by Davit Beglaryan

 

Today, Armenia’s National Assembly passed a law establishing a new national day of remembrance for those who were killed while defending the homeland. On the surface, the initiative appears unassailable. It invokes memory, respect, sacrifice, and unity. These are words that discourage objection by design.

But this law is not about remembrance.
It is a state instrument for depoliticizing defeat and insulating power from responsibility.

The authors of the initiative have openly emphasized what they describe as its defining feature: the remembrance day is not tied to any specific historical event. It is framed as universal, all-encompassing, and deliberately “depoliticized.” This choice is deliberate. It defines the law’s entire logic.

Memory detached from concrete events, decisions, and consequences is not memory. It is an administrative ritual.

By refusing to anchor remembrance in specific wars, dates, and political responsibility, the law severs death from causality. Once this link is broken, memory loses its capacity to accuse, to question, or to demand conclusions. What remains is a safe, standardized form, harmless to those who exercised power.

Managed grief, scheduled by the state

The law establishes January 27 as the official day of remembrance, marked by a state-sanctioned ceremony. The following day, January 28, is Armed Forces Day. This sequencing is not incidental.

On January 27, grief is permitted, but only in a controlled and ritualized form. On January 28, it is immediately overwritten by military celebration. There is no space between the two for reckoning. Mourning is allowed only as a prelude to affirmation.

This is narrative engineering. Loss is acknowledged just long enough to be absorbed into a story of continuity and strength. The fallen are not remembered as a reason to interrogate the cost of war, but as an emotional backdrop that closes discussion rather than opening it.

Personal tragedy as political insulation

Particular attention must be paid to one of the law’s authors, MP Gegham Nazaryan, whose son was killed in the 2020 Artsakh War. This fact is repeatedly cited as proof of the law’s moral legitimacy.

The issue here is not Nazaryan’s personal loss. His grief is real and unquestionable. The issue is how that loss is politically instrumentalized.

Nazaryan’s role provides the law with emotional insulation. Criticism of the policy can now be reframed as an attack on a grieving father rather than a challenge to a deliberate state choice. Personal tragedy becomes a shield against scrutiny.

Within this framework, grief replaces accountability. A specific war, shaped by identifiable political and military decisions, is dissolved into a universal narrative of sacrifice. Loss is acknowledged; responsibility is not.

This is not respect for the fallen.
 It is the neutralization of grief itself.

The unnamed dead and the fiction of “universal remembrance”

The emptiness of the law becomes undeniable when confronted with a basic fact. To this day, the authorities have not published a complete, official list of all servicemen killed during the 2020 Artsakh War and the military actions that followed.

A state that has not named its dead has no moral right to legislate remembrance.

Without names, there is no memory. There is only an anonymous mass, convenient for ceremonies and speeches. The same institutions that now proclaim “universal remembrance” have failed for years to perform the most elementary act of respect.

This is not an oversight. It is a pattern.

Since 2020, there has been no comprehensive public investigation into the war, no institutional accounting of decisions made, and no political responsibility assumed. Symbolic gestures have consistently replaced substantive reckoning. This law fits squarely within that trajectory.

“Died for the Homeland” as a rhetorical solvent

At the center of the law lies the phrase “died for the Homeland.” Its breadth is presented as a virtue. In practice, it functions as a solvent.

The phrase collapses distinctions: defensive wars and peacetime deaths, acts of conscious heroism and losses caused by negligence, battlefield realities and political or command failures. By declaring all deaths morally equivalent, the law removes them from scrutiny.

Analysis is replaced by solemn rhetoric. Responsibility is replaced by silence. The essential question is never asked: why did these specific people die, and could their deaths have been prevented?

This generalization does not unite society.
 It insulates decision-makers.

One date to manage many pasts

Creating a single, legally mandated day of remembrance is not a neutral act. It is a mechanism of memory management.

Instead of multiple dates tied to specific events and requiring separate reflection, society is given one standardized day. It is emotionally predictable and politically safe. Memory is centralized, and in the process, rendered politically inert.

Abstract remembrance does not accuse. It does not connect past mistakes to present authority. It ensures that defeat remains symbolic rather than accountable.

A day off instead of responsibility

Designating the remembrance day as a non-working day is an easy administrative gesture. But memory cannot be outsourced to a calendar.

Real remembrance requires work: published names, open archives, public debate, investigation, and the willingness to confront failure alongside sacrifice. The law offers none of this. It substitutes ceremony for responsibility.

What this law actually does

This law does not preserve memory.
 It manages it.

It disconnects death from decision-making.
 It depoliticizes defeat.
 It renders grief politically harmless.

It does not help society understand why people died or what they died for. It offers closure without understanding, ritual without truth.

This is not respect for the fallen.
 It is comfort for those in power.

It is not an honest engagement with the past.
 It is its careful administrative closure.