Internal political contradictions, revolts and divisions, party squabbles are once again “devouring” this patch of Armenian soil that has come down to us from the depths of millennia, repeatedly saved, risen and survived human and natural catastrophes that destroy worlds: our handful, our palmful, this little, this last, this...
What is it: are our genes our enemies? The Armenian-persecuting fate bestowed and granted by God, by God’s will, upon this mad and poor nation? Failure to learn from the trials of the past? The policy being pursued?.. Which?..
Enough... At this difficult, burdensome, colourless, perilous moment let us at least heed our minds, our elders wiser than ourselves. Let us listen to what the Armenian Hrant Matevossian, the Armenian patriarch, says.
— Today, when Armenian soil groans heavily again, when the nation’s very existence is again in question, what troubles you at this moment, Patriarch?
— Our irresponsibility towards our own republic, every Armenian citizen’s irresponsibility yesterday towards the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, today towards the independent Republic of Armenia. In alliance with the irresponsible idler within us, we associate our work and conduct with an allegedly democratic movement, with the alleged overthrow of tyranny, with the supposed lack of a future for the Commonwealth of Independent States, as though we were the vanguard of something. Yet we ourselves should have been our own masters, scrupulously fulfilling our duties yesterday towards the former republic, today towards this new republic... Yesterday we did not fill the army with Armenian strength; yesterday we did not fill the proposed reforms with the capacities of Armenian thought and strength. We did not submit to yesterday’s machinery and do not submit to today’s... We are very irresponsible... Truly, it is lawlessness; there are anarchists within us. We set this lawlessness against our supposed stance as freedom fighters, our supposed stance as lovers of freedom who do not enter military ranks. In fact it is flight from ourselves, flight from national duty... A state establishes itself only with an army... And parliament too has evaded answering those questions, and every Armenian youth, girl, boy, has joined this alliance very well: supposedly with the times of a tyrannical country’s disintegration, supposedly in a national cause, supposedly we are doing something for the victory of world democracy... But in reality we are doing nothing; in reality we are betraying our nation.
— How much longer must we run from ourselves? It took the people of Karabakh four years to understand that there was a war...
— Yes. The people of Yerevan will probably need a little more still, although the seeds for becoming a state seem good. They simply should have been raised with “tenderness”... The borders should have been protected... Things should have been a little different from what they are...
War is violence, but a reality. You must submit to reality, to the dictates of dark reality. Neither reality nor blindness will allow you to evade or avoid it anyway. Reality imposes its own terms: you must be open before it and formulate your response like a man... But again we run to Ctesiphon, again to Moscow, again we run... We must organise ourselves, organise our regiments, place ourselves before reality, then, having become our own persons within ourselves, having prepared within our republic, turn to neighbouring and other republics... By all means, we must prevent it through this... We must truly be ready.
— History suggests that to be ready we need a firm hand, because we “do not love authority” or “love freedom,” because today the wealthy try to use their wealth to keep their child out of the army (that “child” is eighteen to thirty-five), and the poor try for other reasons. But there is a fact: to preserve a nation you must sweat, shed blood, sacrifice yourself... There is no other truth...
— We must take responsibility for our reality. Fluttering like doves, the expressions of Western democracy arrive on radio and television waves, become a canopy above our heads here and constantly snatch from our mouths the words we would say. Sometimes there are sobering “cries”; sometimes we smell the cruel scent of blood. But when we open our mouths to say it, we again find we have spoken another country’s words; the words of other countries’ political leaders have flown out of our mouths... We must simply close ourselves off and find our own words, conduct ourselves before reality in accordance with those words.
...And reality... A new kind of war has been imposed upon us. It is a question of whether Armenia will remain in the Caucasus. That is how the question is posed. If we wish to be one of the Caucasus’s nations with equal rights, we are obliged not to lose. We have no right to lose and must not lose. Yet every day is defeat, every day flight. On one side we have opened the republic’s gates to paradise, to the West, which is no paradise at all because it is not your country; on the other they have begun to eliminate us. These are the broad plans of Turkish nationalism, and if we are to be slaughtered, we must be slaughtered here; I have nothing else to say—that is it... But if we speak in “ifs.” If, if... If the CIS is preserved, if it is not preserved. If it is preserved, Armenia will have no border with Azerbaijan, although even in the absence of those borders Armenians who had lived for centuries in the territories called Azerbaijan were forcibly displaced, expelled in a civilised manner from their ancestral land. And that Turk, that Turkish peasant element, endured splendidly on that soil, while your Armenian did not endure, fled, and we all know what happened...
