Since the beginning of the war, I have sat at my desk many times, opened a blank document to write down my thoughts. Sometimes, I would spend all day putting those thoughts in order in my head, but I never could go further than that. When ideas are abundant and feelings are overwhelming, it is hard to concentrate and challenge yourself to critically assess and analyze what’s happening around you. Foreign pundits and journalists are doing it really well, because they have no emotional attachment to the events. These last days after the signature of the notorious peace deal, I’ve learned much more about my nation than during the last 25 years of my life. I love my country, and I love my people. I’ve probably vented a lot about our problems before, but that’s only because I knew we could do better. My mom always told me, “Believe me, if no one talks about your mistakes, it doesn’t mean you don’t have any. It means they don’t care about you enough.”
I will not discuss surreal conspiracy theories or search for a scapegoat for the defeat in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war. Instead, I will share my honest assessment of why and how we got here and discuss the endogenous factors that shaped our current reality.
We don’t know our history and geography.
We know only some aspects of our history. We instinctively know about the Armenian Genocide, but only few of us can talk about its reasons and implications. And we certainly did not know much about the 2016 Artsakh War, until recently that is. This ignorance means that we cannot retrieve lessons learned from our experience.
More of my classmates were interested in international history than Armenian history. We can debate for hours about the Byzantine Empire, but can we have a two-hour debate with a knowledgeable foreigner about Armenia and its role in world history? Can we defend our position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict outside Armenia, where people may be unfamiliar with Dadivank and Shushi?
Due to the lack of our own knowledge, we depend on others to form an opinion, which means a national discourse can be formed by few “influencers,” while the rest agree to be retweeters.
We have an education system which doesn’t incentivize critical thinking.
I am currently pursuing my third academic degree. I studied economics in Armenia, communications in France and I am currently studying international relations and diplomacy in Belgium. The enormous gap in teaching methodologies between Armenia and these Western European countries is astonishing. Armenia’s education system (coming from the Soviet times) encouraged a knowledge of general culture. A linguist could easily chat with you about laws of physics and a chemist could recite poetry. At least that was the case until the last few years. With the Europeanization of our education system, there was a necessary transformation of our general culture approach to a more specialized learning process. But the metamorphosis of our educational traditions has been incomplete. The Armenian education system seriously lacks analytical thinking. We don’t analyze. We rarely connect dots. We mainly memorize and reproduce. Over the last three years in Europe, I have rarely learned anything by heart for my exams. I listen, debate and read a lot. Some of our exams are open-book format. I have tried to connect all the dots between theory, empirics, my own experience and personal opinion. But unfortunately, that is not the case for Armenia. Generations educated in this system have failed to acquire critical thinking skills and now we are all suffering because of that. That’s why for 30 days people looked at the map showing a 25-percent loss of territory control but continued to repeat “We will win,” just because someone told them to.
We have the wrong understanding of victory.
Our understanding of victory is rooted in our education system. I am not sure if any other nation in the world has scholarized the notion of “moral victory.” In Armenian history, “moral victory” is a deeply rooted and toxic concept. It means a defeat which still managed to prevent something worse, or a defeat which still sent an important message to the adversary. It was used for the first time to refer to the Avarayr Battle in 451, where Armenians fought against Sassanid Persia to keep their faith, suffered heavy losses, lost the commanders but somehow changed the Persian’s mind regarding Christian Armenia.
I’ve also noticed over the years how much we have used the notion of “moral victory” when speaking about defeat. This numbed our sensibility to acknowledge, accept and cope with defeat. You cannot just do a mic-drop in the 21st century; you need to have a solid military and an economic and sociopolitical basis to win any war. Armenians need to learn how to accept and manage defeat. We need to learn how to move on without forgetting anything or rejecting our past.
We have a low level of media literacy.
I am not revealing anything groundbreaking if I say that we lost this war long before there was a physical defeat on the ground. And I know that some may argue with this statement. The aforementioned factors added to a low level of media literacy has contributed to the creation of a society vulnerable to any kind of information attack. And no matter how much people were told to respect certain rules, don’t panic, don’t underestimate the opponent, don’t overestimate ourselves, the intensive information action led towards Armenians online while Azerbaijanis, in a quasi-total blockade of information, scattered the spirit and unity of our people little by little every day.
We get attached to people, not values.
“Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.” These words by Mark Twain should be printed and distributed to the three million people living in Armenia, where politicians are either villainized or worshipped. It is not fair to blame it all on the current government and their controversial “black and white” narrative. This habit has long been rooted in our society. We get attached to people and not to their values. That is why it is so easy to trick our society, to make people believe in things or accept opinions which are completely groundless and sound surreal. That is why we fall in love so quickly and get disappointed to a level of national heartbreak. Our people are in desperate need of heroes. We have a strong nostalgia for our past. Unfortunately, the heroes we create in modern Armenia fall as fast as they jump on the pedestal of people’s hearts.
