“Artsakh is Armenia, and that’s all”. An Armenian dream that came true as swiftly as it began to fade. The Armenian world paid a very high price for its fulfilment, but is paying an even heavier penalty for its oblivion. This article is not concerned with who is to blame for the loss of Artsakh. In one way or another, all of Armenian Republic’s contributions point to the roots of the total failure of the Third Republic, which was conceived with the mission of achieving ‘Miatsum’ – reunification with Artsakh. However, “everyone is at fault” is an overly superficial explanation that shifts responsibility away from individuals and groups that have made their part in bringing about the loss of one of the strongholds of the Armenian world. This entry will address those who were most pleased with the deflection from the original agenda of the ‘Miatsum’ – the Artsakh ‘elites’ who ran the show during the plague.
Myth of ‘two Armenian states’
At first, the idea of ‘two Armenian states’, like all ingenious projects of undermining the Armenian world, was marketed to the public from a perspective of its favourability for the external legitimacy and security. Naturally, the international community, being aware of the ground realities, was nothing but bewildered by such an arrangement; it permitted them to waive the recognition of Artsakh, as Armenia itself had not done so, and gave the enemy an excuse to claim that the right of Armenians to self-determination had already been exercised within the boundaries of the Republic of Armenia.
It is the inner consequences within Armenian world that matter more, and they weren’t long in coming: a distinct Artsakh ‘elite’ began to form, the constitutional rights of the citizens of the Republic of Armenia living in Artsakh were trampled, in particular, the electoral rights, and psychological estrangement between the Armenians of ‘mainland’ Armenia and Artsakh began to take place, though not without external influence. A quarter of a century later, all this would backfire when Pashinyan claimed that he had no mandate to determine the destiny of Artsakh, then, when he ultimately determined it with his incompetence and indifference, and finally, when he announced that Artsakh Armenians – holders of passports of the Republic of Armenia – were not in fact citizens of the Republic. Doubts about the usefulness of Artsakh among Armenians in Yerevan, Abovyan, and Gyumri on the one hand, and concerns about the goodwill of the latter towards themselves among the Armenians of Artsakh would arise much earlier.
All this can be blamed – and in many ways rightly so – on the first president of the Third Republic, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who sought to distance Armenia from the victory in Artsakh and did not even attempt to formalise it politically. But there were those on the other side from Goris and Vardenis who were completely content with such an arrangement, as it was more profitable to be a president than a governor, and more beneficial to be a parliament member rather than serve in the Council of Elders. And it is purely a story of mundane conception of Artsakh as a source of earnings, because if it was a matter of ambition, Artsakh ‘elites’ would not rush to serve their bosses in Yerevan, and then to wait on the generals of the Russian peacekeeping mission.
Inconvenient truth and inconvenient people
It started with not knowing and therefore, not recognising oneself. The Day of Artsakh’s independence was proclaimed to be on September 2nd, while in fact it had taken place on Armenian Christmas Day – with an eponymic declaration adopted on 6 January 1992, at the first Congress of the Supreme Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR). Why has this day been neglected by all the ruling groups in Artsakh? Precisely for the same reason why the true first leader of Artsakh, who chaired that very first convening, , was treacherously murdered in April 1992, why no one was prosecuted for his assassination, and why this genuine intellectual and combat commander, one of the founders of the national liberation movement, was only honoured with the title of Hero of Artsakh in 2020, just a couple of months before the war broke out. No Artsakh leader had ever laid flowers at his tomb until the spring of 2020.
The first leader of Artsakh, Arthur Mkrtchyan, could have become the Armenian Lech Walesa (the legendary founder of the Polish national liberation movement), but he became the embodiment of the unfulfilled potential of the Armenian world on the land of Artsakh. The very reasons why virtually all major players, including Levon Ter-Petrosyan and Robert Kocharyan (who was not only the second president of the Third Republic, but also technically the first president of Artsakh in 1994-1997), whom Mkrtchyan outvoted in the Supreme Council race, were opposed to his rule are the reasons why the Armenian statehood was being undermined from the outset. It was exactly the future president of Artsakh and then also of Armenia, the future arch-friend of the ‘Dashnatsutsyun’ party Robert Kocharyan, who argued at that time that it was him who should be elected, because he, unlike Mkrtchyan belonging to ‘Dashnaktsutsyun’ party, was close to Levon Ter-Petrosyan and it would be easier for him to coordinate the policy of NKR with the Armenian president. This laid the foundation for a hazardous political thinking, which caused the Artsakh and Armenian authorities to converge into a single entity, while the two societies became increasingly alienated from each other. In Kocharyan’s vision, the Dashnaks could only come to power in Artsakh if their co-partisans had succeeded in Armenia proper. Nonetheless, the then authorities in Yerevan qualified Arthur Mkrtchyan’s tragic death as a “treacherous killing aimed at weakening the people’s forces that have risen to fight for national liberation’’, declared a day of mourning and, for the first time in the history of the Third Republic, lowered state flags. Basically, they did everything that Ter-Petrosyan’s disciple Pashinyan had failed to do after the mass exodus of 120,000 Armenians from their historical homeland in September 2023, which was accompanied by at least hundreds of deaths.
