A Turkish poet swore to cut off my Armenian hand if I reached out to Karabakh. He swears, and his people honour him as a chieftain, and his government adorns him with medals. And this is horrifying, because both he and they know very well that Karabakh is the homeland of a sovereign people, yet they speak of it as ownerless, voiceless territory, as a house whose master has died.
This is the Turk’s desolating gaze: he looks, and I am not there. My home, my water and my mountain are there; I am not. I am not and will not be, if I should suddenly reach my Armenian hand towards my Karabakh. Neither my living present nor my quiet history will exist, and their historian, in the name of conscientiousness, will copy his compatriot from Angora’s account of our great massacre and of us: “Among others, a people called Armenians also lived in these places; in the country’s difficult years, they left.”
That is how they have written; that is how they will write.
Yet my ancestor, in his still darker times, saw a chivalrous spirit in a still more cannibalistic enemy and spoke of “the Turk’s chivalry”. And although this speaks of my ancestor’s noble chivalry, for the world is what you yourself are, I professed my lofty ancestor’s faith and was certain that the chivalrous Turk would cut off my Armenian hand in only one case: if I did not extend it to my brother in Karabakh. He would spit in my shameless face if I turned away from my Karabakh, would sever my legs if I fled from my Caucasian homeland. These, then, who at least bear the spirit of tolerance or are still capable of bearing it; and those who regarded the laws of reason and morality as wordplay and professed violence and conquest; and those whose efforts at mediation shine with honesty; and those who see the dragon-like dimensions of the growing mortal danger and sympathise with us — all of them, friends and enemies, will brand me a traitor if I abandon even one dry hill of my stony mountain country to the enemy. And in no hiding place will I be able to escape their contempt, because I will not be able to escape myself.
Victory, victory alone, will free us from the contempt of the enemy, of outsiders and of ourselves. Victory is our mission before our past and our future, and before all humanity. Defeat will turn our past into a lie, into something nonexistent, the delirium of poet-vardapets. Defeat will make our children homeless paupers without a homeland, will earn us their dark curse. Defeat will make us tiresome petitioners loitering at the doors of justice, whom people may sometimes pity but never respect. Every today is yesterday renewed. From our victorious present a victorious past will also rise; our victorious present will open an Armenian homeland of flourishing towns with clean houses of their own, will set a boundary to the kingdom of darkness, to everyone’s joy, the enemy’s too, the enemy’s too, for I presume he himself is sickened by roasting in his century-long Sumgait delirium.
17 March 1994.