One Month of War Finds Armenians More United Than Ever

Tuesday, October 27, marked one month since the Turkish-Azerbaijani aggression against Artsakh and Armenia. This has brought with it the unbearable pain of suffering the loss of approximately 1,000 Armenian soldiers, most of them men who had barely turned 18 or were in their 20s. For a country with a population of 3 million, that’s the equivalent of what would be 100,000 people for a country of 300 million people, like the United States.

These are the heroes who are defending not only our homeland but our right to exist as a nation. For make no mistake: the war unleashed on Armenia by a corrupt and criminal dictatorship like Azerbaijan, with a massive arsenal built with petrodollars, supported by the genocidal state of Turkey, is to “finish off the work” of Turks’ ancestors, as Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proclaimed in an address to the parliament on July 14.

Yet at the same time, the unhealed wounds that this war by our ancestral enemies reopened triggered in Armenians around the world an unprecedented unity in our often painfully fragmented reality. So often have we been under the domination of foreign empires and rulers of alien religions that are incompatible with the values of our Christian faith that the divisions introduced by them among Armenians have outlasted the historical circumstances that gave birth to them.

At this hour of reckoning, we must stand more united than ever in our epic battle against two enemies that we are waging completely alone and forsaken by a world for which democracy and human rights seem to have a mere declamatory value. We shall win and prevail. This is the Vartanants and the Sardarabad of our generation. For our martyred heroes and for the love of our homeland, we say never again to the criminal attack of Turkey and Azerbaijan. We will win. Յաղթելու ենք։