Immediately after the assassination of Arthur Mkrtchyan, the Artsakh authorities, who, unlike him, grew up in an aversion to new ideas and were at best fit to serve as Komsomol (Young Communist) secretaries, began to willingly turn into an appendage of the Yerevan’s feudal-oligarchic system, thus devoid of motivation to apply their own efforts for the safety and well-being of the lives of two hundred thousand Armenians who were entrusted to them. But they thereby secured this well-being for themselves. Given that many of them are in Baku prison now, the guarantee turned out not to be lifetime, but they fulfilled their mission of raising family fortunes. After all, only the genuine elite thinks in terms of national interests, while their limit was their narrow family and clan interests. By consuming the loans allocated by their Yerevan masters, they did not realise (or did not bother) that by doing so they were compromising the future of Artsakh as well. Consequently, in addition to losing valuable resources that should have been allocated to its development and security, Artsakh became a ‘poor relation’ for the public of ‘mainland’ Armenia and the Armenian communities scattered all over the world.
The local ‘elites’ could not forgive those who were ready to accept such a ‘poor relative’ for the sake of the future of their people either. At his own time, the Armenian philanthropist Levon Hayrapetyan, who established many systemic charitable and educational projects in Artsakh and intended to open a military college so that the Armenian army would no longer solely rely on self-sacrificing autodidacts, but would master military science to the fullest extent, constantly faced resistance from the local ‘elites’ who did not like to see the prominent businessman independently control his own investments and be proactive in the matters of Artsakh’s development. It is no wonder that when Hayrapetyan was imprisoned in Russia (and it was to one of the harshest places of detention) on spurious charges, none of the representatives of Yerevan and Stepanakert made a genuine effort to release the philanthropist who was in a grave state of health. A sort of ‘bonus’ to the already growing frustration in all parts of the Armenian world with the discrepancy between the Artsakh which was fought for and the Artsakh which was built.
There was also little effort to bring as many Armenians from Armenia and overseas communities as possible to visit Artsakh and realise its uniqueness and value, not to mention the lack of interest in motivating them to resettle or repatriate and providing them with the conditions to do so. Owing to this indolence of Artsakh ‘elites’, the Armenians living overseas – mostly descendants of those who fled Western Armenia and acquired a new sense of identity through the Artsakh victory, having made tremendous efforts for this victory in the 1990s – have formed no bond to Artsakh as a homeland.
‘Elites’ in search of a master
The viceroys of the Yerevan feudal-clan system in Stepanakert did not seek to establish meaningful ties with these two true pillars of the Armenian world, which had made a pivotal contribution to the all-Armenian victory in Artsakh and its post-war reconstruction. With this forgotten, the Artsakh ‘elites’ treated the assigned funds as a generous donation from their masters in Yerevan in return for their allegiance. ‘Gratitude’ for them required no political responsibility before their true donors and before the people of Artsakh, because the main contractors and business partners (who, in turn, had their own contractors) were seated on Baghramyan 26. It is therefore little wonder that the withdrawal of the Artsakh’s representatives from the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe – the main platform for conflict resolution) Minsk Group in the late 1990s did not cause a strong reaction on the part of those being excluded.
It was convenient for one to be a part of the Artsakh ‘elite’ in such conditions: unimpeded access to subsoil, forests, rich water resources and agricultural grounds, absence of international control and lack of attention to the ‘grey zone’, in particular, in matters of capital and production, citizens’ fear of undermining ‘unity’ and ‘legitimacy’ with redundant questions, availability of the means of the entire Armenian world and the opportunity to employ all the relatives in the government apparatus, irrespective of their qualifications. It should come as no surprise that this grant pyramid has eliminated the incentive for development and bred a class of futile bureaucracy, which now that Artsakh has been lost, cannot be accommodated in the already bloated state apparatus in Yerevan, nor can it compete in the rest of the big city economy. And it’s not only officials we’re talking about, but also (most of) the farmers, journalists, etc., who didn’t experience the need to raise funds and streamline their operations.
