"Richard Giragosian, sentinel of the Caucasus, has passed away" by Carlo Coppola
In the night of 19 September in Istanbul, Richard Giragosian, analyst, journalist, and founder and director of the Regional Studies Center in Yerevan, passed away.
He was 61. According to Agos, he had come to Turkey for a meeting when, a week ago, a brain hemorrhage forced his admission to Okmeydanı Hospital, where he remained in intensive care for a long time.
The funeral will be held in Armenia.
He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on 8 January 1965, a child of the American Armenian diaspora that keeps alive the memory of a lost homeland. In 2006 he chose to return to where that memory still lives: Armenia.
Behind him lay the US Senate and lectures to Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Ahead lay over thirty-five years in security and international relations, between the College of Europe at Natolin, Yerevan State University and the NATO Defense College in Rome.
He was scholar and chronicler at once. He worked with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Al Jazeera and Asia Times, and wrote for Le Monde and Turkish Policy Quarterly.
He advised the OSCE, the European Union, the US State Department and the French Ministry of Defence.
His ground was where the shadows of the Ottoman and Russian empires have never ceased to lengthen: Nagorno-Karabakh, relations with Moscow, the fragile thaw with Ankara. In 2023, after the earthquake, he saw in Armenian aid sent to Turkey the sign of a possible turning point.
It is no accident that the mourning crosses into Istanbul, where friends and colleagues, among them Nigar Göksel of the International Crisis Group, recall his intellectual honesty. What is said of bridge-builders holds for him: independent, rigorous, able to speak of pain without ever renouncing dialogue.
His voice will be missed by those who believe that understanding history is the first step toward not repeating it.
The Centro Studi Hrand Nazariantz joins in mourning, remembering Richard Giragosian’s great intellectual qualities and his profound commitment to a just peace and democracy in the South Caucasus.
by Carlo Coppola
