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Monte Melkonian (November 25, 1957 – June 12,1993) was a famed Armenian military commander in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. He is credited for the major military victories against Azerbaijan from 1992-1993. Melkonian had no prior service record in any country's army before being placed in command of an estimated 4,000 men in the war. He had built up his experience beginning from the late 1970s and 1980s where he fought against the various splintering factions in the Lebanese Civil War, against Israeli troops in the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon and was a member of the Armenian terrorist group ASALA. Throughout this tenure, Monte had several aliases including "Abu Sindi", "Saro", "Timothy Sean McCormack" and "Commander Avo"; the latter of which was the name addressed by troops under his command.

Youth

Melkonian was born on November 25, 1957 in Tulare County, California. He was the third of four children born to a self-employed cabinetmaker and an elementary-school teacher. At the age of fifteen, he left for Japan, originally in a youth exchange program. Once there, however, he extended his stay to a year, studying martial arts and learning the language. (In the early 1980s, Monte went to serve as a Japanese-French translator at a press conference for members of the Japanese Red Army) From Japan he traveled on his own to southeast Asia, including Vietnam not long before the North defeated the South in 1975. This trip exerted a lifelong influence on him. In a videotaped interview in early 1992, he pointed to the Vietnamese national liberation struggle as an inspirational example for the struggle of Nagorno-Karabagh. Returning to the U.S., he graduated from high school and entered the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in ancient Asian history and archaeology. In 1978 he helped to organize an exhibition of Armenian cultural artifacts at one of the university’s libraries. The section of the exhibit dealing with the 1915-19 genocide was removed by university authorities, at the request of the Turkish consul general in San Francisco. The display that was removed was eventually reinstalled, however, as university officials reluctantly bowed to pressure from a campus protest movement.

Revolution, Civil War and Prison

After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in the spring of 1978, however, Monte traveled to Iran, where he taught English and participated in the movement to overthrow the Shah. He helped organize a teachers’ strike at his school in Teheran, and was in the vicinity of the square at Medaneh Jaleh when the Shah’s troops opened fire on protesters, killing and injuring many. Later, he found his way to Iranian Kurdistan, where Kurdish partisans made a deep impression on him. Years later, in southern Lebanon, he occasionally wore the uniform of the Kurdish peshmerga which he was given in Iranian Kurdistan.

In the fall of 1978, Monte made his way to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, in time to participate in the defense of the Armenian quarter against by the right-wing Phalange forces. At this time, he met his long-time confidante and future wife, Seta Kbranian. Monte was a member of the Armenian militia in Bourj Hammoud for almost two years, during which time he participated in several street battles against rightist forces. He also began working behind the lines in Phalangist controlled territory, on behalf of the "Leftist and Muslim" Lebanese National Movement. By this time, he was speaking Armenian-a language he had not learn until adulthood (Armenian was the forth of fifth language Monte learned to speak fluently, after Spanish, French and Japanese. In addition, he spoke passable Arabic, Italian and Turkish, as well as some Farsi and Kurdish).

In the spring of 1980, Monte was inducted into the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenian, ASALA, and secretly relocated to West Beirut. For the next three years he was an ASALA militant and contributor to the group’s journal, Hayastan. During this time several Palestinian resistance organizations provided their Armenian comrade with extensive military training. Monte carried out armed operations in Rome, Athens and elsewhere, and he helped to plan and train commandos for the "Van Operation" of September 24, 1981, in which four ASALA militants took over the Turkish embassy in Paris and held it for several days. In November 1981, French police arrested and imprisoned a young, suspected "terrorist" carrying a Cypriot passport baring the name "Dinitri Georgiu." Following the detonation of several bombs in Paris aimed gaining his release, "Georgiu" was returned to Lebanon Where he revealed his identity an Monte Melkonian.

In mid-July 1983, ASALA violently split into two factions, one opposed to the group’s despotic leader, whose nom de guerre was Hagop Hagopian, and another supporting him. Although the lines of fissure had been deepening over the course of several years, one event-the shooting of Hagopian’s two closest aids at a military camp in Lebanon-finally led to the open breach. This impetuous action was perpetrated by on individual who was not closely affiliated with Monte. As a result of this action, however, Hagopian took revenge by personally torturing an executing two of Monte’s dearest comrades, Garlen Ananian and Arum Vartanian. In the aftermath of this split Monte spent over two years underground, in Lebanon and later in France. After testifying secretly for the defense in the trial of Armenian militant and accused bank robber Levon Minassian, he was arrested in Paris in November 1985, and sentenced to six years in prison for possession of falsified papers and and carrying an illegal handgun.

