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An Armenian-American, Melkonian left the United States and arrived in Iran in 1978
during the beginning of the 1979 Revolution, taking part in demonstrations against
the Shah. Following the collapse of the Shah's monarchy, he traveled to Lebanon
during the height of the civil war and served in an Armenian militia group in the
Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud. In ASALA, he took part in the assassinations of
several Turkish diplomats in Europe during the early to mid-1980s. He planned the
1981 Turkish consulate attack in Paris.[3] He was later arrested and sent to prison
in France. In 1989, he was released and in the following year, acquired a visa to
travel to Armenia.
Melkonian had no prior service record in any country's army before being placed in
command of an estimated 4,000 men in the Nagorno-Karabakh War.[4] He had largely
built his military experience beginning from the late 1970s and 1980s, when he
fought in Lebanon with ASALA. Melkonian fought against various factions in the
Lebanese Civil War and against the IDF in the 1982 war.
Melkonian carried several aliases over his career and was known as Avo to the
troops under his command in Nagorno-Karabakh. The last years of his life were spent
fighting with the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army.[5] Monte was killed by Azerbaijani
soldiers while surveying Merzili with five of his comrades in the aftermath of
battle.[6] He was buried at Yerablur cemetery in Yerevan and declared a National
Hero of Armenia in 1996.[7]
Contents
1 Early life
1.1 Youth
1.2 Education
2 Departure from home
2.1 Teaching in Iran
2.2 Civil war in Lebanon
2.3 ASALA
2.4 Arrest and imprisonment
3 Armenia
3.1 Nagorno-Karabakh
4 Death and legacy
4.1 Public image
5 Views and beliefs
5.1 Political views
5.2 Religion
5.3 Alcohol consumption
6 Personal life
7 Awards
8 References
9 Bibliography
10 External links
Early life
Youth
Melkonian was born on November 25, 1957 at Visalia Municipal Hospital in Visalia,
California to Charles (1918−2006)[8] and Zabel Melkonian (1920−2012).[9] He was the
third of four children born to a self-employed cabinetmaker and an elementary-
school teacher.[10] By all accounts, Melkonian was described as an all-American
child who joined the Boy Scouts and was a pitcher in Little League baseball.[11]
Melkonian's parents rarely talked about their Armenian heritage with their
children, often referring to the place of their ancestors as the "Old Country." His
interest in his background only sparked at the age of eleven, when his family went
on a year-long trip to Europe in 1969.
While taking Spanish language courses in Spain, his teacher had posed him the
question of where he was from. Dissatisfied with Melkonian's answer of
"California", the teacher rephrased the question by asking "where did your
ancestors come from?" His brother Markar Melkonian remarked that "her image of us
was not at all like our image of ourselves. She did not view us as the Americans we
had always assumed we were." From this moment on, for days and months to come,
Markar continues, "Monte pondered [their teacher Señorita] Blanca's question Where
are you from?"[12]
In the spring of that year, the family also traveled across Turkey to visit the
town of Merzifon, where Melkonian's maternal grandparents were from. Merzifon's
population at the time was 23,475 but was almost completely devoid of its once
17,000-strong Armenian population that was wiped out during the Armenian Genocide
in 1915. They did find one Armenian family of the three that was living in the
town, however, Melkonian soon learned that the only reason this was so, was because
the head of the family in 1915 had exchanged the safety of his family in return for
identifying all the Armenians in the town to Turkish authorities during the
genocide.[13] Monte would later confide to his wife that "he was never the same
after that visit....He saw the place that had been lost."[11]
ASALA
In the spring of 1980, Monte was inducted into the Armenian Secret Army for the
Liberation of Armenia, 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 militant 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 criminal carrying a
Cypriot passport bearing the name "Dimitri Georgiu." Following the detonation of
several bombs in Paris aimed at gaining his release, "Georgiu" was returned to
Lebanon where he revealed his identity as 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, the shooting of Hagopian's two closest aides at a military camp in
Lebanon finally led to the open breach. This impetuous action was perpetrated by
one individual who was not closely affiliated with Monte. As a result of this
action, however, Hagopian took revenge by personally torturing and executing two of
Monte's dearest comrades, Garlen Ananian and Arum Vartanian.
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 his
girlfriend Seda. Together they spent year and a half living underground in various
countries of eastern Europe in relative poverty, as one regime after another
disintegrated.