We have always perceived military service as an obligation and not as a necessity.
Mandatory military service in Armenia has always been considered a burden for Armenian men and their families. I know, as a woman, my opinion may not resonate with men who feel obliged to put their lives on hold for two years, go through a not-so-fancy period of military service and come back most frequently as a different person, affected by their erlebnis (a German word which is translated as experience, but refers to a short-term experience in people’s lives).
This false sense of security has been one result of the confidence that comes after winning a war. We thought we had won our peace for lifetimes. Mea culpa, I never considered that this level of military escalation would happen so soon and so fast. And when it did, many of us were not ready physically, emotionally or professionally to stand beside Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh the way we would want to, because we have never learned to fight in a war. Those who did their service, of course with certain exceptions, mostly considered it an obligation deriving from our blue passports. Had we had a different mentality of this mandatory military service, had we perceived it as an opportunity to have the necessary skills for self-defense, the picture on the battlefield would be substantially different.
What could we have done or what can we do differently to prevent the repetition of this scenario in the future? And that moment, certainly will come sooner or later.
Pursue education reform
We cannot have an extremely educated five percent of the population with three academic degrees and knowledge of five languages while 95 percent prefer to stay in their comfortable darkness. Because the information wars are not targeted at that five percent but to the prevailing majority. Our education system needs a total transformation on all levels, which should include an intensive teaching of military history and Armenian history. We should not learn Italian or Spanish. We have to learn Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Arabic and Persian. Because those are our neighbors and our adversaries. Our teaching has to be transformed from descriptive to critical, and for that we need competent students now who can become teachers and university professors in 10 years’ time.
Invest in hybrid threats, innovation, science and research
Armenia has a growing IT potential which fascinates the world. A significant investment should be done in science, research and innovation. Hybrid threats should become a mandatory teaching subject across different domains. Cybercrime, disinformation and terrorism are going to be our challenges for the next decade. Our IT sector should become the driving force and the backbone of innovation, especially military innovation. But for that, a very intensive collaboration is necessary between public and private sectors.
We need to get rid of the victim mentality and geographic fatalism
Our neighbors are never going to change, but we must reject any concepts of geographic fatalism. Being aware of the complexity of our situation does not mean becoming desperate. Yes, Armenia is situated in a terribly complicated region where we cannot rely on anyone, but it is our region. We have been living there for three millennia, and we will continue to do so. We have to eradicate the victim mentality. We need to discard the paper ladle described by Khrimian Hayrig, embrace the iron ladle, and start building our country, make it stronger, self-sufficient and self-reliant as much as possible in the modern globalized world.
We need to give incentive to the educated young people to stay in Armenia.
The most disappointing question we can ask is “If x politician resigns, then who will manage the country? There is no better alternative.” We are stuck in this vicious cycle of choosing between two evils just because we don’t have a better alternative or refusing to let go of something that has to go because we are scared to stay leaderless. Why? Because young, educated, critically-minded people often have no incentives to stay in Armenia. When the time comes to fill the ministries and the government with competent and dedicated individuals, we lack professionals. But don’t expect an Armenian student who has acquired three to four degrees, is fluent in multiple languages and has a rich working experience abroad to leave all of that for a ministry job and a 150,000 AMD salary. Brain drain has always been our problem and will continue to aggravate if we do not give incentives to those people to come back and invest their time and energy in the development of our homeland.
Do not mistake compassion with weakness.
In order to be strong, we don’t need to be animals, barbarians and vengeful people. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and in our Republic have lost a lot; so did the Diaspora Armenians 100 years ago. But, we need to keep our heads clear and focus on our objectives. Let’s not forget who we are, where we come from and the values that we have retained over the last centuries. In our disgust of documented Azerbaijani violence and in our quest for justice, we must remember that we cannot become like them. If we lower ourselves, it would be a shameful Kafkaesque defeat. Azeris can afford celebrating decapitation and hate-murders; we can’t. That is not who we are. Maps change all the time, but we Armenians are still here after 3,000 years because we managed to maintain our national features and our values.
As I summarize my final thoughts, my heart is breaking, because I realize that we all collectively share the fault for what has happened to us. But it is not a fault that can be attributed to one specific period of time, one event or one decision. It is a cumulation of small “sins” that brought us to our current reality, which for some of us is an ice-cold shower.
