Diary of an invisible war

As her journalism career started, Lika Zarkaryan’s home town was invaded. She kept a diary as she reported and recalls the experience of an invisible war.

Lika Zakaryan

Lika Zakaryan is a writer and photographer based in the Republic of Artsakh (Karabakh).

The We Are Our Mountains monument, a war memorial in Stepanakert, the capital of the Republic of Artsakh,

Photo: Marcin Konsek, Wikimedia Commons.

Once upon a time in a faraway corner of the world, there was a little republic. It was mountainous and beautiful, located in the South Caucasus. Here was the ancient Amaras monastery, where the creator of the Armenian Alphabet Mesrop Mashtots founded the first-ever school that used his script - the Armenian Letters, in the 4th century. Many other Armenian Christian monasteries and churches from the 4th, 8th, 13th and different centuries are located in this area.

This is a magical place - the Republic of Artsakh, although you may have heard it called Karabakh. Depending on who you ask that means Black Garden or a Beautiful Garden.

Stalin’s legacy

Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but for me, it is HOME. The conflict over Karabakh dates back to the early days of the Soviet Union when the boundaries of a new empire were being drawn. It was Joseph Stalin’s idea to award the territory of Karabakh, inhabited by Armenians for centuries, to Soviet Azerbaijan, which produced 60% of the oil of the USSR. But Karabakh would remain semi-autonomous and Armenians actually remained a firm majority there even though ethnic crimes increased over the next decades.

In February 1988 mobs of Azerbaijanis in the seaside town of Sumgait began to attack and kill Armenians in the town. That is when Armenians in Karabakh and in Armenia rose after protests

and in 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the people of Karabakh voted to regain independence, just like Armenia, Azerbaijan and other Soviet countries. Of course, Azerbaijan didn’t like that. That is how the first war started. In the early 1990s, Armenians from all over the world came to Artsakh to fight in an intense ground war. When a ceasefire was brokered in 1994 Armenians were in control of Artsakh and several surrounding regions. So the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Minsk Group, co-chaired by Russia, France, and the United States, was charged with organizing the peace process. But negotiations failed and Artsakh was never recognized. Azerbaijan continued to dream of revenge.

A peaceful capital

This area is not so rich in natural resources, but it seems like heaven on earth. Clean mountain air, green and dense forests, pristine water from the mountains, and kind, smiling people. Here, for example, in public transport, you will never be afraid that someone might steal something from your bag. Such things do not happen in Artsakh. Children can play quietly for hours in the yard, and parents don't even think that someone can harm them. While walking in the capital city - Stepanakert, it is impossible to see any garbage on the street, people keep the environment very clean. People do not usually take their parents to the care home, but take care of them themselves and enjoy the presence of their parents until the last day. Everyone cares about each other and just wants to live peacefully in their homes. I was born in Stepanakert and grew up in just such an environment.

The first day

On September 27, 2020, we woke up in the morning to the sounds of an explosion. At first, I thought it was just a nightmare. But then, when I saw my little sister trembling with fear, I realized that it was real, and the war had begun. Azerbaijan attacked Artsakh and used various prohibited weapons, targeting ordinary people like me. My family and everyone went down to the basements, the first floors of our houses, or wherever we could hide. However, we were aware that we would not be saved in case of a direct hit, of course.

I was working as a journalist in an Armenian media outlet Civilnet at that time and could not sit idly by. My cameraman and I went out into the streets together to see what evidence we could film. I started my work as a journalist only two months before the war and it would be a lie to say that I was the most experienced one. However, at that moment there was no more time, it was necessary to get together and do what you can. Our colleagues from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, joined us and together we began to tell stories about the war. I turned from a novice journalist into a war correspondent.

The diary of war

All my family was in this war: my mother worked in the hospital and I saw her only several times during those 44 days of the war; my brother was called to the frontline on the first day and was in the war till the end; my father, a veteran and a disabled person from the First Artsakh War, helped transport military equipment. For us it wasn’t like ‘going to war’, for us it was ‘protecting our home’.