Armenia
On October 6, 1990 Monte arrived in what was then still Soviet Armenia. During the
first 8 months in Armenia, Melkonian worked in the Armenian Academy of Sciences,
where he prepared an archaeological research monograph on Urartian cave tombs,
which was posthumously published in 1995.[16]
Finding himself on Armenian soil after many years, he wrote in a letter that he
found a lot of confusion among his compatriots. Armenia faced enormous economic,
political and environmental problems at every turn, problems that had festered for
decades. New political forces bent on dismantling the Soviet Union were taking
Armenia in a direction that Monte believed was bound to exacerbate the crisis and
produce more problems. He believed that "a national blunder was taking place right
before his eyes."[17]
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
[Karabagh]," the bulletin of the Karabakh 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 Karabakh, 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.[citation needed]
Nagorno-Karabakh
In April 1993, Melkonian was one of the chief military strategists who planned and
led the operation to fight Azeri fighters and capture the region of Kalbajar of
Azerbaijan which lies between Armenia and former NKAO. Armenian forces captured the
region in four days of heavy fighting, sustaining far fewer fatalities than the
enemy.[5]
Death and legacy
Monte was buried with full military honors on June 19, 1993 at Yerablur military
cemetery in the outskirts of Yerevan, where his coffin was brought from the Surb
Zoravar Church in the city center.[19] Some 50,000 to 100,000 people (some reports
put the figure as high as 250,000),[20] including Armenian President Levon Ter-
Petrosyan,[11][21][22] acting Defense Minister Vazgen Manukyan, Deputy Foreign
Minister Gerard Libaridian, government officials, and parliamentarians attended his
funeral.[19]
Public image
Monte had become a legend in Armenia and Karabakh by the time of his death.[22] Due
to his international socialist and Armenian nationalist views, one author described
him as a mix between the early 20th century Armenian military commander Andranik
and Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.[28] Thomas de Waal described him as a
"professional warrior and an extreme Armenian nationalist"[29] who is "the most
celebrated Armenian commander" of the Nagorno-Karabakh War.[2] Raymond Bonner wrote
in 1993 that Monte had charisma and discipline, which is why he "rapidly became the
most highly regarded commander in the Karabakh War."[21] Historian Razmik Panossian
wrote that Monte was "a charismatic and very capable commander."[30] Armenia's
Defense Minister Vazgen Sargsyan called Monte the most honest person in the world.
[31]
Maile Melkonian, Monte's sister wrote in response to David Rieff's 1997 article in
Foreign Affairs that Melkonian was never associated with and was not a supporter of
the views of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks).[40]
Religion
According to Vorbach Melkonian had become an atheist at the time of his
revolutionary activities.[41]
Alcohol consumption
Raymond Bonner wrote that Monte was said to have led an exemplary life by not
smoking and drinking.[21] Monte is widely known to have forbidden his soldiers
consumption of alcohol.[29] He also established a policy of collecting a tax in
kind on Martuni wine, in the form of diesel and ammunition for his fighters.[42]
Personal life
Monte Melkonian married his long-time girlfriend Seda Kebranian at the Geghard
monastery in Armenia in August 1991. They had met in the late 1970s in Lebanon. In
a 1993 interview Monte said that they had had no time to start a family. He stated,
"We'll settle down when the Armenian people's struggle is over."[43]
As of 2013 Seda, an activist and a lecturer, resided in Anchorage, Alaska with her
husband Joel Condon who is a professor of architecture at the University of Alaska
Anchorage.[44][45]
Awards
sources:[7][46]
Early investigators of the 18th century who suspected that the electrical force
diminished with distance as the force of gravity did (i.e., as the inverse square
of the distance) included Daniel Bernoulli[15] and Alessandro Volta, both of whom
measured the force between plates of a capacitor, and Franz Aepinus who supposed
the inverse-square law in 1758.[16]
In the early 1770s, the dependence of the force between charged bodies upon both
distance and charge had already been discovered, but not published, by Henry
Cavendish of England.[21]
The torsion balance consists of a bar suspended from its middle by a thin fiber.
The fiber acts as a very weak torsion spring. In Coulomb's experiment, the torsion
balance was an insulating rod with a metal-coated ball attached to one end,
suspended by a silk thread. The ball was charged with a known charge of static
electricity, and a second charged ball of the same polarity was brought near it.
The two charged balls repelled one another, twisting the fiber through a certain
angle, which could be read from a scale on the instrument. By knowing how much
force it took to twist the fiber through a given angle, Coulomb was able to
calculate the force between the balls and derive his inverse-square proportionality
law.n Through Peace and War. New York: New York University Press.
de Waal, Thomas (2013). Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War
(2nd (revised and updated) ed.). NYU Press.
Melkonian, Markar (2005). My Brother's Road, An American's Fateful Journey to
Armenia. New York: I.B. Tauris.
Melkonian, Monte (1990). The Right to Struggle: Selected Writings of Monte
Melkonian on the Armenian National Question. San Francisco: Sardarabad Collective
Krikorian, Michael (2007). ""Excuse me, how do I get to the front?" The Brothers
Monte and Markar Melkonian (Los Angeles)". In von Voss, Huberta (ed.). Portraits of
Hope: Armenians in the Contemporary World. Berghahn Books. pp. 237–242. ISBN 978-1-
84545-257-5.
Vorbach, Joseph E. (1994). "Monte Melkonian: Armenian revolutionary leader".
Terrorism and Political Violence. 6 (2): 178–195. doi:10.1080/09546559408427253.
Zurcher, Christopher (2009). The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and
Nationhood in the Caucasus. NYU Pre