My Brother’s Road

"This really looks at the other side. The weakest part of Goltz’s book is that he makes only one trip to Armenia and it’s a very unsatisfactory chapter, so this is the other side of that war over Nagorno-Karabakh – which I myself have written a book on. This is an extraordinary read and it tells you the similarities and yet the differences between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. Just to give you some background, Markar Melkonian is the brother of this romantic warrior/scholar/terrorist, a Californian/Armenian archaeologist, who adopted the nationalist cause. He went to Lebanon and joined an Armenian terrorist group where he was responsible for murdering a Turkish diplomat and killing his daughter by mistake. He was a man with blood on his hands but also an extremely intelligent and, in his own way, incredibly principled man. He went off to Karabakh and was outraged by the corruption among the local Soviet Armenians. Anyway, he eventually got killed and his brother, Markar, wrote this unvarnished biography. Markar Melkonian doesn’t leave out any of the bad stuff, though obviously we get the heroic side. We see that on the Armenian side there was this Soviet, corrupt, fratricidal element to the conflict, but also there was an extra element, which was the worldwide Armenian nationalism that was people projecting the suffering of their grandparents at the hands of the Turks into this war against the Azerbaijani people. It was one of the things that actually helped the Armenians win."