Will You Help Free the Hostages and Protect the Armenian Nation?

A letter to my friends and family. For 148 years we have won the words and never once won the obligation. Here is the gap I found five weeks ago, why I did not see it before, and what it will take from us now.

Dear friends and family,

Some of you have known me since I was a boy. Some of you I have not spoken with in years. A few of you I have argued with, and we did not part agreeing. I would rather be writing to each of you on your own, and I am sorry that I am not.

I am writing to all of you at once because of something I found five weeks ago, and because there are men sitting in a prison in Baku tonight whom I know personally, and they are running out of time.

So I want to ask you something directly.

Will you help free the Armenian hostages?

I know these men

Let me tell you who they are, because none of this is abstract for me. I know these men. I have met them, worked alongside them, and broken bread with them. Some I have sat across a table from and argued with, because we did not see everything the same way. That is what people do when they are building something together.

They are the former political leadership of Artsakh, its military officers, and its humanitarian figures. Men like Ruben Vardanyan and Davit Ishkhanyan. In June many of them passed their thousandth day in a cell in Baku. One has now been held more than two thousand days. They have been put through proceedings that the International Commission of Jurists says bear the marks of political show trials. Behind them stand at least eighty forcibly disappeared Armenians and more than two hundred people still missing from Artsakh.

I have known Davit Ishkhanyan since the early 1990s. He is a close friend, and I do not use that word loosely. In more than thirty years I have never once seen him bend on a question of right and wrong. He holds himself to the same standard of moral and ethical conduct that my grandfather Shahan Natalie spent eight years impressing on me, and he holds it whether anyone is watching or not. He is a devoted servant of the Armenian people.

In February a court in Baku sentenced him to life in prison for it.

In May he got a message out to his family. Azerbaijani officials, he said, were telling them indirectly that they will be kept there as long as the Armenian authorities want.

Read that again. Not that Baku will not release them. That Yerevan has not asked.

A second clock

There is a second clock running, and it has nothing to do with any court.

Siranush Sahakyan, who represents these men before the European Court of Human Rights, reports serious injuries among them, including fractures. She says the conditions they are held in may be incompatible with life. Independent doctors are not allowed near them. Some have gone roughly six years without a proper medical examination.

One family describes a man who has lost so much weight he is skin and bones, and whose lower teeth have been knocked out. Another family put it more simply. We feel bad, everyone feels bad. One complains of heart problems, another of headaches. We are completely ignored. Gevorg Sujyan, released in January after years in that prison, said that after six in the evening there is not even a nurse on duty. A man could die in there and no one would come.

When people who have no teeth are sent dried fruit, that is not help. That is humiliation.

The family of Ruben Vardanyan, spring 2026

At the time I took that as a way of speaking about neglect. It is not.

And as I write this, it is being decided. The Baku Court of Appeal sat today. It sits again tomorrow. The prosecutors have asked the court to find every appeal unfounded and let every sentence stand. Life for Davit. Life for four others. Twenty years for Bako Sahakyan and Arkadi Ghukasyan. Twenty for Ruben Vardanyan. Fifteen to nineteen years for the rest. Armenian outlets covering these sessions put the word hearing in quotation marks. Having read the record, so would I.

They are hostages for one reason. They were doing the thing all of us said we believed in.

So everything that follows, about Washington, about the law, about what has and has not worked, I am saying about them. Not about a policy question. About men whose names I know and whose families are counting the days.

Now let me ask you the harder question, and I want an honest answer even if you only give it to yourself.

Have you quietly concluded that there is no justice for Armenians?

If you have, I understand why. Your reasons are sound, and for most of my life I would have given you the same answer. All I am asking is that you hold that conclusion loosely for a little while, because we have finally found why the system that should have protected us never has, and it is something we can fix.

Why you would be right to give up

In 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, the great powers signed a treaty that was supposed to protect us. Article 61 committed the Ottoman Empire to reforms and to guaranteeing the security of Armenians in their own provinces, and the powers agreed to superintend it.

On paper we had won. It produced nothing, because nothing was attached to it. No consequence for ignoring it, so it was ignored. Worse, it marked us. It told Constantinople that Armenians were a people with foreign patrons on the record and no patron willing to show up. What followed was the massacres, and then the Genocide.

Four months earlier, at San Stefano, that same promise had teeth. Russian troops sat in those provinces, and their withdrawal depended on the reforms actually happening. Berlin kept the promise word for word and deleted the party who could collect on it.