Again, this list is not exhaustive, but it is a roadmap that all of us can hopefully draw from to help bring change in our smaller communities. We also need a strong and competent government that will help us solidify those changes on an institutional level.
The biggest challenge that we, as a nation, have to focus on right now is overcoming our inner enemy. And I am not talking about particulars or political parties; that is not what this article is about. We need to initiate systemic change in our society. We desperately need a change of mentality. Only then will we stop waiting for the EU, the US or any other countries’ condemnation when someone is destroying our cultural heritage or violently killing our people.
Editor’s Note, November 24, 2020: A factual error regarding the Battle of Avarayr was corrected.
Viktorya Muradyan
Latest posts by Viktorya Muradyan (see all)
- In the aftermath of war, time for national introspection - November 24, 2020
Armenia must learn from nation’s like South Korea, a nation that fought a war to a stalemate, and was one of the poorest in the world when Park Chung-Hee became its leader in 1963. At that time S. Korea was poorer than N. Korea. Chung-Hee used the state’s power to build a steel mill, that became the backbone of S. Korean industrial development. S. Korea did not become a democracy until 1993. Similarly, Armenians can learn from the nationalist Kuomintang who built Taiwan into one of the richest nations in Asia, while fending off the much larger People’s Republic of China. These nations focused on INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT, exports, mastery of technology, and at least a decade if not more of political stability. Democracy is meaningless if Turkey can conquer Armenia at any moment, and only Russia can truly defend Armenia. Armenians use the Turkish and Azerbaijani embargos as excuses for an underperforming economy and industrial sector, even though Armenian today is richer than S. Korea was in 1963. Armenia needs an East Asian style industrial policy that focuses on building a steel industry (starting with recyclable steel that is now exported to Iran), manufacturing of small engines and light vehicles, electronics (specifically avionics), and a revival of its petro-chemical industry. Armenia’s focus on tourism and information technology cannot build an economy that can support a strong military that can assure Armenia’s sovereignty and survival even if Armenia’s only ally, Russia, is unable or unwilling to help when Turkey, inevitably, invades Armenia. Armenians must humble themselves and look how S. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam have developed their economies, and how N. Korea and Vietnam are able to guarantee their security against all nations, including several superpowers. We adopted Christianity from Palestine, now we must adopt the economics and technologies of the Asian nations to survive and thrive.
Vahan , 3 million people can not do this.even countries like poland, turkey can not do this..
also israel does not have so much steel industry, this is nonsense.also what will you do by supporting a strong army ? do you want to live in a army state,fighting forever ?
Dear Vahan,
Armenia can learn from a lot of states, a lot of best practices, we can do numerous benchmarks and create a detailed roadmap for transition and development. But, if there is no team, no competent leader, we will never be able to implement the greatest ideas on the paper.
All those examples, from Singapore to South Korea, had a strong determined leader who had respect and authority, who truly wanted to shake things up and they did.
I am looking forward to see who will come to the wheel in Armenia when Pashinyan leaves.
Ms Victorya Mouradyan: I read twice your recent article “Time for National Restrospection” to make sure I did not miss anything important. Congratulations. It is a very well thought out and written article about a very timly & difficult subject. It is good food for thought for every Armenian worldwide. Thank you.
I was very fortunate to join the Government of Armenia from day one of Independence. As a Nuclear Sientist and Energy Specialist, I left my family in los Angeles and moved to Armenia to serve as State Minister for five years 1992-96. They were very difficult years. Slowly, with time, we created the infrastructures; Armenian Army; and established some sence of unity. I consider those five years of my life as the most rewarding.
The Armenian people is naturally smart & creative and with proper leadership they can become like a Second Israel. We should hedge all our assets in providing the best education possible to our youth.
Once again thank you for your article. God Bless!
Sebouh Tashjian
Former State Minister, Armenian
Dear Sebouh,
I am really grateful for kind words. “The Armenian people is naturally smart & creative and with proper leadership” – I absolutely agree with this. The problem, however, is that we’ve never had a chance to have a leadership we truly deserved. We shifted from a corrupt oligarchy to a leadership who was incompetent. Now the situation is so dire that I don’t know who (with good selfless intentions, which doesn’t exist in politics, I know) will take on the lead and guide us out of this crisis.
Viktorya:
This is a remarkable piece and right on the mark in so many ways! I think that the key issues that you lay out explain how and why the onslaught from Baku was not more fully anticipated. Too much looking inwards and not enough objective analysis of international relations. Not enough attention on international recognition and protection of Artsakh. Bravo to you !
