The Yerablur Military Cemetery. Photo via social media.
On 27 September, six years after the beginning of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenia, as a state, did something strange: it barely acknowledged the day at all. There was no remembrance of the soldiers or civilians who died, or of those who came back from the war; Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said nothing publicly about the anniversary; and the public broadcaster aired a pop concert.
Earlier, on 19 September, the third anniversary of the one-day war in Nagorno-Karabakh that led to the exodus of the entire population, there was the same silence. Again, nothing was said by Pashinyan, anyone from the ruling Civil Contract party, or on the public broadcaster — instead, once again, the focus was on a big concert in Kapan, in the Syunik Province.
The public broadcaster later issued a statement on its social media pages, apologizing for airing the concert on 27 September, calling it a mistake. The singer whose concert was aired also made a post condemning the station for airing it, clarifying that the concert was the broadcaster’s property and that he did not know they were going to air it that day.
Despite these clarifications and apologies, and several days of very harsh criticism, including from civil society members who are usually supportive of the government, Pashinyan’s response a few days later did not sound apologetic.
‘On all the days when we have broadcast concerts, is it that we haven’t had dozens of casualties? Today itself [1 October], we have had many casualties. How are we supposed to approach this? 9 November will come next. I want to understand, for example, will it be acceptable to broadcast a concert on 27 September eight or 10 years from now, or not?’, he responded to a journalist’s question.
When asked about his own silence on 27 September, he said: ‘There is nothing new to say about the 44-day war. When I have something new to say, I will say it’.
He added that any message would have required using terminology stemming from the current political context and agreements, and that the presence or absence of certain terms, including ‘Artsakh’, ‘aggression’, or ‘genocide’, could later become a subject of speculation.
Meanwhile, on both of these days, there was an endless flow of people to Yerevan’s Yerablur Military Pantheon.
When I heard Pashinyan say that he did not have anything to say about the war anymore, I kept wondering: do the families who visit their lost sons every year on 27 September have anything new to say? Or do they simply remember, mourn, and show respect?
As someone who was against this war from the start, and who did not share the narratives surrounding it, I still remember and mourn everyone we lost to it.
I mourn the people who participated in it simply because they were serving in the army at the time; the people who volunteered to go, listening to appeals from Pashinyan; the civilians who were unarmed victims of the war. And I mourn all the pain and trauma it caused to all of us, but first and foremost to the people who had to experience the war on the frontlines.
I mourn the years that came after: the depression of our society, the apathy, the crisis of identity, the mistrust towards a peaceful future, the sleepless nights, weeks, and months. I can go on counting the things to mourn,
I was arguing with a close friend who said that the state commemorating the anniversary, or Pashinyan saying anything on that day, would not give her any consolation. She said she would not care whether they said anything or not.
I thought it would not console me either. And it certainly would not console the parents whose sons died in the war. But the absence of any speech, the absence of any message of condolence, the absence of remembrance, speaks so much louder than any words of consolation could.
We talked about memory politics, and about how the state should not be the one deciding whether we remember or not, what day we remember on, or how we mourn. However, to me, this deafening silence was itself the best example of state politics of memory.
But another example of it is the government’s random choice of a convenient mourning day, one that has no link with the war. At the beginning of the year, 27 January was officially designated the Day of Remembrance for Those Who Died Defending the Homeland, observed on the eve of Army Day, 28 January.
To us, and I suspect this is the case everywhere in the world, mourning, commemoration, and the ways we commemorate have become so politicized by the state that we fail to understand that before the ‘winner’ or ‘loser’ narratives, before ‘Artsakh’ or ‘Karabakh’, ‘Shushi’ or ‘Shusha’, ‘3,000 deaths’ or ‘4,000 deaths’, there is a family behind every soldier who lost his life. There is a trauma behind every soldier who came back from the war. No matter the political agenda of the time, this year, last year, or 2020. No matter which side ‘won’ or ‘lost’.
I believe a person who lost a son on 30 September, 3 October, or 8 November does not experience 27 September as ‘the anniversary of a failed state policy’ — they experience it as the day their child did not come home.
The state may change its interpretation of the war, it may change the calendar from autumn to winter. But a family cannot change the fact that someone is missing from its dinner table, and that every year when September comes, it reminds them of the pain.
We have confused remembering people with endorsing the political narrative of the war. A state that has won a war might turn its dead into symbols of victory. A defeated state may be tempted to make its dead politically inconvenient.
Perhaps this is why our political leaders, who were the ones who sent these people to war, do not have the vocabulary to commemorate, to mourn, to show respect to the families of the dead, to the veterans of the war, or to the whole society that went through it.
But doesn’t the government have a moral responsibility towards the people it mobilized for war? Does that responsibility end when the war ends? Does it end when the political narrative surrounding the war becomes inconvenient? Perhaps commemorating the dead has become uncomfortable precisely because it also means confronting the decisions that led them there. And if that is the reason for this discomfort, does it mean the government can use any possible means to divert attention from people’s pain and suffering?
People do not experience war as a state. They experience it as a body, a home, a missing son, a dead friend, a life that does not return.
Just as people need to share their joy, celebrate and live, it is equally human to share pain with one another and grieve. I believe it is a natural process, while suppressed and disregarded pain only creates aggression. Pain that is ignored, that people are not allowed to grieve, cannot heal eventually.
As Lusine Hovhannisyan wrote in The Twenty-Fourth Day of Autumn: ‘The war had been forgotten. When you put a concrete sarcophagus over a war, it no longer emits toxic radiation if you haven’t lost anyone’.
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