Khrimian Hayrig led our delegation to Berlin. They would not let him in the room. He came home to Constantinople and told the congregation what he had seen. There was a cauldron of harissa on the table, and the nations were stepping up to take their portion. The others drew their swords and used them as iron ladles. When he came forward with the petition our National Assembly had given him, they asked him where his iron ladle was. He had brought paper. A paper ladle, he told them, could not draw harissa from that cauldron.

So when Armenians today say the legal system does not work for us, I do not think that is cynicism. I think it is 148 years of evidence, read correctly.

Here is what I want you to notice, though. That conclusion is exactly what our enemies need us to reach. They do not have to win every argument. They only have to outlast us until we stop showing up. Our despair is a weapon we hold and they aim.

The man who asked the question

Before I tell you what I found, you should know who put the question to me.

The Prime Minister of Armenia has told the National Assembly that the country's borders are settled, that no significant part of the nation seeks to continue the Artsakh movement, and that Artsakh flags inside our own parliament amount to a war threat. When Armenia's leadership signed a declaration with the President of the United States in Washington last August, the hostages were not in it. Not one clause. Not one line. Asked how many Armenians Azerbaijan is holding, his Foreign Ministry would say only that the matter continues to be at the focus of its attention. It would not give a number. When General Davit Manukyan, serving life, addressed him directly from his cell this month, and said that those who are held there do not feel the breath of the Republic of Armenia, there was no reply.

He had washed his hands. Of Artsakh. Of the men in Baku. Of the right of the people of Artsakh to return to the homes they were driven out of.

And then, having done that, he stood up on 17 June and asked twice who is left thinking about the destiny of the homeland. Twice he answered himself with a sneer, and pointed at the man who went on hunger strike in 2013 before another country's president.

I am that man.

He meant it as mockery. I took it as a calling, because it is a fair question, and he had already made clear that he was not going to be the one to answer it.

So I went looking. Five weeks later I found the answer inside a victory we were celebrating.

What I found

On 22 July the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 44 to 7 for an amendment saying Azerbaijan should release all Armenian prisoners. Within hours our press announced that Congress had acted.

I went and read the record. The amendment as filed had two paragraphs. The second one named real tools. Full enforcement of Section 907, and Global Magnitsky sanctions. At the markup the chairman objected, and that paragraph was struck. What survived to a vote was one sentence saying Azerbaijan should. It sets no deadline. It names no consequence. It places no obligation on any American official. Then the bill it was attached to failed in the same committee, 23 to 28. It will never reach the House floor, never reach the Senate, never reach the President.

No sanction. No suspended aid. No deadline. Not one hostage home.

The defect is one word. Should, instead of shall.

An opinion is free, so it gets ignored. That is the same flaw that sat inside Article 61 in 1878. For 148 years we have obtained the words and never once obtained the obligation.

So we went back and audited the record. Not all 148 years, but the last fifty-one, the era of organized, funded, professional Armenian advocacy. Measure by measure. We published what we found in A Vote Without Consequences, with citations to the official record.

In fifty-one years, Congress has enacted exactly two binding Armenian statutes. Section 907 in 1992, and Section 620I in 1996. Section 907 was waived by the President every single year from 2002 through 2022. Section 620I was waived the one time it was ever triggered, in 1997, and has never been applied since. Everything else that passed was non-binding. Everything with teeth was killed. All fifty states have recognized the Genocide. Sanctions imposed on Azerbaijan or on any Azerbaijani official, for the blockade, for the ethnic cleansing, or for the show trials: zero.

Hold that number, fifty-one years. I am going to come back to it.

I did not catch it either

I need to be honest with you about two things, because together they are the reason I am writing at all.

The first is that I missed this myself. I have spent decades writing on Armenian rights. On our legal standing to compel liberation, reparations, and restitution. I stand by that work. The law is on our side and I was not wrong about that. But I was building a case for a courtroom that nobody was obliged to open. What I never properly factored in is that a right without political backing and political will is a right that sits on a shelf. I was proving we were owed. I was not building the thing that makes anyone pay.

That is not a small oversight. It is the oversight, and it is 148 years old.

The second is that I did not work this out alone, and I did not see it coming.

I had already started the 1,000 Book Initiative before any of this. Not because I thought it was a promising idea. Because I knew it was how the work is done. It is what I have done for thirty years, in Artsakh, in Dubai, in Burbank. You build the record until it cannot be denied, you put it in the hands of the people who can act, and you do not go away.

