Editor’s note: This commentary reflects the personal views of Davit Beglaryan. It does not represent the editorial position of 301, and its publication should not be understood as an endorsement by 301 of the views expressed below.
Ratko Mladić and Manvel Grigoryan belonged to different nations, fought in different wars and served within very different military structures.
But they belonged to the same generation of men.
A generation shaped not by comfortable politics, conferences or abstract discussions about borders, but by war.
Both became recognizable military figures at moments when their peoples believed that the future of their homeland was being decided on the battlefield. Both became inseparable from the wars that made them. And both remained deeply controversial long after the guns fell silent.
Mladić entered that period as a professional soldier.
Born in 1943, he spent decades in the Yugoslav People’s Army and rose through its officer corps before Yugoslavia collapsed. In May 1992, he became commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska and remained its dominant military commander throughout the Bosnian War.
Manvel Grigoryan followed a very different path.
He was not a career officer produced by a military academy or an established army. He emerged from the Armenian volunteer movement during the First Artsakh War and became one of its most recognizable commanders.
At a time when Armenia had barely begun building the institutions of an independent state, men like Grigoryan were already fighting.
There was no mature Armenian military machine waiting for them.
There were volunteers.
There were improvised units.
There were commanders learning war while fighting it.
There was Artsakh.
And there was the very real possibility that failure would mean the destruction or expulsion of Armenian communities.
Grigoryan became one of the military figures identified with that generation. He later entered Armenia’s institutional armed forces, rose to the rank of lieutenant general, served as deputy defense minister and became one of the leading figures of Yerkrapah, the organization that brought together veterans of the First Artsakh War.
Mladić represented the professional officer transformed by the collapse of an existing state.
Grigoryan represented the volunteer commander transformed by war into a senior officer of a newly independent one.
Different paths.
But a remarkably similar historical moment.
The beginning of the 1990s destroyed political realities that only a few years earlier had appeared permanent.
Yugoslavia disintegrated.
The Soviet Union disappeared.
Administrative borders became front lines.
Questions that politicians had once debated became questions answered with artillery, trenches and infantry.
For Serbs in Bosnia, the war became a struggle over territory, political status and the future of Serbian communities after the collapse of Yugoslavia.
For Armenians, the First Artsakh War became a struggle for the survival and self-determination of the Armenian population of Artsakh, while Armenia itself was trying simultaneously to survive an economic catastrophe, defend its borders and create the institutions of an independent state.
This was not conventional warfare between stable countries living behind established borders.
States were being created while people were fighting.
Armies were being formed while battles were already taking place.
Nobody had the luxury of waiting until institutions were perfect.
That environment produces a particular kind of commander.
His importance is not measured only by rank.
His name becomes attached to positions held, villages defended, offensives survived and territory won or lost.
He becomes part of the collective memory of a generation that remembers exactly what defeat could have meant.
That is where I see the strongest comparison between Ratko Mladić and Manvel Grigoryan.
Both became military symbols for significant parts of their respective societies.
For many Serbs in Republika Srpska, Mladić came to represent the army that fought to defend Serbian communities and secure the survival of Republika Srpska during the violent collapse of Yugoslavia.
For many Armenians who lived through the First Artsakh War, Grigoryan belonged to the generation of volunteer commanders who fought when Armenia and Artsakh did not yet possess the military institutions later generations would take for granted.
Their wars were not identical.
Their responsibilities were not identical.
The scale of their commands was not identical.
But both understood something that comfortable societies frequently forget.
A homeland is not an abstraction.
It is not a slogan printed on a poster.
It is the village where your family lived.
The church where generations were baptized.
The cemetery where your ancestors are buried.
The mountain you saw every morning as a child.
The road connecting one Armenian or Serbian community to another.
And sometimes it is simply a military position that must be held because losing it means that everything behind it becomes vulnerable.
During war, several kilometers can determine whether thousands of people remain in their homes or become refugees.
That is why nations remember wartime commanders differently from ordinary politicians.
Their reputations become connected to survival itself.
Manvel Grigoryan’s wartime reputation was built in precisely that environment.
He was one of the men who fought before victory was guaranteed, before Armenia had stable institutions and before anyone knew how the First Artsakh War would end.
That is the Manvel Grigoryan I remember first.