But if the CIS is not preserved? Spheres of Turkish and Muslim influence arise. What then?.. Whether the saving word of reconciliation were to come from Moscow or from Ankara, it would be the same in both cases. Ankara would not fight at all itself, but with its support would unleash Azerbaijan upon Armenia. Moscow too, with its hesitant promises, would set the peoples fighting. What shall we do under these conditions? In both cases there is no other choice. At some point we deceived ourselves that the Turks’ appetite would be satisfied by swallowing Western Armenia, that new times had come and new relations were emerging between states. But no... We remained deceived until the democrats and intellectuals there spoke their words: Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan. We took that to mean they had spoken under pressure from fascist parties, but we must think that in the end they themselves created those fascist parties too—their people, their government created them. Here the question is simply one nation and another.
— On the border of Pakistan and India, in Punjab, live the Sikhs. They are the people who did not let Islam enter India. It is said that day and night they slept with a dagger, and later a rifle, beside them so that Islam would not pass through that region. Now the same thing is being dictated to us for the umpteenth time. Now more than ever the brain of our state must work, and the soldier must stand and defend the border.
— Either—or... Either we shall remain in the Caucasus or we shall not. Either we shall remain in the Caucasus as a state with equal rights... Yet we have no resources, lack a thousand things, and we all know the rest too—or we shall not remain. What can I say? All the commanding heights are in the enemy’s hands; they have simply crowded us into this little valley and are trying to slaughter us from every side... And we must not let ourselves be slaughtered...
— On one side we must fight; on the other we must set our diplomacy to work. But at this moment, looking around us, we see that we have no ally...
— If we exist, if the nation and state exist, an ally will certainly appear.
— An ally in the sense that these are political games: one time our card may work, another time it may not. Sadly, very little depends on us... Our affairs went badly in Rome. Whom can we see as our ally after that, after our unenviable position was revealed there?..
— Forgive me, but even the Turk—if you stand up for your own identity—even the Turk I see as my ally. If you have done the work, laboured, pursued the policies of war and peace as one whole. Everyone will become my enemy if I condemn myself to suicide, and everyone will become my friend if I have endured, endure and live. That is why, from the very beginning, that ambiguous policy on Artsakh seemed very dubious to me. But I did not surrender to that line of thought, because I left it to supposedly “knowledgeable” people who put before parliament and Armenian public thought in general the version of that ambiguous Artsakh policy which we chose. But those double games were not straightforward steps, and we shall simply fall into the trap we have set. What is ricochet called, what is ricochet?.. That bullet fired at us was supposed to ricochet and hit the Turk. What was fired would return in the same manner to the person who fired it—we evaded it. You know, in the end truth brings the philosopher and the fighter to a seemingly simple thought, to the truth that one must not give up the homeland. We must all be one, and here neither philosophy nor other exercises are needed any longer.
— It seems to me we still have room to tighten our belts; we shall still have to return to Sardarapat. Things were bad then too, but we managed to preserve our existence...
— You said it and I remembered. Aksel Bakunts was fighting there; that boy, Nairi Zaryan, was in that battle; there were other boys too. Derenik Demirchyan, already an established writer, was handing out weapons. Grigor Ghapantsyan was there, the orphanage children, the older schoolboys were there. Sardarapat had brought the future poets, the present poets, the poets of the day, the scholars—everyone—there.
— In other words, today there is no nationwide struggle for Artsakh.
— There is not, there is not, and the fault is parliament’s, all of ours... the entire nation’s...
— And the way to atone for that fault?
— We must bring Artsakh back. They tell us Artsakh will receive autonomy if the Azerbaijanis who fled Armenia return. As they used to say in the sixties: “If you give the Azerbaijanis of your districts autonomy, join them to us with their territory, property...” Now their place, the place of the Azerbaijanis here, has been taken by three hundred thousand Armenians, refugees from Baku, while the property of those Armenian residents of Baku, under Azerbaijan’s land rights, has passed to Azerbaijan. That question no longer exists. Those citizens, those people who were full citizens of Azerbaijan, its owners, have now appeared in Armenia homeless, dispossessed, naked, and it was something like an exchange. The Artsakh question has remained a land question, a question of land and rights. People viewed Artsakh as the question of an “ownerless garden.” The Armenian living in Artsakh did not count; to this day “territorial claims” are presented to the whole world. Precisely so: “A territorial claim against one’s neighbour.”
...And it makes no difference to me how my delegation is received abroad: whether they whistle at it, provoke it, whether our people arrive to find they have no hotel room, are threatened with knives in dark corridors or slapped. It makes absolutely no difference. Everything I have listed is to be expected, and all of it is called the opinion of the international community. But your opinion as an Armenian and a citizen here is what it is. Can they persuade us that Karabakh is not your and my land, that Karabakh is not half of me? Karabakh is also my problem, the problem of me, a citizen of Armenia, because when people are driven out of there they come to my door, to share my ration, to devour and exhaust my meagre resources... That is the manner of refugee life... Karabakh is my problem, Karabakh is my land, and we cannot give up Karabakh even if anyone at all stands behind the Turk, even the United States of America. That is it. The remaining alternatives are absolutely unacceptable to me.
