I have a new dispatch on Slate from Armenia:
I had come to Armenia at one of the most difficult times in the nation’s history, and it was about to get worse. On Sept. 27, Azerbaijan had launched a full-scale offensive in order to recapture Karabakh, an enclave within its territory that it lost to Armenians nearly three decades earlier.
By the time I got there, about a month into the war, Armenia was losing. The individual human cost was visible here at the refugee center, in the stories of people who had had to flee their homes ahead of the advancing Azerbaijani forces. If Azerbaijanis managed to take all of Karabakh, the territory’s entire population of 150,000 residents—virtually all ethnic Armenians —would likely become refugees.
But the loss was also being experienced at a different level among Armenians, at a national and existential scale. For Armenians, Karabakh is an integral part of their national identity. One common formulation has it that the nation is a “trinity,” consisting of the country of Armenia, Karabakh, and the large global Armenian diaspora.
Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation.
Read the whole thing here.