Honor Thy Dead

2026-01-27 - 14:08

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. A bill designating January 27 as the Day of Remembrance of Those Killed in the Defense of the Homeland passed parliament last week. Introduced by Deputy Speaker Ruben Rubinyan and independent MP Gegham Nazaryan, it moved swiftly from the floor in late 2025 to final approval on January 20. Presenting the bill at its second and final reading, Rubinyan said the date was deliberately chosen to avoid association with any specific military operation and to precede Army Day on January 28, which marks the founding of the Armenian Armed Forces. January 27, he said, would be devoted to honoring the fallen; the day after, to affirming the army’s continued existence. A nation needs a shared day of remembrance to honor those who perished in its defense, not as statistics, but as individuals whose loss devastated families and communities, and reshaped the country itself. Collective remembrance matters precisely because loss was not experienced privately, but all at once, everywhere. Long before parliament sought to formalize remembrance, however, it unfolded in quieter, more brutal ways. For us, it began not with a vote in parliament, but with a list. During the 2020 Artsakh War, one of the most difficult tasks we took upon ourselves was translating and publishing the names of the dead. Every single day. We approached it meticulously: one staff member would translate the names into English, another would read them aloud, slowly, to ensure no name was missed or misspelled. Day after day. Some argued that the names of the fallen soldiers should not be published while the war was waging. We disagreed. We had a very clear purpose in mind: to honor them. These young men were not entries in a grim tally. They had names. They had lives, parents, wives, children, siblings, friends, entire communities. Toward the end of the war, that process became almost mechanical. There were no more tears or muffled sobs. No more walking outside, desperate to find oxygen to fill our lungs. After the war, the numbers of dead became unstable, shifting wildly, from 3,000 to 5,000, leaving absence where there should have been clarity, and silence where there should have been remembrance. That insistence on naming the dead was precisely why the numbers mattered. Each daily figure represented lives. Naming them was about bearing witness. We started the harrowing process of publishing the names on October 1, four days after the start of the war. By that day, the death toll, according to the Defense Ministry, was 103 killed in action. On October 2, another 55 killed. On October 3, another 51. By October 5, the number had climbed to 229 killed and it went on. Looking back at the daily updates we published, the headlines read like a chronicle of devastation: “Unrelenting Battles Continue”, “An Unfolding Humanitarian Crisis”, “Stepanakert Sees Heaviest Strikes to Date”, “As Battles Continue, Iconic Cathedral in Shushi Targeted”, and it went on. And then came November 9 with the headline “Fighting on Several Fronts”. We published that briefing at 11 p.m. A few hours later, the news broke. Armenia had signed a trilateral statement ending the war and for all intents and purposes, marking its defeat. Most of Artsakh was lost. A nation shattered, humiliated, broken. The next day, on November 10, the Defense Ministry published another 81 names. By then, we had lost count. One name bled into the next. What followed was a deafening silence, as we moved like apparitions... unsteady, disoriented, unsure not only of our footing, but of our future. By April 2021, authorities in Armenia and Artsakh had published the names and dates/years of birth of 2,736 fallen soldiers. A year later, in March 2022, the Investigative Committee reported 3,822 killed servicemen and civilians. The agency did not release additional names, only providing the final tally. A few months later, in August 2022, the fact-checking platform FIP requested detailed lists of fallen servicemen from both the Ministry of Defense and the Investigative Committee. Both agencies refused, citing privacy concerns, state secrets, or ongoing investigations. A month later, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan claimed that the names of the fallen were publicly available on the Zinapah website. As FIP later noted, this was misleading: the site lists only compensation cases submitted by families, not all confirmed deaths. In November 2025, Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan offered a different explanation, saying the names were withheld as personal data and that publishing them was “not right.” Yet during the war and immediately afterward, the Defense Ministry regularly published names, and Armenian law does not prohibit the publication of the names of deceased persons. In December 2025, FIP compiled a list of fallen soldiers using publicly available data from the Zinapah website. The list includes 3,246 military casualties. The official death toll, including civilians, stands at 3,822. Hundreds of names remain absent. What is it about these missing 576 names that authorities refuse to release? Why publish thousands, yet withhold the rest? To honor the dead, you have to give them a name. But names are only the beginning. The refusal to fully account for the dead is part of a broader refusal to account for the war itself. In February 2022, parliament established a special commission to examine the causes of Armenia’s defeat, assess the actions of the government and military leadership, and evaluate the country’s pre-war defense preparedness. The commission concluded its work in 2025, having collected extensive evidence, documents and testimony detailing strategic, operational and decision-making failures. Its findings were expected to be presented in a parliamentary plenary session. Instead, Parliament Speaker Simonyan blocked the report’s inclusion on the agenda, citing a procedural rule limiting the lifespan of ad hoc commissions to 18 months. Rather than prompting public debate, the report was classified and archived, making it accessible only to MPs with special security clearance. Andranik Kocharyan, who chaired the commission, has said that non-classified portions may eventually be released to journalists and the public after review by defense and security bodies, but no timeline or format has been specified. What does this report contain that is deemed so explosive it must be withheld from the public? What, exactly, does it reveal about Armenia’s generals, military planners, or defense system that disclosure would cause more harm than good? What findings were so unsettling that an entire government chose secrecy over transparency, especially when the report could have been used to explain, or even contextualize, the loss of the war? Did it expose, as many have speculated, levels of desertion, command failures, or even direct Russian involvement that authorities fear would be politically destabilizing if made public? If the purpose of the report was to expose the structural failures of Armenia’s military over the past two decades, then its conclusions could hardly indict a government that had been in power for barely two years when the war began. On the contrary, the findings might have vindicated it. So why refuse to release it? A national day of remembrance is a welcome and necessary gesture. But remembrance cannot end with ritual alone. To truly honor those killed in the defense of the homeland, we must be willing to speak their names and confront what happened during the war, how decisions were made, why they failed, and at what cost. Otherwise, remembrance risks becoming performative. The dead are owed more than silence wrapped in ceremony and the living are owed answers: not only about how the war was lost, but about what has changed since, and what has not. January 27 may yet become a meaningful day. But it will only earn that meaning if it marks not the end of inquiry, but its beginning. Because a nation that asks its young to die in its defense must, at the very least, have the courage to remember them honorably, and to tell the truth about why and how they were lost. Comment