What I did not know was that for 148 years we had not been doing it that way.

I found that out on 22 July, at a table with two friends. Harut Sassounian, publisher of the California Courier and president of the Armenia Artsakh Fund, and Harut Bronozian, who built the Return to Armenia program.

I was describing the 1,000 Book Initiative to them, and they were asking me the useful kind of questions. What exactly do you want to come out of it. What does success look like. What changes.

To answer them I brought up the committee vote from that same day, the 44 to 7 everyone was celebrating, and I read the text out loud at the table.

And there it was. One sentence saying Azerbaijan should. The enforcement paragraph struck before the vote. The bill dead the same afternoon. I had always assumed that somewhere behind all those resolutions there was a documented file sitting on a desk with a binding demand attached to it, and that it simply had not worked yet. There was not. There never had been. The letters went in and the resolutions came out, and in 148 years nobody had carried the evidence through the door and asked for a statute.

I said something at that table that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.

This is how they keep us medicated. Every so often we are handed a win. We celebrate it, we tell each other we are gaining traction, and we go back to our lives to wait for the next one. Nothing has to change. Nobody has to tell us no. A people can be kept docile for 148 years on the promise that the next resolution will be the one that finally matters.

Despair is one way to stop a movement. This is the other one, and it is gentler, and it works better.

That was the table. I found the gap itself later that night, alone, reading the thing properly.

I went through the text word by word, and then I went back through fifty-one years of it. What I found was not that Washington had refused us. It was that we had never once asked in language that obliges anyone to answer. And in those same years, in that same building, other people were appealing to the same powers and coming out with laws.

Losses on our side of the ledger. Gains on theirs. And the difference was not sympathy, or access, or money.

I want that on the record, because it would be easy to write this letter as though I had seen it all along. I did not. It took a mocking question from a prime minister, five weeks in the record, and two friends at a table.

The system is not closed to us

This is the part that should change how you feel.

When Congress writes shall and may not into law, and attaches sanctions or an embargo to it, foreign governments comply. Not because they respect us. Because it costs them.

Jackson-Vanik in 1974 conditioned trade status on the right to emigrate. Nixon and Kissinger fought it and lost. More than 1.5 million Soviet Jews got out. Congress had passed sympathetic resolutions on Soviet Jewry for years before that, and emigration stayed in the low thousands. Only when the sentiment acquired a price did the Kremlin negotiate over human beings.

After Turkey invaded Cyprus with American weapons, the Greek American community, a diaspora the size of ours, did not seek a resolution of condemnation. They enforced a statute. Arms, aid, and credits to Turkey were cut off in February 1975. Ford vetoed it twice. Congress passed it anyway, and the embargo held for three and a half years.

Bill Browder took one documented case file office by office through Congress and produced the Magnitsky Acts, under which the President shall impose asset freezes and visa bans. As of this year, 583 individuals and entities from more than fifty countries have been designated.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act says goods from Xinjiang shall be prohibited from entering the United States. Congress had already passed Uyghur condemnations in 2019 and 2020 and nothing moved. Once containers started being held at the Port of Los Angeles, 16,755 shipments worth nearly $3.7 billion were detained and global brands re-engineered their supply chains.

And the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 is the complete template. Congress overrode Reagan's veto, banned investment and imports, and then did the masterstroke. Section 311 wrote the exit conditions into the statute. Sanctions would lift when Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners were released, the state of emergency was repealed, and banned parties were legalized. Congress had condemned apartheid in resolutions for a generation with no effect whatsoever on Pretoria. The moment condemnation acquired an import ban and a statutory checklist, the checklist became the negotiating agenda. Mandela walked free in February 1990. Within five years apartheid was gone.

Six times, the same sequence. Documentation first. A binding ask second. Persistence third. Constituents fourth.

Every one of those campaigns began with documented evidence physically placed in the hands of policymakers, welded to a specific binding demand. That is the one thing the Armenian cause has never systematically done.

What we built

Global Peace International has drafted what a binding Armenian accountability statute looks like, using clauses that already exist in enacted American law or in Armenian bills already introduced. Security assistance may not go to Azerbaijan, and the Section 907 waiver is suspended, until the President certifies that every Armenian prisoner of war, hostage, and political prisoner has been released. The President shall determine within 120 days whether the named judges, prosecutors, prison officials, and commanders meet Global Magnitsky criteria, and shall impose sanctions on those who do. Arms transfers are prohibited to any state blockading American humanitarian aid. And as in 1986, the exit conditions are written into the law, so that Baku knows exactly what it must do.

