By SEVITA RAMA
Danica Harootian at the Report the Truth protest and march. Photo: Sanan Panossian.
Sanan Panossian, a 28-year-old Armenian-American from San Francisco, California, has activism in her genes. She grew up in the largest Armenian diaspora community in the United States, attending protests and walking in the footsteps of her great grandparents, who led a resistance in 1915 in Musa Dagh, her ancestral homeland, during the Armenian genocide.
On September 27, 2020, when Azerbaijan invaded the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, Sanan felt she had lost her homeland again. “I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” she said, “and to experience that kind of diaspora guilt and pain.”
Young Armenians born after 1991 have not lived through the genocide or occupations that color Armenia’s past. But when Azerbaijan launched an offensive in the Nagarno-Karabakh region — known as the Republic of Artsakh to Armenians — in late September of this year, many younger Armenians, especially those in the diaspora who have only ever known an independent and free Armenia, were shocked to confront a reality that they only grew up hearing about.
Sanan had been organizing within the Armenian community far before the conflict in Nagarno-Karabakh began, but September 27 spurred something deeper within her. “Being thousands of miles away from what’s going on to my counterpart in Artsakh, it was horrible,” Sanan said.
The most recent outburst of conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region has been a point of reckoning for Armenian youth who have only known a post-Soviet Armenia. Though conflict in the region was not unheard of, for many young people in the Armenian diaspora, this was the first time they felt the real and far-reaching effects of the continuous threats to autonomy, identity, and mere existence facing their people.
“[Artsakh] was not only a war on the ground. The diaspora was almost like a second army, not with real bullets, but with hashtags as our bullets,” Sanan said in one of her impassioned monologues that give away her practiced role as an activist in the Armenian community.
On September 27, Azerbaijan launched an attack to reclaim the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Since the 1990s War, this area has been administered by Armenia under international law but the region is within the borders of Azerbaijan, a point of contention at the heart of the years-long territorial conflict and for the many ethnic Armenians who populate the region. Azerbaijan’s technological and military advancements from its oil wealth have turned the tables in this prolonged conflict, creating an opportunity to take control of this region for good. This new wave of violence has led to protests, fundraising efforts, and awareness campaigns by Armenians living outside the country. There are more Armenians in the diaspora, an estimated 8 million, than the country itself, which only has a population of slightly less than 3 million people.
Armenian Americans have long been politically organized in the United States. As of last year, community organizers successfully reached their goal after a generations-long campaign to get Congress to recognize the Armenian Genocide. These activists utilized established networks and organizations like the Armenian National Committee of America, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Armenian Youth Federation, and the Armenian Assembly of America. With the help of existing community infrastructure, younger activists have taken the helm of these organizations and led them in the protests around the Nagarno-Karabakh conflict.
Since coming to New York City in 2018 to get her Master’s degree at New York University, Sanan has worked with the Armenian Youth Federation to organize political action and protests in the city. She spoke at the “Report the Truth” protest in New York City in early November, which advocated for unbiased reporting of the conflict in Artsakh and garnered a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. While the Armenian diaspora’s news outlets have been considering the power dynamics of the region, Sanan and the protestors took issue with the way major media outlets like NBC and ABC reported on the conflict without pointing out the geopolitical machinations of other world powers, such as Turkey and Russia, in the conflict.
Sanan admitted that she had low expectations for the turnout at the New York City “Report the Truth” protest, as she knew the Armenian community on the East Coast was smaller than her community back home. The high attendance despite the pandemic and the smaller population of Armenians in New York, as opposed to California, came as a shock to her.
Report the Truth protest and march, outside NBC News in New York City. Photo: Danica Harootian.
“It wasn’t just Armenians from New York,” Sanan said. “People came from out of town to attend.”
Sanan noted how normal it was for people to travel to protests in nearby cities like Washington, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia to present a stronger united front. Especially in the East Coast, this solidarity links many Armenian American communities where the diaspora infrastructure is not as robust as in California.
The messaging around the Artsakh protests since late September has evolved in response to the ever-changing nature of the conflict. Initial efforts aimed to condemn the lack of action or even acknowledgement of the need for intervention from the international community, followed by requests for fairer reporting from Western media. Now that a peace deal has been signed, the protests are taking a more political and divisive turn around the circumstances of this deal, as Armenians consider what it means to have lost ancestral lands and who is involved in these decisions.
For Danica Harootian, a young American woman born to Filipino and Armenian parents, the war in Artsakh was a moment to take a more active role in her people’s struggle.
In the days leading up to her birthday on September 29, Danica was anxious. She had started to hear the chatter about another outbreak of fighting in Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh. She was at her family home in California, initially unsure of the gravity of this news. After all, she knew flare-ups in this region were common.
Unlike Sanan, Danica’s integration into the Armenian community was not as seamless. Danica’s father’s side of the family had fled the Armenian genocide and come to America through Ellis Island, and she visited Armenia for the first time after she graduated college in 2016. Danica was in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, when the Four-Day War broke out in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. She saw immediately how the war directly impacted everyone around her, particularly with Armenia’s mandatory draft.
When Danica started seeing the numbers of soldiers being deployed from Armenia and the number of civilians being killed, she realized that this was turning into an all-out war. On September 29, her 27th birthday was quickly overshadowed by the dread of what this conflict would mean for her friends and family in Armenia and in the diaspora.
“Everyone either has a brother, boyfriend, or dad — someone who, if they aren’t fighting already, are at risk of being asked to,” she said. “And for the men, a lot of their identity is based around the pride in that [service] and wanting to defend Armenia.”
Since the conflict broke out, beyond attending protests and supporting community actions, Danica has used social media to work with other Armenia Fulbright alumni to write a letter to the U.S. State Department ahead of planned peace talks with Armenia and Azerbaijan, brokered by Secretary Pompeo. The widely circulated letter supporting Artsakh’s right to self-determination was published in Armenian media and received 225 signatures from scholars from 65 countries. Youth activism like this in the Armenian diaspora builds on the knowledge of previous generations of work that centers genocide recognition.
Sanan maintained that despite more political protests in Yerevan and Los Angeles that pushed back on the decision of the Armenian prime minister to cede lands to Azerbaijan in a Russia-brokered peace deal, her focus is on an independent and free Armenia. The political infighting only further clouds the potential reality of this ideal, liberated state.
“I think this new spark awoke something in my generation, especially in the younger ones,” Sanan said. …”Our parents’ generation lived under the Soviets … and saw the pogroms in Azerbaijan, but we had never seen that. We just read about it. We just learned about it. We just heard about it. To see it in real time, I think that changed the feeling.”