Daredevils of Sassoun: A Timeline

It was the morning of July 23 at around 9 a.m. I got a call from a colleague. “They have finally agreed to let the media in,” she said. “Are you coming?”

Yes.

The Daredevils of Sassoun, a group of armed men had taken over a police station in the Erebuni district of Yerevan in the early hours of July 17, 2016.  And similar to what happened in Karabakh that April, when the national narrative was never calibrated (war, escalation, or worst ever breach of the ceasefire agreement?) we had woken up to a situation with no commonly agreed upon description (terrorism, armed rebellion, or self sacrifice?). In light of the external miscalibration, an internal one arose and the veterans of one became the frontrunners of the other.

A group of journalists were allowed into the vicinity of the Erebuni Police Station under siege. Were we afraid? I was not, and others did not seem to be either. We ought to have been. There were journalists who called the Daredevils of Sassoun “terrorists,” journalists who called them “armed men,” “war veterans” -- none was afraid more than the other.  

Were the men who had killed a police officer, taken six others hostage, had control of the entire Yerevan internal security arsenal, not a threat? Were the Internal Security Forces behind us, who had been crowding the city’s police stations with detainees and only days later would target journalists during clashes with protesters not a threat? This casual group of journalists readily put itself between two armed groups; one more unpredictable than the other. What is more, contrary to the initial agreement, communication was taken away from us; cellphones, Live equipment, anything that could be used to establish direct communication with the outside. Unfortunately, we were only bothered, not outraged.

A year has passed since and things are surely not clearer.

A lot of us cannot hate an act against injustice; we can disagree with the methods used but that means almost next to nothing. So a lot of us know better than to embrace violence but know of no alternative to express intolerance towards injustice, state aggression towards national interests and the rights of its non-violent citizen. Then we should admit to being helpless.

About the most violent of nonviolent forms of protest, how many of us remember that Kajik Grigoryan set himself on fire last July when we pass by Baghramyan Avenue?

Journalist David Halberstam, who witnessed Quang Duc’s self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, remembered the moment: "Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh. ... Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think." Does anyone smell burning flesh on Bahgramyan Avenue? It seems the air was sterilized because Kajik was HIV positive. 

Forget Saigon and the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk. In Tunis, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in 2010 in response to the harassment he had suffered at the hands of a municipal official. “His desperate act struck a chord with millions of Arabs living with few job prospects or avenues for change under entrenched autocracies,” wrote Reuters.

In 2011, Bouazizi was posthumously awarded the Sakharov Prize for his contributions to "historic changes in the Arab world.” The Tunisian government honored him with a postage stamp. The Times of the United Kingdom named Bouazizi  "Person of the Year," the front page read, "Bouazizi was no revolutionary, yet his lonely protest served as the catalyst for a wave of revolts that have transformed the Middle East."

No one was at Kajik’s funeral.

The same atmosphere of no reciprocal respect or apprehension is now prominent in the courtroom during the Daredevils of Sassoun trials. It seems what the Sasna Dzrer has really achieved is the right to publicly voice contempt towards incompetent authority.

Around 4 p.m. the authorities bring in the father of one of the armed men, a man in a wheelchair, the only parent of any Sasna Dzrer member to publicly condemn his son’s actions.

Of course, by then, the connection was set up and this segment we could transmit live. He accused his son of abandoning him, of letting him starve now that there is no one to care for him. He reminded his son that his responsibility was first towards his parent above anything else. The son tried to explain, “I did this for you,” but the father’s yelling was louder than his voice. And that is the Catch 22 of our reality -- the causes of complaint are the same, reactions are conflicted.

The ultimate dilemma for me at the epicenter of the concentric mess of last July’s Armenian reality was the collision of national interest vs State interest. In a homogenous, small and battered Armenia and its diasporas, those two would logically coincide - more often than not, they don’t. 

Maybe we are an inherently patriotic and at the same time extrinsically nihilistic nation and Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” describes us best.

A year has passed and we've moved on.  

Photos by Roubina Margossian.