What happened to him decades later cannot be separated from the political environment that emerged in Armenia after 2018.
After the change of power, Grigoryan became the target of what I regard as a politically motivated prosecution designed not simply to prosecute one individual, but to publicly destroy one of the most recognizable military figures of the First Artsakh War.
The authorities did not treat the case merely as a criminal investigation.
They turned it into a spectacle.
Images from searches of properties linked to him were released and circulated across the country. Allegations were publicly presented in a way that encouraged people to reach their verdict before the judicial process had run its course.
The objective, in my view, was obvious.
Destroy the man politically.
Humiliate him publicly.
And then allow that image to overshadow everything he had done during the war.
It worked.
For part of Armenian society, the name Manvel Grigoryan quickly stopped meaning commander, volunteer or Artsakh War veteran and became associated almost exclusively with the accusations made against him after 2018.
That transformation did not happen accidentally.
It was the product of a political and media campaign.
Grigoryan spent a prolonged period in detention while suffering from serious health problems. He was eventually released in 2020 and died later that year.
For me, none of this erases the historical Manvel Grigoryan.
Governments can prosecute people.
Politicians can rewrite narratives.
Television can destroy reputations.
But none of them can travel back to the early 1990s and change who was standing on the battlefield when Armenia and Artsakh needed men willing to fight.
Whatever one thinks about Grigoryan’s postwar life, his role in the First Artsakh War belongs to Armenian history.
He was part of the generation that fought and won that war.
That cannot be retroactively confiscated from him.
Mladić’s postwar fate was, of course, very different and far more consequential internationally.
After years as a fugitive, he was arrested in Serbia in 2011 and transferred to The Hague. In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him of genocide in connection with Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and that sentence was upheld on appeal in 2021.
Those judgments are part of the historical record.
They cannot simply be ignored.
But neither can they erase the fact that many Serbs remember Mladić through an entirely different historical lens.
To his opponents, his name represents some of the darkest events of the Bosnian War.
To many of his supporters, particularly in Republika Srpska, he remained the commander who refused to surrender while Yugoslavia collapsed around him and Serbian communities fought for their political and territorial survival.
Both realities exist.
That is how historical memory works after war.
The commander regarded as a defender by one people may be remembered as something completely different by the people who fought against him.
There is no universal national memory of war.
There are Serbian memories.
Bosniak memories.
Croatian memories.
Armenian memories.
Azerbaijani memories.
Each is shaped by different graves, different refugees, different victories and different defeats.
Armenians should understand this better than most.
The commanders of the First Artsakh War are described entirely differently depending on whether the story is being told in Yerevan, Stepanakert or Baku.
That does not mean every historical claim is equally true.
It means that nations remember wars through their own experience of survival.
This is also why comparing Mladić and Grigoryan does not require pretending that they were identical.
They clearly were not.
Mladić commanded the Army of Republika Srpska at the highest level throughout much of the Bosnian War.
Grigoryan emerged from a volunteer movement and later became a senior officer in Armenia’s armed forces.
Their authority was different.
Their armies were different.
Their wars were different.
Their postwar histories were different.
And the international criminal judgments surrounding Mladić have no equivalent in Grigoryan’s biography.
The comparison lies somewhere deeper.
Both were products of an era when borders were collapsing and new ones were being created.
Both belonged to societies that believed military defeat could mean far more than losing territory on a map.
Both became inseparable from the wars that defined their generation.
And both became figures whose supporters continued to distinguish between the commander they remembered from the war and the judgments imposed upon them afterward.
Ratko Mladić’s death therefore closes another chapter of the generation that physically fought over the borders created by the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Armenians had their own generation forged during precisely the same historical period.
Men who became volunteers because there was nobody else to fight.
Men who became commanders because a war required commanders.
Men whose names became inseparable from the First Artsakh War.
Manvel Grigoryan was one of them.
I do not compare these two men because their biographies were identical.
They were not.
I compare them because they represent the same historical archetype.
The wartime commander whose name becomes inseparable from a national struggle.
The man remembered by his supporters not primarily through politics, courts or later controversies, but through the moment when everything appeared to be at stake.
Different nations.
Different armies.
Different wars.
Different legacies.
But two commanders forged by the same violent age.
An age when borders were not simply discussed around negotiating tables.
They were defended, lost and won on the battlefield.