— That is how I understand it too. I also know we must exist, that our existence is at issue. But today we face a reality in which the question is death or salvation in this unending defensive war. What grounds for reliance can there be, Patriarch?
— Are there no tanks in Armenia?..
— There they crush people with tanks; in Yerevan or Kirovakan we probably have a tank that we do not use or do not wish to sacrifice. Or is it that the slave sits within us: let ten more people die, what has happened?.. Perhaps that is what this is about.
— You probably remember from history how in 1918–20 the Azerbaijanis—the Musavatists with Menshevik support—disarmed and massacred the retreating Russian divisions. They did the right thing... No, you came, brought enmity and war into this country, and now you get up and calmly leave, do you? Give us those weapons. That was right.
We have our share in the former Union, a share in gifts as well as demands. This was a powerful military country, so we must seize, demand, take back our share. The Turk has his way of fighting, of demanding—you see it, do you not? Surround them with mothers and children, push from behind yourself... But if this is the empire’s property, I too have a share; give me my share...
— We have not done it with mothers and children, of course, but even if we had, if there really were an order, they would not take mothers and children into account. This is simply a somewhat deeper policy, perhaps accessible to you as a deputy, because beyond the curtains there are things ordinary mortals cannot see... Besides, we can beat government members and members of parliament, but we cannot say: leave those weapons and get out of here...
— True. Do you remember who cut off Tsitsianov’s head? The Khan of Baku. Cut it off and sent it away. Do you remember Hadji Murad? Hadji Murad was a traitor too. That was how it was. Once I was talking with a Turk, a writer from Voskepar; he said two headless corpses were buried in Azerbaijan. One is Hadji Murad, the other Tsitsianov. One was seen as a traitor, the other as a conqueror. Again our loyalty is punished by the Russian, while the Azerbaijani has betrayed, betrays and betrays again...
— But our loyalty does not reach its destination. This is not loyalty, and this spirit we have is very bad. In another’s army we are both brave soldiers and glorious generals, but at home we are wretched people.
— Admiral Isakov was from Karabakh, from the village of Nakhijevanik. In 1918 there was an Admiral Bagratuni; after the Provisional Government he fled and came here, to Armenia—many intellectuals returned to Armenia then in general—and he knew Isakov too. Here is what Bagratuni said: suddenly Isakov summoned me and said, I appoint you commander of the Van flotillas. To me, a former admiral, he says such a thing—just look at him!.. Do you see where your pitiful internationalism leads?.. Sadly, yes, your generals have commanded other armies; your high officials have been splendid lads who rose at other high courts, the courts of Moscow, Persia or America, lads who flourished on another platform, politicians—or, as a play says, someone sits on Peter the Great’s shoulder and boasts how tall he is. We need a lad who has grown here.
— The nation that honourably filled the ranks of marshals and generals in all great wars has no commander or soldier of its own today. Today flight is universal: flight from military service, from the border. Only a very few enlist, those who carry history within their being and have the memory of blood. In short, another picking of the finest flowers of the volunteers.
— War, the army—both are coercion, labour and coercion, and if today we have no formed army, that is a great failing of parliament, the authorities, the president. Yes, we must admit like men that we have not created an army and have no right to justify ourselves by saying this person or that person hindered us. The army, war, is hard and rough work...
— In that case we must hope that if we ourselves do not, history at least will force us to resort to coercion, seeing the supreme goal as the creation and establishment of a state.
— So far our beloved writers too, along with us, have embodied the warlike, adventurist image of the fedayi movement. Nevertheless, I repeat, that is not an army... Entering the ranks, subordinating one’s will to another’s, is very difficult...
— And yet what do you consider the first harsh but life-giving step we must take?
— Having the courage to die. We have skirted many things. And if in many things we had followed even the constitutional approach, Gorbachev’s plans for separation from the former Union, the damage would not have been as great as it was under our own populist, anarchic conduct. By now the army should have become seventy-five per cent Armenian. We evaded it, and must seek among ourselves those who frustrated that cherished task.
— Yes, among ourselves and beside the deputies of the Republic of Armenia’s Supreme Council. To this day parliament has not even called Hayrikyan to account, although he spared no effort to keep our sons out of the “totalitarian,” “tyrannical,” “occupying” Russian army, and to parliament’s shame, and why not to that of very many of us, he succeeded. I wonder whose mill he was feeding with his provocations? Meanwhile our neighbour’s army was established on the basis of that same “occupying” army, with their mercenaries added, not to mention the method of financing.
