Interview with Former Prime Minister (1990-1991) and Minister of Defense (1992-1993) Vazgen Manukyan

How was it possible to win the war? It is sometimes said that Levon Ter-Petrossian was often unaware of what was going on in the war, or that the ARF (Armenian Revolutionary Federation/Dashnaktsutiun) role was extremely big.

The ARF played a role but it was a small part of the whole. The NSU (National Self-determination Union) had units and was a small part; the participation of the ANM (Armenian National Movement) was to an extent that corresponded to its role in the state apparatus. The state wins a war, not a political party. And the state loses a war. All the resources, all the efforts made by the political parties were tiny in significance compared with state efforts. Of course, at the initial stage of the war Levon Ter-Petrossian did not support capturing territories and was reluctant to agree to the Kapan operation [the military operations that took place in mid-December 1992 when Armenian forces captured several villages that were located in the immediate vicinity of the railroad station and the airport of Kapan but lay within the administrative borders of the Zangelan region of Azerbaijan]. Ter-Petrossian's relations with Boris Yeltsin, with leaders of the Western states, were extremely conducive to our making advances without suffering blows. The main weight of the war - victories and defeats - were the achievements failures of our state and Nagorno Karabakh.

Would it be justified to say that Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh won the war, and the president of Armenia at the time was Levon Ter-Petrossian?

It would not be very justified, because after the capture of Kelbajar, for example, Ter-Petrossian believed that Kelbajar should be returned since there was great pressure from the outside. The Nagorno Karabakh leadership, and I as well, were opposed to that. I won't use Ter-Petrossian's name because many times we did things that he was unaware of. It is wrong to attribute all of it to him. There was a state, a government; the state apparatus was at work and victory came as the sum total of all this work. Mentioning the name of any individual here would be wrong, especially, since Ter-Petrossian wasn't the inspirer, the leader; on the contrary, in some cases he was the hindrance.

In September 1992 the Armenian forces almost lost the Lachin Corridor. Over that summer we had lost Shahumyan and most of Martakert, or more than 40% of Nagorno Karabakh; in August we had lost Artsvashen. After your appointment as minister of defense a series of victories began. What was the principal reason?

What were the main reasons for that turning point? First - the political one. Vazgen Sargsyan was the defense minister and fully obeyed Ter-Petrossian's political pressure. And his instructions were the following: to find a common language with the Azerbaijanis and to stop the war at some point. Second, my deputies and I succeeded in created a friendly atmosphere in the Army. Thousands of young people and volunteers wanted to win. Third, the contradictions between the ministry of defense of Armenia and the leadership of Nagorno Karabakh vanished. At that time, Azerbaijan's backbone was not yet broken; it broke after Kelbadjar. We were trying not to draft eighteen-year-old boys, but the Azerbaijanis drafted eighteen-year-olds and the death of any one of them led to protest rallies in Baku. Azerbaijanis didn't want to employ career officers, considering them Soviet spies. On our side thirty-to-forty-year-old men who had volunteered were getting killed, so there were no similar protests here.

Of course, a lot depended on individuals too. But the most important thing was that there were tens of thousands of Armenians ready to sacrifice their lives for Karabakh. Besides, Nagorno Karabakh displayed heroism, the entire people participated in the war, because for them it wasn't only an abstract national struggle, but it was also a matter of defending their families, their homes. If Armenia seethed with patriotism, for the Karabakhtsis, besides patriotism, there was a specific task - they came to conquer your home, you have to fight.

Why did I disagree with Ter-Petrossian's political course? Of course, none of us wanted war but we understood that it was impossible to stop the war. For example, in the days of the Kapan operation negotiations were taking place in Stockholm and the Armenian leadership believed that it was possible to solve the problem through negotiations. Azerbaijan used the negotiations as a cloak and wanted to solve the problem by military means.

We put the question this way: in order to have peace we have to win the war. That was not only my attitude, but that of many generals and soldiers and the Nagorno Karabakh leaders as well.

What would you say about Kelbajar?

After I left the post of prime minister and before my appointment as defense minister I went to Martakert with a small military unit. Martakert had already been captured by Azerbaijanis. On the way I saw what my grandfather had told me, what I had read in books - the routes of mass exodus. Our people escaped through forests, I saw sheets hanging from trees, children's toys, the smell of unburied bodies. I realized that it would be impossible to keep hold of Martakert even if we recaptured it without having Kelbadjar under our control. Samvel Babayan and Robert Kocharyan held the same view. Levon Ter-Petrossian couldn't even grasp how important it was to capture Kelbajar. And Babken Ararktsyan was saying that Armenia would be considered an aggressor for that.

What kind of a burden was Karabakh for Armenia from the political, economic, and military standpoint?

Karabakh was an issue uniting the nation; it wasn't an artificial problem. The Armenians had developed complexes over the previous centuries because they had lost territories and people. The Karabakh problem wasn't only, or rather wasn't, a territorial issue. It seemed like we wanted absolution from all our sins; we wanted both to defend our compatriots and to keep hold of the land that belonged to the Armenian people - the last remaining fragment. From the psychological point of view, the significance of Karabakh was much higher than that of any other issue, and remains so, since if we lose Karabakh we'll fall back into the same complexes. Karabakh freed the Armenian people from complexes.

The Karabakh Army, the Karabakhtsis, played a great role, but nothing would have been possible without Armenia. The Nagorno Karabakh leadership had a very broad independence during the war and wouldn't just carry out orders from Armenia.

From the political point of view, the Armenian leadership's relations in the international arena were extremely conducive to our hopes of achieving victory on the battlefield.

In some cases Armenia took the blows upon itself. For example, the Kapan operation had two meanings - on the one hand, to save people's lives because it was impossible to walk in streets of the town; on the other hand, during the operation in the course of one day we captured ten or eleven villages and entered Azerbaijani territory, which was a surprise for the Azerbaijanis. We calculated what the Azerbaijanis would do when we began the Kapan operation. We calculated that they would attack in the direction of Sevan and set traps there. Elchibey had declared that he would take a swim in Sevan. And indeed, we attacked in the direction of Kapan and the Azerbaijanis attacked in the direction of Sevan. When I came to the defense ministry, the village of Artsvashen had already been captured. The distance to Sevan was short, and if the Azerbaijanis had reached Sevan it would have had great psychological significance for the subsequent course of the war. We entered Kapan, and the Azerbaijanis attacked in the direction of Vardenis and lost in both cases.

When I came to the ministry of defense we had a big problem. On the one hand Armenia had already invited Brigadier General Ter-Grigoryants to take charge of organizing the Army. On the other hand, his method of organizing the Army - through a draft-would have required two or three years, but the war was already going on. Besides, conflicts had arisen between the career officers and the freedom fighters. We had to first smooth over these conflicts. And we smooth them over in the following way: we decided, in a way, to create two armies. On the one hand we had a standard structure that corresponded to the Soviet Army reinforced with conscripts who we tried not to use on the frontline. On the other hand, military operations were carried out by volunteers. They were paid salaries. We paid career officers for their ranks 1.5 times as much as they were paid in the Soviet Army since we wanted to bring Armenian officers into our Army. In Karabakh, serving in the militia was mandatory since there was a war.

February 2, 2006