It is quite remarkable that Nikol Pashinyan, who was not affiliated with this system until 2018, opted for the old ‘suit’ even in this matter and did not consider resetting the relationship format between the Yerevan and Stepanakert authorities, and yet we are “responsible for those we have tamed”. Furthermore, Pashinyan even abandoned the Artsakh people’s hope for change that they held out after the transfer of power in Yerevan in April 2018. The prime minister visited Artsakh in June 2018 and personally voiced support for then-President Bako Sahakyan, who had prolonged his rule in 2017 through constitutional changes following the example of Serzh Sargsyan and had suppressed public protests. As a result, the Artsakh ‘elites’ were spared the trouble of undertaking serious changes on the eve of a big war. At that, stepping down would not be a wasteful endeavour: about $20 million was allocated annually from Artsakh’s budget to the maintenance of former presidents and high-ranking officials.
Starting from 2018, among other things, a part of the Artsakh ‘elites’, who interpreted the need to be loyal to the Armenian ruling class too literally, focused their attention and efforts on the inner political struggle in Yerevan, as the dispossession of patrons from the previous government would hit their pockets much harder than the loss of Artsakh. It was therefore even more acceptable for many of them to suffer a defeat in 2020 that could help put patrons back in their positions than to make an effort to mitigate it or even win the war (which certainly doesn’t make them the main culprits, but at least complicit in the tragic end of the war).
To this day, the former rulers of Artsakh show a much keener interest in the infighting in Yerevan than in their former constituents who entrusted them with their future. Anyone can enter the Artsakh Representative Office except those whom it is supposed to represent, and the very last, ten-day ‘president’ of Artsakh Samvel Shahramanyan, has other troubles – like the state-owned car seized from him by the Armenian National Security Service on suspicion of misappropriation. At least Shahramanyan was luckier than his ‘fellow citizens’ as Archbishop Bagrat handed him the keys to his Lexus instead in the spirit of Christian solidarity. Perhaps, this is the way Shahramanyan is being remunerated for having signed the decree on the dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh and endorsing the ‘humanitarian aid’ that entered Artsakh from Azerbaijan through Akna (Aghdam) under the label of the Red Crescent (despite the resistance of the Artsakh Armenians), while the trucks of the Red Cross and the Paris City Hall were idling for weeks in the Lachin corridor waiting for permission to enter the famished Artsakh from Armenian side. Yet, the Artsakh ‘elites’ have not changed, and even now, feeling resentment towards the Yerevan timeservers, they involve themselves in the common struggle rather discreetly, since, as before, their assets are more important, which is why it is safer not to cross the ‘red lines’ drawn by Pashinyan since grief-stricken citizens may be told far too much about the causes of their misfortunes, plus villas are much nicer than solitary cells.
Things versus the meaning of things
Under such circumstances, who would be concerned with demography, human capital development, at least increasing agricultural productivity, or more thoughtful construction of hydroelectric power plants so as not to convert the river valleys into deserts? Definitely not a guy who virtually monopolised it all, like ex-president Arayik Harutyunyan. On the other hand, it was him who, before the 2020 elections, even prior to the war, declared the threat to food security against the background of the pandemic as an ‘expert’ – but the flow of the 2022-2023 blockade revealed that he realised the threat in name only, given that after the war Artsakh lost a great deal of arable land, and much of the remaining land was constantly targeted by the Azerbaijani military. Alas, it was too late when the public started addressing questions to the ‘elite’, which by accident found itself at the helm of the frontline of the Armenian world, liberated by the super-concentration of efforts of the best children of the Armenian ethnos.
The substitution of meanings was ubiquitous: every 5-10 years Artsakh ‘elites’ conceived of new situation-oriented constitutions in isolation from the challenges facing the society, by 2013 they had already replaced 8 ministers of education, but all these changes were implemented only for the sake of not truly changing anything. Those who were to constitute the spiritual and intellectual elite, following the example of the political one, opted to serve as an appendage to it rather than as its and the society’s ethical reference point. Loud toasts, low-grade ‘patriotic’ songs, reiteration of distorted traditions – no deviations from Yerevan and from their masters, for ‘unity’ was above all.
It is hardly surprising that against this background, even many members of the ‘elite’, let alone society, have begun to confuse the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘authorities’. The wicked twist of fate is that the end of these two came at about the same time: after the ‘dissolution’ of the state, the very same authorities ended up in Baku prison. The ‘unity’ was not only not enriched with meaning by these groups, but as if deliberately deprived of it, and all those who did not fit into this ugly norm – bearers of good taste, authentic traditions, genuine state-oriented position – were in Artsakh society. Competition was suppressed not only in politics, culture, society, but also in such basic infrastructure as the mobile communication. Armenian mobile network providers entered the Artsakh market only after the war of 2020, and before that the residents of Artsakh subsisted under the conditions of insupportable prices for low-quality mobile internet and mobile communications in general. As a result of all of this, there was not only a detachment from reality with dire consequences, but also mass emigration of qualified specialists, whereas mass repatriation should have taken place instead.
