armenians averted this scenario in the 1920s and 1990s, and there is no reason to believe that their willingness and ability to defend their territories has dramatically evaporated over the past 30 years.
The “well-fed” post-war years, the illusion of sovereignty and permanent negative selection allowed the timeservers gain a foothold in power and lull the instinct of self-preservation, but not to destroy the collective memory of the Armenian world.
Both the heroic liberation of Artsakh and its shameful surrender will remain in this memory forever: it was Syunik that fought together with Artsakh and broke through its blockade in the 1990s, and only Syunik could realize the tragic exodus of the Artsakh Armenians – Armenians just like them who needed to overcome several kilometers for several days and find themselves on the safe side of the frontier. However, the collaborationists will do everything possible to erase it. And there can be no more certain and reliable way to destroy it than by expelling or forcing Armenians out of the places that nourish it.
Undoubtedly, the geographical location of the region, its infrastructure, abundant water resources and base metal-rich subsoil are necessary for Armenia’s sustainable development and cannot but interest the neighbors both on their own and from the standpoint of rivalry with Armenia. However, the key resource of Syunik in an age when water is the new oil, as it was in the age of old oil, remains its ideological and historical heritage. Nzhdeh believed that the people of Syunik would still have stood up to defend their mountains even without his leadership, for they realized the value of their natural fortress for their own defense. The ultimate oblivion of the true allies of the Armenian world – ourselves and our mountains – and of the taste of resistance and victories will take the Armenians to their “nowhere without Syunik” – to the extinction.