— They operate according to the full laws of war, while we only complain helplessly, naively, protest, say: that was an unfair blow. War has no sacred things; it has rules, with deception, bribery and all its other attributes. Witness the neighbouring republic’s policy and actions towards Nagorno-Karabakh.
And among us?.. In fact it is again the image of the “outlaw,” the volunteer, that is in the arena, not the hard-working, labouring soldier. The image of the army has not yet entered the arena. It is the image of guerrilla fighting that has arrived: hit and run...
— ...And no responsibility. The minister of defence will bear the responsibility.
— I am sorry it is so. I love Vazgen Sargsyan; my heart is attached to that lad.
— He is a writer, and perhaps two of your spiritual sons, Vazgen and Vano, now hold the most important and responsible posts, carrying the heaviest burden with the republic’s president.
— Let me say that both of them—and whoever held those posts would be dear to me, and I would approach them with reverence and compassion—cannot betray; both are quite sincere, both quite defenceless, without cunning. They are the most defenceless, unsupported and honest beings there in today’s Armenian struggle. I regard the action of both, taking it upon themselves, as a high human feat; the other quality shared by them is courage and sincerity. Nevertheless—and I refer less to them than to others—the square taught them bad things... That is not a statesman’s conduct. It is not permissible. One must not appear on screen without a tie, unshaven; one must not be a state official with broken teeth, be fifteen minutes late for work, fail to be at the scene five minutes after an incident, be unhealthy. Many things are not permissible. We need splendid state officials, magnificent executors, good, precise public servants...
— But public servants must be nurtured, taught, educated, clothed; they need a state’s fatherly treatment. These people will emerge from among us.
— True, and the president himself must set the example.
— If the president sets that example, if the parties truly care and their struggle really is not for a seat—I do not say they must swallow a great mistake, but a Georgian or Azerbaijani scenario can always be imposed upon us, and the sharp political events of recent days gave off a bad, very bad smell—they can direct their actions solely and exclusively towards the nation’s interests. Whoever does not understand must understand that every coup, every change of president and parliament, means going backwards again, turning into chaos. Our immediate neighbours have a great interest in that, and none of them will wish Armenia to grow strong quickly.
— Well, under this freedom of ours in quotation marks, everyone who leaves will steal and take much away: property, opportunities opening up, ideas. First from power, then from the homeland. Do you remember how during the massacres of Tomak and Gapo in 1898–99 the Sultan beat his knees and cursed their fathers: they took my gold, they took my wealth? We must judge and think as he did. They take my gold, take my resources and will go on taking them. They themselves are our resources; they leave us, weaken us. It would offend one’s conscience to say: stay here, with me, share the misery with me. But we brought you up, did we not, sons? Through deprivation and everything else we gave you schooling. Is that not so?.. My child did not go to sports school; you did. The state clothed and educated you. Is this not a national matter? And now you flee; you are a deserter wherever you flee from—the border, the battlefield, your post, power or the homeland...
No, this is no way. This way is no good. It is a clique...
— These are times when cliques and groups enter the arena. Joining together, whetting their appetites, they say: we are taking this house, and rule over its lodgers. To hell with the lodgers, because they are divided.
— For now the dark force at work has put its fools and idiots into the square—parliament and the parties—as “dogs barking in the middle of the village,” let that not be offensive, while it plunders the country itself.
— In other words, it has become a circus, a milieu of clowns; they keep the people entertained...
— Yes, with the radio on all day too, as though it were a theatrical show. Yet it does nothing itself. One fellow will not hit his shopkeeper in the face—he drank vodka with him—but his strength falls upon the poor schoolteachers...
— Is it possible that at history’s crossroads we have lost our... code for being governed, our instinct for survival?
— Lost it or not, let us not speak about that, because if we say we have lost it we shall lose it again. A person tends towards being governed, being protected, well protected, becoming a nation and growing that nation into a state. I do not like those despairing notions that the nation has grown old; that too is a code imposed by the enemy. The Sultan, the Turk, called us anarchists, a nation of anarchists. And I answer: we are a nation of anarchists because the authority is not mine, and that is why I rebelled against the authorities. We are not really anarchists, and we shall have our own authority. I shall answer that when we have our own authority and with it answer the stigma manufactured by the enemy. There is a God above; our conduct must be such that even the enemy marvels, admires it: what a beautiful sacrifice, what a right act.
— And to remain we need a state structure again and again, rather than go on marking time like this, with populism, a plunderer’s mentality, a mindset of stealing, hitting, killing. If yesterday we feared the “Russian soldier” you mentioned, today we can hit our own police, attack officials, open fire.