The substitution of meanings was the most heinous in the matter of the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement. On the one hand, until 2020, the Artsakh leaders claimed that their Armenian counterparts represented their position in the negotiations on international stages, that they kept them informed and that Stepanakert and Yerevan had no significant disagreements in the vision of the settlement. On the other hand, Armenian leaders have been discussing concessions to Azerbaijan since signing the Bishkek Protocol and refusing to fight for the political formalisation of victory in the first Karabakh war, explicitly agreeing to the Madrid principles. At the same time, the Artsakh authorities were building their policies and using all-Armenian resources as if there was no question of any surrender even in the : they were restoring the second road linking Artsakh with Armenia along the Karvachar-Vardenis line and accommodating Armenians who had fled from Syria and Lebanon in the liberated districts. It would later turn out that it was only for the sake of another corrupt construction deal and to make those people refugees once again. At the same time, the mantra that negotiations cannot be effective without the participation of Artsakh’s representatives was being recited, while no clear demands to the participants of the negotiation process were articulated.
Not a single elected representative dared to tell his people about the changes in the negotiation agenda, about which they had been informed – for example, by Serzh Sargsyan – in order to begin mentally preparing the population. After all, Artsakh was a national asset, and the Armenian world, in particular the inhabitants of Artsakh, who always took the first blows related to the defence of the region, were entitled to be aware of the threat – otherwise it would be impossible to prevent it. And even that did not compel the Artsakh leaders to engage in comprehensive military retraining, to start equipping bomb shelters, for example, in Hadrut, so that civilians would not be forced to flee at the first attack, and so that the military would not leave Hadrut relatively quietly in the expectation that they would return with renewed vigour – after all, there was no one to defend. They did not even undertake mining in the surroundings of Mekhakavan (Jebrail district), since after the 2016 attacks it was obvious that the South would become one of the main strike directions.
Even after the war of 2020, during the toughest years for the people of Artsakh, one could hear only one thing beyond gossip and curses from the parliament, a body that was supposed to serve as a centre of statecraft and at least alleviate the existence of the citizens of Artsakh under the conditions of partial and then complete blockade. These were the claims against the former patron (the Armenian authorities) and deifying the current one – the Russian peacekeeping mission. Were the claims valid? No doubt, since Armenia effectively washed its hands after 2020, albeit in many respects that decision was linked to the new situation on the ground. But now we are dealing with the political immaturity and irresponsibility of the Artsakh ‘elites’, who by that time had been ruling almost invariably for 30 years with the only mission entrusted to them – the preservation of Artsakh.
Did it make them start reflecting on providing security for the population that had elected them? And not just military security, but also informational, mental, humanitarian? The 2022-2023 blockade gave an unequivocal negative answer to this question. Instead of introducing substantive changes and bringing in fresh ideas and approaches from the new generation that fought heroically in the 2020 war, they proposed to draft the third constitution since 2005, because the second one, adopted after the April War in 2016 with the professed aim of confronting such challenges, also suddenly stopped meeting them. The new constitution draft was never published, and the state of emergency, imposed against the background of the blockade, allowed the second-to-last President of the Republic of Artsakh Arayik Harutyunyan to introduce an amendment, which allowed him to relieve himself of the responsibility for the termination of Artsakh statehood bypassing the referendum and dissolution of the parliament, leaving his people a ‘leader’, for whom they had never voted (Samvel Shahramanyan), to do this dirty work.
Throughout all this time no political (as well as military, religious, cultural) elite has been formed in Artsakh, which would be clearly aware of the interests of Artsakh and the Armenian world as a whole, capable of formulating them, presenting itself to the world community, not to mention serving as an ideological, value and moral compass for its citizens. The authorities of Mother Armenia were satisfied with such an ‘elite’, allowing it not to assume the fate of Artsakh in its own hands, as they did with Armenia itself, and at the crucial moment simply abandoned it, reconciling themselves to the fact that after 2020 the conflict shifted to the realm of Russian-Azerbaijani relations. The ‘elite’ did not lost heart and began holding feuds, competing for a ‘jarlig’ (a permission to rule on behalf of the Tatar rulers in Medieval ages, particularly granted to Russian feudals) from Moscow and, to be safe, why not, also from Baku, to rule over what would be left of Artsakh.