Very well written article, thank you dear one and yes I have thought about the same issues. Simply put. We must stop the Armenian exodus! And future corruption in the gov. And what happens to Serzh Sargsyan? The previous PM. He got away with murder. Shouldn’t he be held responsible for weakening the Armenian economy? He should return all the money he stole from the people and face jail! Otherwise others could follow in his foot steps further down the line. People like him are the enemy within. He’s done to the Armenian people within what the Azeris have done without. No more no less. complete deterioration. Of course he was not alone. So let’s bring those people to court and make them pay back what they stole to the people of Armenia. Finally, Democracy is a myth. “Dzour nesdink shidag khosink”. Do we have democracy in the West? No we don’t! Look at the state we’re in! Still, we can help Armenia become an integral part of the world economy by opening her doors of trade. We are traders by excellence. We need lawyers though and figure heads in the governments around the world. Most importantly get the 1915 genocide recognised world wide once and for all by joining forces with the Greek and Assyrian communities world wide! Not only that make sure Armenia moves in the rank of the ancient civilizations in the history books to this day. So let’s get working! There’s a lot to be done and I am getting older!!!! Medz eshe akhore mortsa! There is this issue; to clean the whole world from corruption!!!
What’s happened in Armenia is a reflection to what is happening all around the world. I guess you can see that by now… and don’t tell me it’s a conspiracy theory!
“If we lower ourselves, it would be a shameful Kafkaesque defeat. Azeris can afford celebrating decapitation and hate-murders; we can’t. That is not who we are.”
History has always shown that might is right and the victors write the history books- no matter how brutal they are. The reality is that this world respects violence and savagery. Maybe this sense of ‘who we are’ is the reason why Armenians lost this war. There is only one rule in war- to win.
While I agree with your realpolitik assessment, another maxim is just as true; those who live by the sword die by the sword. Turkey and Azerbaijan may feel emboldened by the recent developments, but if they keep this up, they’ll meet their violent end by a greater force. And this is coming from a Turk..
Dear Viktorya, if you learn turkish, and persian and read the history critically, you can not defend armenia’s current standing. therefore your state will never ever will allow you that; to learn and critize.. hate and lies.is all you can find.
you can murder and destroy with hate and but you cant fight long wars if you dont believe you are on the right side . that is what is happening..
my humble advise to you stay in belgium if you can. some wars are already lost and should be kept so …but individuals can keep themselves away…and there are more rules other than just to win…real warrior nations know well..
That is a very wrong assumption. I have myself learnt Turkish before moving to Europe for my studies and no one ever complained about that. Our Yerevan State University has a Faculty of Oriental Studies and a Chair of Turkish Studies, which allows you can learn Turkish and Azerbaijani and become a specialist in the region. The same concerns Persian and Arabic. So the assumption that Armenians are not allowed to learn regional languages or cultures is mis- or disinformation depending on your intentions.
Thank you for you advice. Running away from problems never defined my personality.
Dear Seaman, I would strongly advise you to learn Armenian ASAP so that you can read the inscriptions on what are presented as Caucasus Albanian churches before the unmistakably Armenian scripts are erased by the Azeri government. Before long, just as with the Nakhichevan khachkars, only satellite images will remain as evidence of anything that can’t be Albanised. You might undergo a shock when you read history books written by apolitical academics rather than government-sponsored rewriting of history practiced in Azerbaijan. As evidenced in the article, Viktorya has enough critical thinking to go without your humble advice. I am enjoying learning Turkish. It is a beautiful language. So is Farsi! So is Arabic but impossibly hard. So don’t you worry about Artsakh and the Armenians. Instead, find the strength to appreciate difference and replace hostility with tolerance.
Dear Victoria,
Very good toughts.
-Scatter, adapt, remember – this is a book title, you can find. I would add, create synergies. Synergies can be copied – so create hidden synergies. Is diaspora a geopolitical force multiplier, or only a nostalgic mass? Create channels of energy from and to diaspora.
– Hungarians suffered in Trianon the same great shock. So nothing is new under the Sun.
– Common causes. The masses are far behind the elite. The elite doesn’t communicate with the masses. The nations graph looks like an Eiffel tower, not like a BMP. In a war, the giraffe has the chance or the rinoceros ? In war there is no substitute for victory.
– How much you see as individual and nation depends, how far you look. Don’t just hear, listen. Spread knowledge, toughts. Enforce the individual. But be careful: self-esteem, self-confidence in a simple man would become self-idolatry.
– When i was in Yerevan, in May 2018, I asked someone in the market about azeris. He repplied with hate, “don’t even mention them, he said”. Well, you will never know your neighbour, you would say adversary, if you hate them. Hate gives energy but causes blindness. The eagle doesn’t hate the chicken, he loves her. Too much emotions, hate, self-complacency in this thiny nation, too much distance between individuals, few synergies, few rational thinking. The cultural values that are excellent for the survival in the diaspora,imped the beckoming of a well functioning, synergy generating society.