I started to write posts - diaries every day and post them online. Here is a paragraph from the first day:

‘I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. No matter how much my parents insisted, I decided to go out into the city and work. I am not a war journalist, of course, but this is not simply a job. These events are happening in my Artsakh. Today, for the first time, I witnessed the traces of explosions, scattered pieces of rockets, wounded people and a drone flying and exploding in the air… I think that’s enough for a day.’

The diaries became quite popular by that time, especially after some days, when my cameraman was also called to the frontline. I couldn’t make video reports myself, and then I started to write and photograph more. I understood that I don’t want to write about politics, but rather about human beings, who suffer, hope, smile, cry, lose, and love.

‘Today my friend Mike from the USA, also a reporter, asked the five-year-old boy Marat what he would do if he had a lot of money. We met the family of Marat in a basement of an old school. He replied, “I would buy a watch and sunglasses.” Mike took his Lacoste glasses out of his bag and gave them to Marat as a gift. “Try them on!” And Marat, not knowing how to put them on, wore them backwards. We all laughed and helped him to do it properly. They were too big for him but he was incredibly happy. We looked at the boy and said, “Marat, you have to be careful, they cost a fortune!” We all had a good laugh…’

Sometimes it was very difficult to stay resilient…

‘Day 15: October 11, 2020

It already feels like Groundhog Day. Stepanakert isn’t being bombed, at least that is how it seems so far since I’m still in the basement. The drones flew and fell, but I did not hear talk of victims. The weather was great today, but it was scary to go outside. Sometimes, it feels like I will never be able to go out into the street. I woke up at midnight and I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night from yesterday’s heavy bombing. We already can distinguish the sounds—when it’s a Smerch, when it’s a drone, when it’s cluster bombs, and when it’s us hitting their drone. It is sad that we can distinguish these sounds. But what can we do? This is our reality for today.’

During the war, I and my diaries experienced a lot. I heard that the hospital where my mother works was bombed. I headed there and found her, thanks to God, safe and sound. I saw a man repairing his garage as cluster bombs were falling; a woman making tea between an intermission of the bombs; the targeting against the civilian population; a human rights defender who could not see asking the world not to be blind; soldiers being baptised in the middle of the war; a man dying in a hospital; houses without faces; closets abandoned; toys left behind; mothers who lost the meaning of the lives - their sons…

The war was over with our loss… We didn’t win, although we thought we will… Azerbaijan conquered nearly 70% of Artsakh. Thousands of people lost their lives, and thousands lost their homes and became displaced persons. The war continued for 44 days and 150 000 Armenians of Artsakh and millions of Armenians in Armenia and Diaspora will never forget those bloody days.

Writing the diaries for me was a way to express myself, as sometimes it seemed that I could go insane. I also felt that by doing that I am useful to others. And that is a very important factor for me. I, like everyone else, wanted to be useful. Mostly the women and children left for Armenia, to a safer place, than Artsakh. They went there to wait until the war is over, and later they came back home. I felt that people who are outside couldn’t really know what happens there. That is why I wanted to give them information first-hand.

During the war, I met many wonderful people. I also met a director, Garin Hovannisian, who came to Artsakh from Armenia to film the war and my diaries. After the war, he supported me in publishing the diaries as a book: 44 days: Diary From an Invisible War. Together we made a documentary on the Artsakh war - Invisible Republic, which is now, after taking part in film festivals, available for watching.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

19 April 2024

5 min read

Cutting America to the bone

Civil War warns against worshipping civic and political violence.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. His research interests include political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and faith-based investment in global development.

An explosion occurs at the Lincoln Memorail

Civil War's finale in Washington DC.

A24.

The president of the United States is dead. The film Civil War culminates with soldiers of the Western Forces (a fictional secessionist group composed of California and Texas) posing for pictures with a presidential corpse just minutes after executing him. It’s a chilling climax, with optics reminiscent of American soldiers capturing deposed president of Iraq Saddam Hussein in 2003. The film ends with a warning. No democratic country, no matter the perceived strength of its institutions, is immune from tyranny, civil violence, and the bloody process of state failure. Collapse follows when states lose the capacity to provide solutions to the linchpin challenges negatively affecting their citizens.