— To this day no one has raised a finger against a Russian official who set foot in this country, against any Persian official... We still glorify Aghasi, a hundred and fifty years later, put him among the gods because he dared to kill the farrash abducting his paternal aunt’s daughter. Here is Abovyan’s talent, his genius, retrospectively.
— Yet in their place we are ready to tear one another’s throats, spill one another’s guts; and sadly parliament too has already become a backstage theatre...
— Your and my beloved Vano—I spoke of him earlier—is losing in the street. There is lawlessness in the city, and Vano’s defeat comes from his kindness. I remember it was after the earthquake. Razmik Davoyan and I were in Mets Parni; we heard that events had occurred in Yerevan, clashes ending in the defeat of the state traffic police. It was very painful. The mob had defeated the state structures. The structure had lost to the mob; that was dreadful, very... It was still the Socialist Republic of Armenia then, a kind of semi-independent state, whatever it was—how could that be done? When the state grows strong and we see the authorities gaining power, we shall quickly, quickly loosen the people’s bonds and let the people strike the state, not allow the authorities to grow insolent.
— And if the police take a step or an action is expected from them, some party sends its members out and demands the government’s resignation. What must we do now? Either there must be an apparent democracy, meaning the crowd does whatever it wishes, or for the state to establish itself we must return to a strong hand. Our desperate situation today dictates it.
— It was during the Kuwait war; Iraq was being bombed. In one American city, on popular initiative, people attacked an Arab neighbourhood and smashed everything... And the presidential guard immediately, very quickly, parachuted a force into the scene and established order. That is the rapid judgment we need, that speed of response; it is not coercion we should fear.
— Such cases have occurred, but we still have not managed to distinguish between the former and present states. Only the exploiters have multiplied, and again no one thinks about the state. We must think about a prescription for defeating the internal enemy. Although here too one hesitates: the internal enemy is also imported from outside and generates enmity to order.
— Yes, perhaps. Then they have worked on us, worked well, encoded us, put us on the machine, and we capable ones boast how much we know. Every time, after every phrase, looking back, we involuntarily marvel too at how correctly we have spoken...
— For days now, the opposition’s so-called “National Alliance” has been holding rallies in Theatre Square, Freedom Square. If you were there, at the microphone, what would you say to our people? Of course, I do not see a need for Hrant Matevossian to speak at a rally, nor for an appeal, because over the past few years many sacred things have been erased, our few more or less acknowledged authorities discredited, and today there is no man who can truly show an intelligent path, show the truth. Truth is only ever one, whereas we have as many truths as there are parties or inhabitants in Armenia. Nevertheless, your words at least to those who can, who have ears to hear.
— This should not have happened. This is Attila’s image in the square, Attila’s image raised up, destruction, the image of destruction... This should not have happened... Good and bad should not have been mixed. Above all, there should not have been destruction, mixing good with bad. Perhaps here there is also disrespect for their own son, parent, elder, younger, losing them underfoot along with the enemy, but it should not have happened. Yet once it has happened, one must go thoroughly mad. D. Demirchyan’s words are apt, are they not: “Madness has gone mad,” or “The struggle struggles.” He has an expression like that. You must go mad if the war is mad; you must go properly mad to win...
— Yet today our history is surfacing again, and had we learned lessons until now, we would not have reached this point. A notorious example is the political situation both in June and July and in recent days.
— I must agree, painfully. Once or twice such an appeal was made in parliament, convincing and impressive as words, but it was simply an appeal: those making it did so to avoid responsibility for what was to come. Yet there really was a need for sincere speech, for a round table and independent words; I felt it keenly. Capable people with a statesman’s judgment should sit around a table and present the object, the problem. Each has their own attitude, thought, impression; from everyone’s words a full description of the object will emerge, from which one can proceed and act according to its image. This is the way to keep pace with the objective course of events, rather than, like yesterday’s sons, again taking our subjective opinions, our one-sided impressions, as a complete description of the object and attacking other opinions, refusing to tolerate them. That is truly not the conduct of statesmen. Briefly, they have made us curse our own God, taken our idols away. In that interval we might topple Lenin’s statue with some enmity, but with the statue’s dismantling, with its destruction, the image of destruction invades the square. Destruction becomes an active force, and then from Lenin to Shahumyan, from Shahumyan to Andranik, is simply one step. Not erecting a statue to Andranik, demolishing another, leads there and goes that far. See how they began cursing the dictator, took him out of the mausoleum, spat, and that was it. We joyfully embraced it with all the former Union’s democrats. Then it went on and on, no boundary was set, and it still goes on and will go on... Amid it your Avetik Isahakyan and the other living authorities will go, people from whom things beyond their power will be demanded. How can you ask Hamo Sahyan to stand beside you with a sword? Hamo cannot; he is seventy-five.
