Monte Melkonian (sometimes simply referred to by just his first name Monte) was born on November 25, 1957. He was an American born Armenian commander during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Melkonian had no prior service record in any country’s army before being placed in command of an estimated 4,000 men in the war. He had largely built his military experience beginning from the late 1970s and 1980s, when he fought in Lebanon with ASALA. Melkonian fought against various factions in the Lebanese Civil War and against the Israel Defense Forces in the 1982 Lebanon War.
An Armenian-American, Melkonian left the United States and arrived in Iran in 1978 during the beginning of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, taking part in demonstrations against the Shah. Following the collapse of the Shah’s monarchy in 1979, he traveled to Lebanon during the height of the civil war and served in an Armenia militia group in the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud. In ASALA, he took part in the assassinations of several Turkish diplomats in Europe during the early to mid-1980s and was later arrested and sent to prison in France. In 1989, he was released and in the following year, acquired a visa to travel to Armenia.
Melkonian carried several aliases over his career including “Abu Sindi”, “Saro”, “Timothy Sean McCormack” and “Commander Avo”; the last being how troops under his command addressed him in Nagorno-Karabakh. The last years of his life were spent fighting with the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army.
Monte’s activities in Martuni were not limited to the military field. He supported the operation of a cooperative bakery in Martuni; he visited reactivated elementary schools and hospitals; and at the time of his death, he and Seta were planning to set up a worker-owned carpet manufacture, to employ local women who were skilled weavers. In a country with a rigidly patriarchal culture, Monte discouraged discrimination against women, chiefly setting an example for men to follow in the conduct of their daily affairs. He washed dishes, appealed to women to fight on the front lines and considered female staff in the radio room and the kitchen at headquarters to be fighters on an equal footing with uniformed soldiers on the battlefield. His reputation for modesty and directness earned him the affection of the civilians he defended.
Monte was killed on June 12, in 1993 in the abandoned Nagorno-Karabagh village of Merzuli in the early afternoon of June 12, 1993, with controversial reports about the circumstances of his death. He was buried at Yerablur cemetery in Yerevan, Armenia and is revered by Armenians as a national hero.