A strength of Civil War is the way it articulates a universal political message without defiling itself with the toxic hyper-partisanship asphyxiating real-world American society.

It features a number of loyalist and secessionist geopolitical groups each motivated by a distinctive combination of social, economic, and political interests and goals. These groups include the Western Forces, Florida Alliance, New People’s Army, and Loyalist States.

The film’s storyline prioritises a violently unfolding near future civil war in a United States whose president bucked constitutional tradition by remaining in office for a third term. The president, whose character is modelled after Donald Trump, is the villain of the film, despite being supported by over half of the 50 American states. The Western Forces function as the film's hero group. Unlike the mercilessly murderous and viciously xenophobic soldiers affiliated with the Loyalist States, the soldiers of the Western Forces treat an eclectic team of journalists and war photographers (the film’s main protagonists) with kindness and respect, allowing them to accompany them during the final stages of their assault on the White House and entrance into the belly of the beast, the Oval Office.

The film includes shocking scenes that would make the most patriotic Americans shudder. Shortly after it begins, a suicide bomber associated with the Loyalist States, proudly carrying a large American flag, sprints into the centre of a group of vulnerable people, pleading with agents charged with guarding a water tanker, and detonates a bomb. Dozens of people including children are killed, many of whom were non-White Americans. This scene's power is that it bring home the threats Americans associate with foreign lands. Suddenly the menaces Americans instinctively link with states like Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela exist in cities like Charlottesville, New York, and Washington DC. America is no longer safe, and the threats have come from within instead of from abroad.

The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully.

As an American watching this film from a cozy cinema in Oxford, I thought about how the violence, polarisation, and civic rage depicted in the film already exists in many forms in the country I love from a distance. Shootings, many of them mass in nature, happen every day in an America whose citizens are comfortable with violence but afraid of each other. The United States suffers from an embarrassingly high association with mass shootings, far more than whichever county manages to claim an ignominious second place. Whilst it is unlikely tanks and attack helicopters will surround the White House anytime soon, the casual spirit of violence that has overtaken American society already fosters a level of violence far above the threshold any twenty first century democratic state should tolerate.

I watched this film as a proud American and as a committed Christian, a faith I share with many of my fellow American citizens. My Bible, and theirs, does say we are “citizens of heaven” destined to enjoy an eternal posterity in a New Creation marked by perfect peace and prosperity. However, until Christ returns, and God remakes the cosmos, Christians do have a vital role to play in their everyday civic communities. Whilst Civil War offers a grim view of America’s immediate political future, that message of Christ contains the content needed to cure the gravest challenges bedevilling the United States. I remain optimistic.

Not all Americans identify as Christians or even with organised religion; nevertheless, twentieth century history confirms that states that altogether ignore God will soon wither into an ecosystemic abyss of state-sponsored moral relativism that endorses the use of violence for an increasing, arbitrary range of unsuitable, injudicious, and illegitimate purposes. The message of Christ applies to theocracies and secular states alike. Every state, regardless of its attitudes toward religion, has an interest in its people living together peacefully. Humans need a moral system to provide them (as well as their societies at large) with at least a perceived sense of moral structure. Christ’s message articulates a concept of civic love that challenges the existing worship of civic and political violence. Christ argues that violence in moments of disagreement or dismay is never the appropriate option; the mark of genuine Christian devotion is revealed in the avoidance of violent action even when the use of violence would not categorically be condemned by observers.

Civil War explains how multiple, competing Americas exist. These Americas have different cultures, economic capacities, and sociopolitical ideologies. It teaches that America’s main problem is Americans only love other Americans like them. A number of enclaves exist across American society. Cut off from each other, the development of these enclaves has led to the emergence of micro-Americas so distinctive from each other that some of them no longer view formal geopolitical ties with other micro-Americas as in their best interest.

The same enclavisation portrayed in Civil War exists in the nonfictional, real-life America. However, unlike in the America depicted in the film, the real-life America still has time to solve its sociopolitical troubles and stop the American state from collapsing. I recommend Civil War to anyone interested in being entertained and warned by what a dystopian, worst-case-scenario of near-future American political activity might actually look like.