– Read Powershift from Toffler for the first three basic synergies, read Trust from Fukuyama for the fourth one, read Hofstede for knowing other cultures, other synergies.
– I have an eye on you,but others may hear on on you. Satellites are everywhere.
– So imagine, create and build enduring synergies within the nation, and why not with other nations, scatter, adapt, remember and you will survive!!
I feel Armenians tend to talk around the reality of Armenian’s place in history in 2020. I have used extracts from Viktorya’s thoughtful article because it is well said! That said,
What now?
– is it feasible to expect a nation of 3 million to fund and keep funding an army of 200,000 personal?
– is it fair to pour millions of dollars into buying arms?
– it is fair to be on war alert 24/7?
– is it fair losing thousands of young men in battle every few years?
– Armenia can not afford an army this size?
– Armenia can not keep on fighting wars because now she knows she stands alone!!!
– Armenians in the diaspora would hesitate to move their families to Armenia and have their children undergo compulsory military service.
– Not enough investment is coming from the Armenian diaspora because the country is still politically unstable.
A re-think is needed; militarily Armenia has been punching above her weight.
Armenia should consider having a much smaller army with proper military pacts, like the Arab Gulf states have, like Japan and South Korea have; and concentrate on diverting resources into education and paying the working force wages commensurate with a fair standard of living.
There shouldn’t be 3 million Armenians in Armenia and 8 million in the diaspora,these figures should be reversed to turn Armenia into a tiger economy.
Armenians need to learn how to accept and manage defeat. We need to learn how to move on without forgetting anything or rejecting our past.
We desperately need a change of mentality. Only then will we stop waiting for the EU, the US or any other countries’ condemnation when someone is destroying our cultural heritage or violently killing our people.
When the time comes to fill the ministries and the government with competent and dedicated individuals, we lack professionals. But don’t expect an Armenian student who has acquired three to four degrees, is fluent in multiple languages and has a rich working experience abroad to leave all of that for a ministry job and a 150,000 AMD salary. Brain drain has always been our problem and will continue to aggravate if we do not give incentives to those people to come back and invest their time and energy in the development of our homeland.
Mandatory military service in Armenia has always been considered a burden for Armenian men and their families. I know, as a woman, my opinion may not resonate with men who feel obliged to put their lives on hold for two years, go through a not-so-fancy period of military service and come back most frequently as a different person, affected by their erlebnis
I feel Armenians tend to talk around the reality of Armenian’s place in history in 2020. I share Viktorya’s well articulated thoughts;That said,
What now??
– is it feasible to expect a nation of 3 million to fund and keep funding an army of 200,000 personal?
– is it fair to pour millions of dollars into buying arms?
– it is fair to be on war alert 24/7?
– is it fair losing thousands of young men in battle every few years?
– Armenia can not afford an army this size?
– Armenia can not keep on fighting wars because now she knows she stands alone!!!
– Armenians in the diaspora would hesitate to move their families to Armenia and have their children undergo compulsory military service.
– Not enough investment is coming from the Armenian diaspora because the country is still politically unstable.
A re-think is needed; militarily Armenia has been punching above her weight.
Armenia should consider having a much smaller army with proper military pacts, like the Arab Gulf states have, like Japan and South Korea have; and concentrate on diverting resources into education and paying the working force wages commensurate with a fair standard of living.
There shouldn’t be 3 million Armenians in Armenia and 8 million in the diaspora,these figures should be reversed to turn Armenia into a tiger economy.
I agree with you Vahé. Just want to emphasize again, that I am not advocating for more war. But knowing Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s ambitions in the region, the lack of external support we get, we need to get ready for another potential attack. We would stop, if we had any reassurances that this would not repeat. But unfortunately, we don’t.
Whoever prefers to invest in military instead of social welfare and education when there is no real threat is certainly not national. But we do have a big, dangerous threat, which is now bolder and closer to our state borders.
I agree with you Vahé. Just want to emphasize again, that I am not advocating for more war. But knowing Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s ambitions in the region, the lack of external support we get, we need to get ready for another potential attack. We would stop, if we had any reassurances that this would not repeat. But unfortunately, we don’t. Whoever prefers to invest in military capacity instead of social welfare and education when there is no real security threat is certainly not rational. But we do have a big, dangerous threat, which is now bolder and closer to our state borders.
Armenians have three options 1)to leave their homeland2)to become russian slaves and 3)to be strong very strong ,economy and military