The text is not the hard part. The text exists. What has never existed is the evidentiary record sitting in congressional offices that moves such text from introduction to markup to floor.

That is what the 1,000 Book Initiative does. It places a numbered Congressional Briefing Package on the desk of every one of 450 targeted offices. A personalized cover letter addressed to the member, an 8 to 12 page policy brief, two white papers, and two documented books. Then we follow up. We answer questions, offer briefings, encourage members to convene discussions, and keep the material alive instead of filed and forgotten.

Congressional staff say this plainly in survey research. 91 percent say information about a bill's impact on their district would be useful, and only 9 percent receive it regularly. Form emails vanish into a queue. A numbered briefing package on a shelf becomes something that can be checked, cited, and turned into questions, letters, hearings, amendments, and statutory findings.

Raphael Lemkin carried one documented 712 page book corridor to corridor and produced the binding Genocide Convention in four years. That line runs directly back to the Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, which Lemkin followed, and which my grandfather Shahan Natalie directed.

Fifty-one years, measured a second way

I chose fifty-one years for a reason, and it was not arbitrary.

I should explain who Shahan Natalie was, because most of you know me and have no idea who my family is.

He was my mother's father. In 1919 Ottoman courts-martial tried the men who organized the Genocide. They were convicted. They were sentenced to death. And then they fled, and not one government on earth carried the sentence out. Shahan was a principal organizer of Operation Nemesis, which found them and did.

We do not talk about this much in my family. It makes people uncomfortable, and I understand why. I am proud of him, and I am also aware that being proud of an ancestor is not an argument for anything. At the end of the day we are ordinary people who would rather be seen for who we are than for what our family has done, and I have gone most of my life without leading with this.

I am raising it now because of what it actually teaches, which is not what people assume.

A lawful court had ruled. The sentence was real. And it came to nothing, because nobody was obliged to carry it out. That is the same defect I have been describing to you for the last ten minutes, in a different century. Shahan's answer was the only instrument available to a stateless people in 1920. Ours is a statute with an enforcement clause, and it is available to us now in a way it was never available to him.

That is the inheritance. Not the method he used. The refusal to accept that a judgment on paper is the end of the matter.

In 1975, at ninety years of age, he studied his three grandchildren for three months and chose one of them, nine years old, to be trained to continue the work. That was me. The mentorship ran eight years, until his death in 1983.

So the fifty-one years I audited are also my own. The same clock, running on two different methods. I am not offering you my record because I think it is impressive. I am offering it because it is the same period, the same people, the same adversaries, and one difference.

Here is what the other method produced in that time.

In Artsakh I took a corruption file to the Prime Minister implicating a regional governor, the regional police chief, and the regional prosecutor. Three men everyone considered untouchable. Within a month all three were dismissed.

From 2004 to 2006 I worked undercover in the brothels of Dubai with Hetq editor Edik Baghdasaryan, on the investigation published as Desert Nights. We documented roughly two thousand Armenian women trafficked into the sex trade of the Emirates. We named the ringleaders, and we named the officials who were profiting from them.

Here is what came of it on our own side.

• Armenian traffickers were arrested, extradited, and convicted.
• The Armenian who headed the United Nations anti-trafficking office in Yerevan, a former prosecution official we found connected to the very ring he was charged with fighting, was removed from his post.
• Armenia put new legal protections in place to keep orphaned children out of the trade.

Those were Armenian women. Armenian children. Armenian criminals, and an Armenian official who was supposed to be stopping them and was not. Nobody handed us a resolution about it. We built the record, we put it in front of people who could act, and we did not go away.

Then something happened that is the whole argument of this letter, and it happened to me.

Our findings fed into the American review of the Emirates. I was told by someone at the State Department that Secretary Rice pushed to put the UAE on Tier 3, the lowest rank, the one that under American law points toward sanctions. The President overruled her. The UAE went instead onto the Tier 2 Watch List. That is not a penalty. It is a clock. Improve within a set time, or be downgraded to Tier 3 and face what follows.

A clock was enough. The UAE enforced its ban on child camel jockeys, passed its first federal anti-trafficking law, and under international supervision sent 1,075 children home. To Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Mauritania, and Eritrea.

Now understand what that means, because I have thought about it for twenty years.

