1865 - 1927
Leading figure in the Armenian resistance against Ottoman rule.
Andranik Ozanian is popularly known as General Andranik (Andranik Zoravar in Armenian). He was born in Shabin Karahisar in central Anatolia. He received only an elementary education and was trained as a carpenter. He became involved in revolutionary activities in 1888 and joined the Dash-nak Party (ARF) in 1892. Soon after, he emerged as the leader of a band of guerrilla fighters involved in the defense of Armenian villages in the region of Sasun and Moush during the 1895 - 1896 mass killings instituted against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He gained legendary stature among provincial Armenians after breaking out of the Arakelots Monastery in the Moush area, in which he had been trapped by Turkish troops. Andranik retreated with his men into Iran, resigned from the ARF, and thereafter traveled to Europe, where he participated in the First Balkan War in 1912 at the head of a small group of Armenian volunteers fighting in the Bulgarian army.
With the outbreak of World War I, Andranik went to Transcaucasia and took command of a contingent of Armenian volunteers supporting the Russian army in the campaigns against the Ottomans. He was promoted to the rank of major general, and eventually placed in charge of a division consisting of Armenians, who were left to defend the front as the Russian Army disintegrated in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Forced to retreat against superior Ottoman forces, Andranik had a falling-out with the political leadership of the just-founded Republic of Armenia for submitting to Ottoman terms in the Treaty of Batum signed on 4 June 1918. Resigning his command, Andranik formed a new brigade consisting of Western Armenians. He took refuge in the Zangezur district of Eastern Armenia, where he continued fighting against local Muslim forces, and was about to march to relieve the Armenians of Karabagh when a telegram from General Thomson, the British commander in Baku, informed him of the end of the war and ordered him to cease hostilities. The moment proved fateful, as the British commander subsequently decided to place Karabagh under Azerbaijani jurisdiction. Forced by the British to disband his forces, Andranik left Transcaucasia in 1919 and traveled to Europe to plead the cause of the Western Armenians dispersed by the Ottomans. He eventually settled in the Armenian community of Fresno, California, where he spent his remaining years. Communist authorities in Armenia denied his remains entry while in transit; thus he was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Bibliography
Hovannisian, Richard. Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Walker, Christopher J. Armenia: The Survival of a Nation, 2d edition. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.
— ROUBEN P. ADALIAN