— But I think you agreed to that gathering or round table, more indispensable today than bread and air. I would like you to name those people. Personally I would not want them to be leaders of a party or people aligned with one, because today the parties in parliament exploit party interests and personal ambitions.
— Disagreeing with you, I must name the party leaders themselves first, and the republic’s president as the leader of another party. They were and are obliged to sit at a round table and talk among themselves as sincerely as possible, rising above party interests.
— Very well, then agree that people like you should be beside them.
— It is a fact, a very oppressive fact, that even if Hovhannes Tumanyan himself were in parliament, he too would become merely one button; there would be no party behind him. In fact parties are the precise forms of parliamentary work. Humanity has found no other form of government. Consequently the saving appeal must be addressed not to the people but to the parties, so they can truly rise above their narrow interests.
— It is hopeless. Nothing will have an effect. In my opinion parliament really has reached a dead end, and it is time either to dissolve the parties or dismiss parliament, which our constitution does not provide for.
— In the classical capitalist countries, in Europe and generally in civilised countries established as powers—for example Spain—not long ago Franco put an end to the civil fighting, and today his people worship him. Pinochet was such a figure in Chile; Özal became one in Turkey. These men were called dictators, but it is merely military force arriving to establish authority. Sadly, we do not have the army whose general could come, bind everyone’s tongues, demand temporary silence, say for three years, and ensure a normal situation and conditions for the working officials. We do not have that force... And the word “dictator” has different interpretations. Again they impose from outside that for us a dictator means Stalin, Genghis Khan, but that is not what we are talking about at all. Absolutely not. Simply, what does the dictate of political life require, what do this country’s needs dictate? What, for example, is the dictate of Yerevan’s needs? An iron fist, an iron broom—I do not know whether I say it jokingly or seriously—to clean this country’s, this Yerevan’s streets of filth and rabble. Who would call Hambardzum Galstyan a dictator then? If they must have the streets cleaned by a dictator’s coercion, establish and preserve order, let it be so. That is what we mean. Levon Ter-Petrosyan must not fear the Western patrons. Yes, yes, the image is America, Europe, the civilised countries. They have come here and dictate: keep away from a dictator. But they have another fear, want to stay away for other purposes, because they think the dictator must again rise from Moscow, a united country’s united dictator bearing an enormous threat to the entire world. In that case, of course, long live national liberation movements, perhaps independent republics too; down with dictatorship. They speak from those demands, then extrapolate it to dictators in general, including local ones. Todor Zhivkov, Rashidov, Snegur, Landsbergis or Ter-Petrosyan—they too are cast down, dethroned, the dictator rejected in general. But in our case, when your country is collapsing, slipping away beneath your feet, what dictatorship can be at issue on this stage of human tragedies? Your intelligence service must ensure that their codes do not work, or that your codes arise from your country’s needs. Your laws must flow from your country, your conduct respond to its daily needs.
— On one not-so-distant page of our history, in a roughly similar situation, the Armenian Aram Manukyan put things right in a very short time.
— He adapted the country to the demands posed by the enemy, to the demands of resistance. Then something else happened too. After the May Day Bolshevik-Kemalist order was undermined, Dashnaktsutyun took the country into its hands. There was a little Dashnak terror, but that too achieved little, and that too was a demand of the day.
— From whom should we demand action in this respect? Parliament is our people’s mirror, its elected representatives sit there, yet it too is powerless. And generally, I think readers will be very interested in the Patriarch’s opinion as a deputy too.
— By my innate inclinations I do not listen to nonsense. I cannot listen. I grow angry and immediately deaf before nonsense, and my ears open at intelligent, balanced speeches. Accordingly, within me is generated the intelligence parliament expresses. But sadly the form of parliamentary work is not the form—I speak from personal experience—in which our reality, our words stand before us in their clear simplicity. I do not know by what enchantment the most straightforward situations are distorted every time, and instead of a precise formulation some impoverished, disfigured, distorted things result, seemingly placing responsibility upon other forces. As though we hand things over to the centuries—the centuries are not people—to books—books are not people... We evade it each time... It probably simply will not happen in parliament; it is something for ten people to decide. Sometimes I think: if only we had a king, and that king gathered his advisers around him. If we had such mutual brotherly love and brotherly tolerance that those of us truly capable chose the capable, said goodbye to parliament, separated, drew aside and determined, decided the Republic of Armenia’s policy.
— We cannot evade the truth: even when we had a kingdom, squabbling was never absent among us.
— That is the time of legends and myths; it belongs to history.
— But we did not learn lessons from history, at least so that mistakes would not recur...
— Well, that is already formulated, stock knowledge. I know only that today it is already being proved whether the commander Vahan Mamikonyan was Armenian or not, whether the Bagratunis were Armenian or not, Grigor Narekatsi...