Armenia

Monte spent over three years in Fresnes and Poissy prisons. He was released in early 1989 and sent from France to South Yemen, where he was reunited with Seta. He then spent another year and a half living under-ground in eastern Europe, as one regime after another disintegrated around him. Eventually, he made his way to what was then still Soviet Armenia. Seta and Monte were married at the monastery of Geghart in August of 1991. Finding himself on Armenian soil after many long years, he wrote in a setter that he found a lot of confusion among his compatriots. Armenia faced enormous economic, political and environmental problems at every turn-problems which had festered for decades. Unfortunately, new political forces bent on dismantling the Soviet Union were taking Armenia in a direction which Monte believed was bound to exacerbate the crisis and produce even worse problems. The leaders of these forces gained overwhelming popular support in the late 1980s, thanks to what in retrospect appears to have been an unbroken series of arrogant reactions, miscalculations and blunders on the part of Mikhail Gorbachev and his would-be reformers. As a result, Yerevan was swept up in an atmosphere of chauvinism and exasperatingly foolish illusions about the West. Under these circumstances, it quickly became clear to Monte that, for better or for worse, the Soviet Union had no future and the coming years would be perilous ones for the Armenian people. He then focused his energy on Karabagh. "If we lose ," the bulletin of the Karabagh Defense Forces quoted him as saying, "we turn the final page of our people’s history." He believed that, if Azeri forces succeeded in deporting Armenians from Karabagh, they would advance on Zangezur and other regions of Armenia. Thus, he saw the fate of Karabagh as crucial for the long-term security of the entire Armenian nation. Ever true to his convictions, he fought in the Shahumian region north of Karabagh for three months in the fall of 1991. Forces with which he fought helped to recapture several key Armenian villages from Azeri forces. In a video lecture recorded in early 1992, Monte stated that, within the coming year, Armenians would either establish a land bridge linking the Republic of Armenia with Karabagh, or the Azeri military would succeed in "solving" the problem of Karabagh once and for all, by deporting Armenians en masse. Sure enough, within a year, Armenian forces-including fighters Monte led-opened and overland corridor through the town of Lachin, thus linking the Armenian Republic with Karabagh. After a short stint helping to defend the Ichevan region in northeastern Armenia against Azeri attack, Monte accepted a position as commander of the region of Martuni, in southeastern Karabagh. There, he reorganized fighters into an effective and disciplined force, armed in large part with captured Azeri equipment. Under his command, his three to four thousand fighters and fifty tanks successfully defended a mountainous region of 200 square miles, populated by some 28,000 people, mostly peasants involved in agriculture and wine production. His fighters recaptured much land and won one battle after another. Monte’s forces also fought on other fronts, in Mardakert and elsewhere. In April 1993, he was one of the chief military strategists who planned and led the operation to capture the region of Kelbajar, Between the Republic of Armenia and Karabagh. Although vastly outnumbered, Armenian forces captured the region in four sleepless days of heavy fighting, sustaining far fewer fatalities than the enemy. Throughout these operations, Monte maintained respect for Azeri non-combatants. On one occasion, his troops evacuated Azeri residents caught in the fighting, delivering them to safety by armored personnel carrier. In Kelbajar he addressed enemy soldiers by megaphone, assuring them in Turkish that those who were to lay down their arms and pull back from the front would not be fired on.

In the early stages of fighting in Karabagh, small groups of volunteers Fedayeen, or "brigades" (jogadner) played a major role in the fighting. Monte was a member of one such group in the Shahumian region. He quickly became disenchanted with them, however, for a number of reasons: their tendency to emulate the Azeri practice of executing captured prisoners; their adoption, in more than one case, of the aesthetic trapping of fascism: and their military inefficiency, compared to more professionally organized and disciplined regional. For these and perhaps other reasons, he set out to curtail the activities of the Fedayeen in Martuni. Monte never wore a pistol; he never smoked; he swore very rarely; and he never drank liquor while in military uniform. When he participated in the traditional toasts, he would raise a glass of yogurt. He handed his monthly salary over to cooks, cleaning women and the families of wounded soldiers, and time and again he turned down privileges, preferring to live under the same conditions as the fighters under his command. He established a policy of collecting a tax in kind on Martuni wine, in the form of diesel and ammunition for his fighters. One night in January 1993, he personally stopped a truck smuggling contraband wine to Stepanakert, and dumped the entire tank load onto the road. A couple of weeks before his death, he incurred the wrath of local Mafia bosses in Karabagh-and defied the advice of close friends-by burning a large field of cultivated cannabis plants.

Monte’s activities in Martuni were not limited to the military field. He supported the operation of a cooperative bakery in Martuni; he visited reactivated elementary schools and hospitals; and at the time of his death, he ant Seta were planning to set up a worker-owned carpet manufactory, to employ local women who were skilled weavers. In a country with a rigidly patriarchal culture, Monte discouraged discrimination against women, chiefly setting an example for men to follow in the conduct of their daily affairs. He washed dishes, appealed to women to fight on the front lines and considered female staff in the radio room and the kitchen at headquarters to be fighters on an equal footing with uniformed soldiers on the battlefield. His reputation for modesty and directness earned him the affection of the civilians he defended .

Monte was killed in the abandoned Azeri village of Merzuli in the early afternoon of June 12,1993, with controversial reports about circumstances of his death.

Monte was buried with full military honors on June 19, 1993. According to one estimate, some 15,000 people filed past his open casket as it lay in state at the Officer’s Hall in Yerevan. Among the dignitaries present were Levon ter-Petrossian, President of the Republic of Armenia, high-ranking Armenian and C.I.S. military leaders, and members of all the major political parties in the country.

References

1. Melkonian, Markar. My Brother's Road, An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 1850436355