Why Won't They Release the War Dead's Names?
How can you keep the list of people who died in such a catastrophic war secret?
Asbed opens by noting that an official figure has begun to emerge for the dead of the 2020 44-Day War, after Vahagn Khachaturyan corrected his numbers to around 4,800 casualties. He asks whether Hovik is satisfied that the government now has an official number. Hovik’s answer is immediate: of course not. Having a number is not the same as knowing who these people were.
Hovik pushes for specifics, the exact names, where and when each person died, the time of day and the date. He argues that this detail matters because it will tell a story, and in his view that story is one of betrayal by Pashinyan. Asbed broadens the question beyond the 44 days of 2020 to the September 2022 border attack and the final defense of Artsakh in 2023, asking how those deaths are being accounted for. Hovik’s reply is blunt: the same policy of complete silence, with no names released.
The moment carries weight because it fuses grief, dignity, and accountability into a single demand. Hovik invokes how families from World War II still search for the remains of loved ones decades later, and argues that any dignified peace requires that Armenia’s dead be fully known and named. Tied to human rights, memory, and the wider story of the loss of Artsakh, which was ethnically cleansed of its more than 150,000 Armenian inhabitants in September 2023, this clip poses a question that is hard to look away from: why keep the names of the fallen secret, and what does that silence conceal?
Transcript
Hovik Manucharyan: Of course not. This is, you know, I should say they have an official number, but who are these people? I mean, how can you keep the list of people who died in such a major catastrophic war secret? And what are you trying to hide? You know, so we want their exact names. We want to know where they died exactly, the time of day, the date when they died, because all of that is going to be important. And I think that will tell a story. It will tell a story of betrayal by Pashinyan, I think.
Asbed Bedrossian: Now, Hovik, there's something else that I want to know.
Hovik Manucharyan: autopsies, including volunteers.
Asbed Bedrossian: We're talking about the 44-day war in 2020. If you look at a lot of people, they don't look at the war as having been a 44-day war. They feel like that war is still going on or went on for at least two or three more years. how is the government accounting for the people who died in the September 12-13 war in 2022 and then all the way until the deaths in the final defense of Artsakh in 2023? How are those being accounted?
Hovik Manucharyan: Same policy, same policy, complete silence, they won't release any of the names. Part of it, I think, has to do with also trying to downgrade the memory, because,