The Killing of Monte Melkonian, the Loss of Artsakh, and the System That Threatens Armenia’s Existence
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On June 12, 1993, Monte Melkonian was killed on a quiet road outside the village of Merzuli. He was thirty-five, he commanded the Martuni defense region, and by that summer he had turned a war that four capitals had already written off. Armenia buried him a national hero. More than two hundred Armenian soldiers were in and around that village that morning. Only one of them was ever asked what happened. No file was opened. No one has ever been tried.
For most of thirty years the belief in Armenia and in the diaspora has been that Monte was killed by his own side, and the suspicion was earned. He was fighting two wars. One was against Azerbaijan. The other was against the corruption inside our own structures, and it was by far the more dangerous of the two. He burned the hemp fields. He dumped the untaxed wine. He stopped the pillage of four hundred tons of cognac going out of a captured village. He made men repay stolen humanitarian aid through the prosecutor. He docked officers’ pay for abandoning their posts, and he refused a bribe in front of witnesses. Men who do that in Armenia have a way of not surviving, and attempts had already been made on his life.
On Thanksgiving Day of 1998, on the gravel outside a military base in Artsakh, Monte’s eighty-year-old father took the arm of a locksmith from Burbank and said one sentence about the man who had just finished telling him how his son had died. He never asked for anything. He did not say find out and he did not say promise me. He said his sentence and waited. The exchange took about four seconds. Ara Khachig Manoogian promised anyway, and it opened an investigation that ran for twenty-eight years.
He did not fly in to conduct interviews. He moved to the town Monte had commanded and he stayed. He married there. He stood as godfather to more than a hundred of its children. He buried its people. Almost everything in this book was gathered in that place, in kitchens, from men who had been told for thirty years not to say it, sitting at their own tables with their wives telling them it was all right to talk.
The evidence is set out in the order it was found, so that the reader reaches a verdict before the family’s words are heard. The road and the radio. The escort that was not sent, although the one man on that axis nobody could afford to lose asked for one twice. The hour and ten minutes before help reached the wounded, and the ambulance that never came at all for the second man. A four-page account taken out of a safe on a commander’s own base and edited in its author’s own hand, with one sentence ringed and drawn out into the margin. And, for the first time, the Azerbaijani account of that morning set beside the Armenian one, from the veterans who were firing from the other side and who have no reason on earth to serve ours.
What twenty-eight years produced is in these pages, in the order it came, and it is not what the author went looking for. This is, to this day, the only trial the killing of Monte Melkonian has ever received. You are its jury.
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