Armenians in the 2020 Second Nagorno Karabakh War Resistance against ‘evil’: symbols, narratives, and practices

The term ՄեծԵղեռն [Great Evil Crime] is used in Armenian to refer to the Armenian Genocide. The term comes from the Bible. This demonstrates that the commemoration first took place in religiously defined spaces, and later took on a civic character. However, the Armenian Apostolic Church preserved its role by promoting the Armenian Martyrs’ Day Commemoration. On the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, the victims were canonized by the Armenian Apostolic Church. This made the Holy Martyrs of the Armenian Genocide the first saints canonized by the Armenian Church since Saint Grigor Tatevatsi’s canonization in the XV century. After the 100th anniversary, the Armenian Church’s feast day for the commemoration of the martyrs of the Genocide started being celebrated on April 24. The name of this commemoration was later shortened to ‘April 24’. When in 1988, Nagorno Karabakh Armenians demanded to join the Republic of Armenia they met anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azeri cities of Sumgait, Kirovabad [Ganja] and Baku. However, what started as an administrative-territorial problem soon acquired an ethnic dimension reactivating memories linked to the Genocide. In Armenian national consciousness, the Sumgait pogrom was linked to the events of 1915. This was confirmed when, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (24.04.1988), a khachkar to the pogrom’s victims was erected at the Genocide Memorial site of Tsitsernakaberd (Armenia). This paper suggests that it is the memory of the Armenian Genocide that can help explain Armenians’ behavior in the Nagorno Karabakh Wars. First, practices of violence were constructed on a memory of the Genocide-Resistance narrative. This was symbolically reproduced in the conflict. The memory of the fedayeen was activated when the fedayeen, the defenders of the Armenians, were popularized in rallies via songs, slogans, and photos after the Sumgait pogroms. The term fedayeen comes from the Arabic which means ‘those who sacrifice’ and originally referred to guerrilla Hayduk-type volunteers who fought against the Ottomans (1880-1920). Thus, when later ethnic-Armenian volunteers formed paramilitary units, self-describing themselves as fedayeen, they inherited the name of the fighters who opposed Ottoman massacres (Iskandaryan, Mikaelyan and Minasyan 2016, 99-100). Second, a major symbol displayed during the conflicts was the cross. Armenian soldiers wore crosses on their uniforms and vehicles. The cross was more than a manifestation of religious affiliation but materialized in churches and monasteries as a symbol of belonging and identity. This was confirmed when crosses became objects of cultural cleansing during the war, and the representation of the ritualized killing and destruction by ‘evil’ forces. Third, ‘evil’ acquired a political dimension based on the memory of the Genocide, embodied in the faces of Azerbaijani and Turkish militants. Thus, when the Turkish Army got directly involved in the 2020 Second Nagorno Karabakh War, ‘evil’ reproduced itself in political practices. These were already related to the Genocide because they glorified Ottoman Genocide-related icons while also targeting religious symbols, i.e., when Shushi Armenian churches were first bombed and then hosted Turkish flags. Concurrently, Armenians developed their own countermeasures to fight ‘evil’ forces, i.e., ‘white crosses’ and emergency-style rituals.