Not one of those boys was Armenian. They were not our target. We went to Dubai to document what was being done to Armenian women. Those children went home as a by-product, because once a consequence was attached to that government's conduct, that government did the arithmetic on all of it.

Small boys who had been sold and used until they were used up went home to their families. No statement of concern had ever moved that government. The prospect of a real cost moved it in months.

In 2010 the Artsakh defense ministry denied a video of an officer brutally abusing two conscripts and got it pulled from YouTube. I had downloaded it. I re-uploaded it from California, eight thousand miles away, and I refused every demand to take it down. Within days the officer was identified and arrested, and that December he was sentenced to three years.

In Burbank I documented the city government maneuver that would have removed a reforming police chief. The city manager resigned, the chief was made permanent, and the department was rebuilt.

None of that was done with a title, a budget, or an office of state. It was done with evidence, patience, and a refusal to accept that nothing can be done.

Set the two records side by side. Fifty-one years of organized advocacy, tens of millions of dollars, millions of volunteer hours, and no binding law, no sanction, no consequence. Fifty-one years of one man with a camera and a notebook and no institution behind him, and officials were dismissed, traffickers were convicted, a United Nations official was removed, an army officer went to prison, a police department was rebuilt, and 1,075 children went home.

I am not the difference. The method is the difference.

That is all I am proposing we finally do in Washington, at scale, with the case we have already spent 148 years building.

This is pan-Armenian, and it is bigger than Armenians

I want to correct something before we go further, because I have heard it too many times.

This is not a diaspora campaign. Armenians in Armenia and Armenians from Artsakh are not spectators here, and they are not meant to be the recipients of somebody else's charity either. They can contribute, and they should.

The target is Washington. That is not because Washington is our friend, and it is not because we are asking America to save us. It is because Section 907 sits in American law, and the Magnitsky mechanism sits in American law, and those are the levers that reach Baku and Ankara.

A citizen of Yerevan cannot vote for a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Neither can most of the people reading this. But a briefing package does not ask which passport paid for it. Fifty dollars from Gyumri and fifty dollars from Glendale put the same documented case on the same congressman's shelf. And when Armenians from Armenia, from Artsakh, from Russia, France, Lebanon, Argentina, and the United States fund the same record and make the same demand, it becomes very hard for anyone in Washington to be told that this is one narrow lobby's grievance. One people, one file, one demand.

And if you are not Armenian, this is still yours.

Remember those 1,075 boys. They were Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sudanese, Mauritanian, and Eritrean, and they went home because a few people documented a crime properly and a government was made to face a cost. That is not an Armenian mechanism. It is a human one, and it is available to anyone whose case is documented and whose demand is binding.

What we are building is not only a remedy for the men in Baku. It is a demonstration that a people with no army, no oil, and no leverage can still compel a great power's law to work the way it was written. Every group being told today that nothing can be done, in a hundred places you and I will never visit, is being told the same lie we believed for 148 years.

So this is not only an appeal to Armenians. It is an appeal to anyone who believes that justice, truth, and peace are things you build with instruments, and not things you wish for. That is what this work produces. We are simply going first.

What I am asking

$50 Sends one complete Congressional Briefing Package to one lawmaker. Every package is numbered. We report progress in packages, not in dollars.

Sponsor a package

You sponsor the package. We do the heavy lifting. I am not asking you to learn the law, find the right official, get past the gatekeeper, follow up for six months, and keep score. That is our work, and I have been doing it for a long time.

Everything is published in 14 languages, Turkish and Azerbaijani among them. Send it on. By email, by post, by a phone call to your family.

One last question

Have you ever wished you could have been there? I mean during the Genocide, with what you have today. Your money. Your passport. Your telephone. Your standing, your education, your voice, your ability to reach a congressman or a newspaper or a lawyer in an afternoon. Have you ever wished you could have gotten word to your grandmother, or to whoever it was in your family who was marched into that desert, and done something about it?

I have wished that my whole life. I have thought about it more than is probably good for me.

Here is where I have landed. I cannot help my grandmother. That door is closed and it is never going to open.

But there are Armenians in cells in Baku tonight whose families are counting the days, and that door is still open. It is open today. It may not be open long.

Khrimian came home from Berlin and told us to go and get an iron ladle. It took us 148 years to understand what he was holding, and what he was not. I was as slow to see it as anyone.

I see it now. Help me carry it to the table.

With love, and with respect,
Ara
Ara Khachig Manoogian
Founder, Global Peace International
Burbank, California

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