Armenian Ruben Vardanyan is on trial in Azerbaijan. His crime? Helping others.
With so much suffering in the world, individual cases can get lost. But I want to explain the plight of a man named Ruben Vardanyan, who is a political prisoner on trial in Azerbaijan and is facing a life sentence — and whose case deserves greater attention.
Vardanyan’s crime, if you can call it that, is that he championed Armenian resistance in Nagorno-Karabakh, a remote region in the Caucasus that is legally part of Azerbaijan but whose population was once largely Armenian and self-governing. Not anymore: The region’s 120,000 Armenians fled in September 2023 when Azerbaijani troops invaded. Vardanyan was arrested as he tried to cross the border into Armenia.
Vardanyan is an unlikely martyr. He is a businessman who made money as an investment banker in the wild early days of post-Soviet Russia — and then began giving it away to good causes. In 2014, he founded an international school in Dilijan, Armenia, to connect his small and fragile country with the world. And in 2015, he co-founded a human rights group called the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, whose supporters include such luminaries as George Clooney, former U.N. high commissioner Mary Robinson, and several Nobel laureates.
Aurora’s motto is “Gratitude in action.” Vardanyan’s idea was to honor people around the world who are selflessly helping others in our time — just as decent people had saved his great-grandfather Hamayak Vardanyan during the Armenian genocide in 1915. Rather than looking back in anger on that terrible event, Vardanyan wanted to look forward in hope, by celebrating what’s best in the human spirit.
I should make clear that I’m not a neutral observer of Vardanyan’s case. He has been my friend for a decade, and I’ve served as unpaid master of ceremonies for Aurora’s annual awards ceremony since 2016. It’s personal: My father’s family is Armenian and, by helping Aurora, I wanted to share my own gratitude for those who saved my ancestors in Ottoman times.
To give you a sense of Aurora’s work, here’s a quick sketch of the people it has honored since 2016: a Tutsi woman in Burundi who rescued Hutu victims there; an American physician in the Nuba mountains in Sudan who treated patients in that remote killing ground; a Rohingya Muslim lawyer who protected his people during the slaughter in Myanmar; a Yazidi activist who rescued kinsmen being murdered by the Islamic State; two Somali women who saved victims of sexual violence in Mogadishu, and a female activist and a doctor, both Congolese, who saved rape victims.
I can remember each of these people as they took the stage at the Aurora awards ceremony. They were often awkward, with little experience speaking in public, unaccustomed to taking credit for their work. Each year, I would come away from these ceremonies grateful for the enduring, inexplicable goodness in the human spirit that produces heroes like these. Vardanyan and the other two Aurora co-founders, the late Carnegie Corp. president Vartan Gregorian and Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan, were always humble in the presence of these humanitarians.
Vardanyan’s trial began a week ago in Baku. Azerbaijan has brought 46 charges against him, ranging from terrorism to organized crime. But his troubles really stem from his decision to move to Karabakh in 2022 and become a senior minister in the breakaway government there, as well as an outspoken defender of the Armenian population. Throwing himself into this vortex was dangerous. But Vardanyan told his daughter that he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t try to help fellow Armenians who have suffered so many tragedies in their history. It was gratitude in action.