...Whether Armenians built the Hripsime church or did not build it. Our retreat today distances that past from us, makes it alien. After a gap of six hundred years Alexander Tamanyan arched across and connected with Ani’s old masters... A thousand years later Hovhannes Tumanyan proved, said, that Narekatsi was Armenian. Is that right or not?..
— The same blood, the same genes are in our veins too, therefore...
— Therefore, if we speak of the past, we have duties towards the past; and the past is Tigran the Great and Khorenatsi, and for it to be seen that Khorenatsi is Armenian and you are his grandson...
— Patriarch, you were the republic’s president’s authorised representative during the presidential election. When did you last meet him?
— You know, I am an open person, and I shall say when just as it is: long ago.
— Have you recently wished to speak with him personally, consult, share your thoughts?
— You know, even if I were president myself, so much interference from supporters would irritate and anger me. I do not know whether that is the right conduct in general for people close to political life. Is it right to approach, offer advice? I do not know. Perhaps it is my personal failing; perhaps I am not the complete person who perceives and understands reality sufficiently to approach and “in friendship” impose upon the president the course towards that road, that way out, which would truly be salvation... I have trusted the president. You can write that exactly, just so: I have trusted the president. Among the other presidential candidates, the so-called team, he seemed the worthiest to me. He seemed neither closed nor partisan, leaving the doors open on all four sides to the republic’s cares. I attributed shouting to the parties, and precise, living perceptions of any sphere of the republic’s pan-Armenian life to its president, who bears the testimony of all of it within him.
The opposition, the political parties, have their share of guilt before the republic’s president. If the president embodies statehood, the parties too must nevertheless temper their party selfishness a little, speak only when they have an answer within themselves as to what they would do in the president’s place in the given situation. They must not enter the square with unanswered questions, be revolutionaries for revolution’s sake—that is terrible. It destroyed our first republic. Yes, yes, partisanship destroyed the first Republic of Armenia and will destroy this republic too if we do not come to our senses.
I would probably wish the president to lead the republic along the edge of war without drawing the country into war. Yet we are in war; losing Artsakh means losing Armenia. And let us have the manhood to say that under the Turk’s absolutised slogan Armenia’s very existence in the Caucasus is in question. There is no need to explain to anyone what that means to the whole world, the diaspora, Armenians scattered around the world. If Armenia exists, Armenians will exist in the world; if Armenia does not exist, there will be no Armenian, and... No Deukmejian of yours, no Filpejian, no service you have rendered the world, no renowned name of yours can replace the concept that is the Republic of Armenia.
This is the source of Armenian life, its cradle, its last homeland, its last patch of soil. If Armenia is endangered, the fate of all of us Armenians, of every Armenian in the world, will be endangered absolutely. Think of bands of Gypsies wandering here and there, as in García Márquez’s novel. Every Armenian politician whose words and deeds find a response, move and materialise in this country must think about the country as a president, even if by station he is a shepherd...
— Yet out of our helplessness we can do nothing to the external enemy and devour one another within. Though sadly I must admit that we all see the internal squabbling is merely the expectation of a seat. Whether Shahumyan falls or not, whether Karabakh falls or not...
— I do not want to believe it...
— But it is so. People who were together a year or two ago have divided today purely over party convictions, and what they have not divided today will become our lost homeland tomorrow... As it has been for centuries, so it is today. We do not love a leader, a king, a president. We do not accept that someone who yesterday was a student with us, or a colleague, let alone a comrade in the struggle, has now become president. We do not accept our professor of yesterday in the presidential office.
— Were our old kings not right to connect their roots with the ancient Chen people, with the mythical world? The Arshakunis connected themselves with some mythical world; perhaps they came from Urartu. The Bagratunis considered themselves Hebrews, because they had already found themselves in a Christian country and derived their origins from Christian origins. If it were one of themselves, from their own midst, who would allow it?
— In other words, there is no “bless us, lord” for our own masters?..
— Yes, peoples always do that. Take the Sultan: say his roots came from the twelve or thirteen hundreds; through legends they distanced their roots in space and time. But what splendid lads there can be when things happen that way, can there not? For example, in the United States: a splendid, wonderful fellow who was a bomber pilot, fought in the war, suffered wounds, whose plane fell into the sea and who survived by chance... Then, soaring like that, he emerges from among them: I am one of you, and I am president... Is it not wonderful, magnificent?.. One of us there. Then, when necessary, when he sees mouths opening, about to speak—old man, cur, how are you going to govern us?—he says: I shall bring a doctor’s certificate that my wife is not dissatisfied with me...
— That is the American version.
