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Ara Khachig Manoogian

Founder and Chief Executive, Global Peace International

Ara Khachig Manoogian founded Global Peace International to do one thing at scale: hold power accountable to the laws it is already bound by. It is work he has been doing, in person and at real risk, for more than three decades.

He was born in 1965 in Pasadena, California, to Khachig Evan and Dr. Sylva Natalie Manoogian. His maternal grandfather is Shahan Natalie, the mastermind of the executions of the Young Turk leaders responsible for the Armenian Genocide; his maternal grandmother was a direct descendant of the Bagratuni dynasty, which ruled Armenia from the ninth to the eleventh century. He is also a nephew of the late Archbishop Torkom Manoogian, Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem. From that lineage he inherited a single, unbending standard — that those who abuse power must answer for it — and since 2008 he has served as the steward of Shahan Natalie's private archive.

On the ground in Armenia and Artsakh

Ara first traveled to Armenia in 1989, as a videographer documenting earthquake-zone relief, and returned again and again through the 1990s to record the daily lives of ordinary people and find ways to ease them. He was elected president of the Monte Melkonian Fund (1995–1997), and in 1998 he moved to the town of Martuni, in Artsakh, where he coordinated aid programs and began openly whistle-blowing on government corruption — helping ordinary citizens claim their rights without paying bribes. In 2000 he became the Artsakh representative of the Shahan Natalie Family Foundation, the third NGO ever registered in Artsakh.

His investigations produced concrete results, documented and widely reported by outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Hetq, Keghart, and Hraparak.

Human trafficking and the “Desert Nights” investigation

Beginning in 2004, working with the Hetq Investigative Journalists of Armenia, Ara investigated the trafficking of women and children from Armenia to the United Arab Emirates — the operation that became Desert Nights, a book and documentary the OSCE later called the most important work on human trafficking for sexual exploitation in Armenia. Victims were freed; numerous criminal cases were filed against pimps and traffickers, and more than a dozen were jailed. The investigation also implicated Rafayel Gyulnazaryan, head of the anti-human-trafficking department at the United Nations office in Yerevan, as part of the ring — and, with the help of the U.S. State Department, Gyulnazaryan was dismissed from his post. Armenian authorities denied the evidence of official complicity until, in 2011, WikiLeaks released 2006 U.S. Embassy cables that confirmed it.

The same effort contributed to international pressure over the United Arab Emirates' record on trafficking. As a U.S. State Department official in Armenia described it, the evidence GPI helped provide set off a dispute at the top of the U.S. government: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed to place the UAE at Tier 3 — the lowest rank — in the department's annual Trafficking in Persons report, while President George W. Bush resisted the listing, at a time when Dick Cheney's Halliburton had just relocated its corporate headquarters to the UAE. The UAE was ultimately placed on the Tier 2 Watch List — a formal warning that it would be downgraded to Tier 3 absent real improvement.

Corruption, adoption, and abuse

In 2003, posing as a prospective adoptive parent, Ara exposed an illicit adoption business trafficking Armenian children abroad; his findings led the Armenian National Assembly to enact new adoption laws. In 2009 he ran a parallel field investigation into the murder of Armenian-American philanthropist Nazareth Berberian in Yerevan, uncovering corrupt practices and forensic failures within the Armenian police. In 2010, when a video of an officer's sadistic abuse of two conscripts was scrubbed from the internet under official pressure, Ara re-posted it on his own channel and — despite death threats and demands from the police and a defense minister — refused to take it down; the public outcry led to the offender's arrest and conviction. His blog Martuni or Bust! and his white paper To Donate or Not to Donate? on the “Hayastan” All-Armenian Fund drew retaliation from powerful figures, which only confirmed the stakes of the work.

Burbank, California

His work has not been confined to Armenia. In 2012, insiders within the Burbank Police Department invited Ara to conduct an independent investigation into long-standing corruption. Working with Interim Chief Scott LaChasse, his findings helped confirm that major reforms were underway and helped save the department from being dissolved and absorbed by the L.A. County Sheriff. As the investigation reached into city administration, Ara publicly urged the City Council to appoint LaChasse permanently; when he requested an interview with City Manager Michael Flad, Flad avoided the meeting and soon resigned. The incoming administration then named LaChasse permanent Chief of Police, and the reforms took hold — replacing an insular old-guard culture with a more transparent, community-aligned force.

In 2013 he carried out a hunger strike — from an RV outside Rep. Adam Schiff's Burbank office and then in front of the White House — in protest of U.S. validation of a fraudulent Armenian election. When Artsakh came under attack in 2020 and a drone killed his nine-year-old neighbor, Victoria, he and his fiancee Nanoor Shahin launched the “Disarm Azerbaijan” campaign, petitioning the White House to enforce the 1992 OSCE arms embargo.

He does not promise outcomes he cannot deliver. He points to a record of outcomes he already has — earned in some of the most corrupt and dangerous environments in the world.

He is co-author of Desert Nights (2006) and of BETRAYAL: The Promise Never Kept (2019), which draws on declassified documents to trace the driving forces behind the Armenian Genocide. He also wrote the introduction and conclusion to Memoirs of a Stranger, his grandfather's first-hand account of Operation Nemesis. Global Peace International is the continuation of all of this work, offered as a service: investigation, documentation, advocacy, and relentless, lawful pressure for accountability — standing up for your rights, and the rights of every human being on earth. It is now available to everyone who chooses to retain it, and to fund it together.

This account draws on the “About the Authors” section of Memoirs of a Stranger (Global Peace International, 2025).