The deed to a dream

2026-02-05 - 19:57

Today, the sham courts in Baku issued their final judgment on Artsakh’s political and military leaders. Arayik Harutyunyan: life imprisonment Arkadi Ghukasyan: 20 years Bako Sahakyan: 20 years Davit Ishkhanyan: life imprisonment David Babayan: life imprisonment Lt. Gen. Levon Mnatsakanyan: life imprisonment Maj. Gen. David Manukyan: life imprisonment The outcome was expected — much like peace these days, it comes in pieces. In our paper, we’ve spotlighted the stories of Artsakhtsis, rebuilding and rebreathing in exile. We cover their light; hands remaking homes amid hostility and ever more uncertainty. We document people fighting for their homes, planting gardens, clearing landmines, baking bread, singing songs and doing what the diaspora does (or thinks it does) best: keeping a sense of the past alive. A piece of a broken home, now to live on foreign lands. “Armenia is the homeland,” they say, but not home. Another article to gloss over. An unfinished sentence. Like these words, unhomed and forced into your sockets. Five and a half years ago, my friends and I were collecting names — fathers of missing soldiers, orating their sons’ lives in numbers, dates and the fog of their last memory: the final phone call. 30-seconds looping endlessly through our lobby, dissolved into pixels. We stayed, we sentenced, we stood. As the self-proclaimed leader of the “fathers” — before the word unraveled — stepped inside Artsakh’s parliament building, its pink dusty tuff still warm with belief, to meet with the leader of a dissolving state. Arayik Harutyunyan was inside those pink walls of his abandoned city, waiting to receive the names of those abandoned boys — lying in a gorge outside the city walls, we would soon find out. But on that day, there was a glimmer of hope, and it rested in Arayik’s hands. He promised to hand over that piece of paper to the prime minister of Armenia. Knowing better, we crooned in silence: “I heard the sweet voice of my aged mother. Akh, what a pity; it was but a dream.” For months, we’ve been in a fever dream, covering papers — shuffled, initialed, signed — handed over like deeds. No good deed goes unpunished, we’re told. And today, the punishment arrived. A life sentence for the leader of a murdered state who, for a fleeting moment, held hope in his hands. And soon, a new sentence will arrive for the ones who put him there. If only, in a dream.