On the eve of the exodus
Many Artsakh civilians who fled the deadliest hotspots in the first days of the war or were forcibly evacuated by the Artsakh authorities without any explanation in the last days of the war, including those who had lost their homes in the Azerbaijani-occupied areas, returned in the hope of change, as the result of the previous stalemate was self-evident. Obviously, a considerable part relied on Russian peacekeepers as well, naively assuming that any advances by Azerbaijan would henceforth be perceived as being directed against Russia. The futility of such hopes became apparent soon enough, as early as December 2020, when, in complete violation of the ceasefire agreement of 9 November 2020, with the connivance of the peacekeeping troops and immediately after the irresponsible and populist statements of the then Secretary of the Security Council of the Republic of Artsakh, Vitaly Balasanyan, used by the Azerbaijani side as a pretext for an attack, the Armenians were forced to withdraw from their last strongholds of heroic resistance in the Hadrut region – Khtsaberd and Hin Tagher, with the soldiers guarding the positions taken captive.
Even in the deteriorating international situation and amidst the loss of the negotiating leverages available to Armenians before, the Artsakh ‘elites’ could not renounce the empty clichés such as “we have already self-determined in 1991”, sabotaging all previous and subsequent efforts of the Armenian side in the negotiations, no matter how negligible the latter might be, especially in 2022-2023. Blind faith in Russia’s protection allowed them to overlook this as well. Where reality could no longer be ignored and citizens started asking questions, the ‘elites’ called for not generating unnecessary tension. They did everything possible to please their new masters: they gave Russian the status of an official language, recognised the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, shipped humanitarian aid to them, allowed the peacekeepers to restrict the entry of foreign nationals into Artsakh, including those of Armenian descent.
And what have the Artsakh ‘elites’ done to benefit their own people as well? Again, it’s easier to say what they didn’t do. They certainly did not alleviate its sufferings during the nine-month blockade and even made profit from getting a cut in deals with some peacekeepers who enjoyed free movement and therefore had access to the blessings of civilisation in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Were most definitely not there for their people even in the last days of their reign. They failed to take care of the early evacuation of relics and museum collections, to create digital copies of cultural monuments, archives, newspapers – everything that would have helped to do a thorough work on mistakes and restore Artsakh as accurately as possible after performing such work and returning there. They did not defend themselves and did not protect each other from the disgrace of being captured by Azerbaijan (for example, former Foreign Minister David Babayan travelled to Shushi to surrender to the enemy voluntarily).
The list isn’t exhausted. They didn’t manage the evacuation, didn’t prevent the mounting panic, which resulted in the disastrous explosion at the gas station on September 25 – many of them were not even in Artsakh by then, since ‘elites’ should be the first to evacuate. It could have been a terrorist attack to make Armenians leave their homes without a second glance, but whatever it was in reality, the rulers of Artsakh are the direct accomplices and culprits of the deaths and incapacitation of hundreds of Armenians (mostly men) that occurred in a matter of a few hours. There were practically no physicians left in Artsakh by that time either. It was the panic against the backdrop of the fear of not being able to evacuate in time and being physically exterminated as well as the small number of working petrol stations (in the last months of the blockade there was no fuel at all), as well as, most likely, non-compliance with technical standards at the petrol station, which obviously belonged to not the last person, that led to such a tragic closing line of the last page of Armenian history turned by them and by their Yerevan collaborators with the tacit consent of all international actors. There is a reason why Artsakh was sometimes called a ‘mini-laboratory’ for reproducing the successful experiments throughout the whole territory of the Republic of Armenia. The ruling class of Artsakh mimicked the ruling class of the rest of Armenia, moreover, regarded doing so nearly as its mission. As a result, no one was actually responsible for the preservation of Artsakh, and the Armenian world paid very dearly for the mansions and assets of undeserving rulers, whereas the main goal of the enemies of the Armenian world – the destruction of even formal statehood and the physical extermination of Armenians – is already as clear as the palm after the ‘running-in’ in Artsakh. There, too, was no meaningful and state-centred elite, while security was entrusted to external forces just as it is now in Tavush, Vayots Dzor, Syunik, Shirak, Gegharkunik and other marzer (provinces) of Armenia, where Russian border guards and military personnel stand and EU civilian observers patrol. The eventual outcome was predetermined by weakness, incompetence, immaturity, lack of state-oriented thinking, reliance on anyone but themselves and ultimately by just one signature. The very signature, after which many people naively believed that Armenia would be spared, but exactly the opposite happened, because the laboratory experiment gave the ‘green light’ as no immune response in the test subject was observed.
