Unlike his predecessor, the current head of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS), Andranik Simonian, has refused to meet with their representatives since taking up his post last June.
At least 198 soldiers as well as 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed during the 24-hour hostilities that enabled Azerbaijan to regain control over the region. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged around 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia.
Karabakh’s leadership agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s ethnic Armenian residents to flee to Armenia. The refugees included the parents, wives and other relatives of the Karabakh soldiers killed in action. They left their homeland just days after hastily burying their loved ones.
Many of those bereaved refugees still hope to have the bodies of their soldiers exhumed, transported to Armenia and reburied there. They include Anzhela Arzumanian whose son, Vachagan Dadalian, was killed on the first day of the Azerbaijani assault.
“We barely managed to organize his funeral in the cemetery of the town of Martuni,” Arzumanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Thursday. “Since September 30, 2023, we have applied to various bodies in Armenia and to this day, two and a half years on, no one has provided a solution to our issue.”
Arzumanian spoke as she and several dozen other parents of fallen soldiers rallied outside the NSS headquarters in Yerevan to demand a meeting with Simonian. They were told that the NSS director, who also heads an Armenian government commission on prisoners of war and missing persons, is too busy to talk to them.
Their representatives were repeatedly received by Simonian’s predecessor Armen Abazian, who was sacked by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in June. According to Arzumanian, Abazian assured them at the last meeting that it is “possible to solve this problem.”
Simonian visited Baku last September with the declared aim of attending an international conference organized there by Azerbaijan’s State Security Service. The NSS never reported any details of the unprecedented trip.
It remains unclear whether Pashinian’s government has raised the issue of the fallen Karabakh soldiers’ reburial during its peace talks with Baku. Pashinian again alleged last week that the Karabakh Armenians did not fight back during the Azerbaijani offensive. Samvel Shahramanian, who led Karabakh at the time, rejected the allegations as false and “provocative” on Thursday.