Now that surge has passed among us; we must preserve, strengthen, all of us, with everything we have. And I would not like to think this is merely a struggle for a seat, but...
— Our common friend Andranik Tsarukyan left something for the living that borders on cruelty. He says: when the Turk raised the yataghan in 1915, he did not ask whether you were Catholic or Apostolic, rich or poor, a deputy or an ordinary private, from Van, Aintab or Cilicia. He asked nothing. He slaughtered the entire nation alike. The same threat hangs over all of us today, and one must be at least a fool, at worst a vile traitor, not to find the way to reconciliation. The enemy uses this and awaits more. I said earlier that many are insincere, because very many speak in vain. In the old communist times, ten or fifteen years ago, let me speak from my work, my situation, my impressions: at meetings in the university or elsewhere I sometimes caught myself speaking for the KGB’s ears, so they would convey my words as a citizen where they needed to go. So that they in turn would take into account that one cannot be so naïve, otherwise the country collapses. I spoke roughly in that way for someone to hear, to the Russians, for God’s ears or what... Now many in our parliament anoint their faces with chrism, speak for someone to hear, no longer understanding that today the Russian is absent, that they themselves are responsible for the country, and each person’s conduct must be dictated by their position as a father, the country’s patriarch, its master. I grieve greatly and fear that many still have simply the fugitive within. In a recent interview I said that nevertheless some twenty litres of fuel are kept aside for escape. I fear that very many have one foot set to flee. I fear they will not live as men standing on this soil, walk along the edge of death, much less come to their senses as politicians and stand on positions from which they do not retreat: if they will kill us, let them kill us. And be thrice assured they will not kill us. We gave up Shahumyan for nothing. We gave up Artsvashen for nothing. I shall say something harsh and, sadly, unfamiliar to our ears: the people of Shahumyan should have stood and been slaughtered; in war’s tactics, in the conduct of battle, that is a good defeat. The enemy’s strategy is built precisely on this: harass, make people flee, drive them from here, from the Caucasus, empty the Caucasus. That is clearly written on their banner. Tserents wrote it back in 1879, before the Berlin Congress, and the journal Pordz printed it.
— We have touched on many questions, Patriarch. Nevertheless I cannot refrain from asking this too: what question concerns, troubles Hrant Matevossian the prose writer today?
— The question of Karabakh, of the Republic of Armenia, of the Armenian people remaining here at all, of Armenia’s future, of today... By not answering today’s question here, by retreating one step here today, I betray tomorrow’s Armenia... Tomorrow it will already be too late; tomorrow from California and other distant places, from my secure or insecure position, I shall bark at yesterday, which is today now... And it will already be far too late. We have barked much from afar; from afar we have barked about yesterday, howled and howled over yesterday. Those have become questions of history; histories have been written... Today we stand before reality, and...
— What would Hrant Matevossian like to do in literature?
— I would like to bring an orderly, sound, balanced text into the public arena amid today’s dark flood—like Saryan’s Flowers, say, during the genocide, but without flowers. That is the kind of text I wish to bring forward. I do not know; it would probably be self-satisfaction to say: that is patriotism. Perhaps it is not patriotism, yet it is patriotism: we must say what is worthy of defending...
— In other words, let us return to the thought that everyone must do what they can so that the country establishes itself.
— Yes, the Panjunis must be cast out of the arena. As they said at the movement’s beginning, those who fight simply for the trough. Squabbles beside the food; in many cases what nerves it took to say: never mind, that too happens. Later we shall separate good from bad. If we say this is a task of human self-sacrifice, what is this scoundrel doing here?..
— On your table are the classics of our painting, yesterday and today; history itself has become material, these people have reached us, and again it is our culture that will remain. It would be good, of course, if it remained with the borders, with the soil...
— Our culture, what exists, is the real Armenia; they are the voices of the real Armenia... Our present cultural and political figures must, following these ancestors and contemporaries, speak our words, say our word. As our great ones managed to distinguish it—our Saryan, our Hakob (Hakobyan), our Sureniants—so we too must distinguish our own words and not dance to another’s pipe. For that refusal to dance, even the enemy will consider us a friend when they see us speaking our own words, standing firmly on our soil, firmly with the conviction of smashing their face and their design.
...A tragedy unfolds in the street, a historical novel unfolds. Fortunate are those with sound eyes who can read. Of course we are all wounded, all our lives are endangered, but if we can, we must first save these lads, these children. ...Truly, it is not a time for literature...
— Let us come to the beginning again, Patriarch: everyone must do their own work. If you till the soil, till your soil; if you cultivate the written word, cultivate your writing. Do your work so that, as the Armenian Hrant Matevossian said, “...this country becomes a country...”
Interview conducted by Vanush SHERMAZANYAN
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 20–21 August 1992.