Voleva una vita migliore nella sua patria. Ha ottenuto una condanna a 20 anni in Azerbaigian per essere armeno

Vicken Euljekjian: one among many of the Armenian hostages in Baku.

Whenever I am reminded about his case it honestly breaks my heart, especially seeing his wife’s tweets https://x.com/lindavicken. Here is an older but better article with more details https://www.csi-int.org/news/armenia-our-hearts-have-been-torn-apart/.

It maddens me how this nightmare continues for their loved ones, with no end in sight. Each of hostage cases is extremely sad but this is one that at least gets a bit of attention once in a while. It feels like this whole situation has completely faded into the background and people have moved on. I think it has been a year and a half since the last hostage release.

How are we this complacent with the situation? It seems we don’t even have a proper website somewhere listing all the known POW’s with pictures and their bios? Some sort of effort to keep them in the national consciousness? Is it that we feel so helpless in this situation as a nation/state/people, that we’d rather not worry about it?

I remember when Ruben Vardanyan’s case was getting some attention here a while back, and there was massive criticism here for his case being given attention over other hostages. This frustrated me because I felt that attention to any of them was good and should be used to help uplift the other profiles too, rather than focusing on tearing down Vardanyan. But fine, if people aren’t happy with Vardanyan, let’s pick another person to be the face of the hostages, like Vicken. But instead, since attention on Vardanyan’s case diminished, so has attention to the whole situation.