Book Description
Known at various times as "Abu Sindi", "Timothy Sean McCormick", "Saro", and "Commander Avo", Monte Melkonian was denounced in Europe as an international terrorist, while his adopted homeland of Armenia decorated him as a national hero who led a force of 4,000 men to victory in Azerbaijan. Markar Melkonian spent seven years unravelling the mystery of his brother's road: a journey which began in his ancestors' town in Turkey and led to a blood-splattered square in Tehran, the Kurdish mountains, the bomb-pocked streets of Beirut, and finally, to the windswept heights of mountainous Karabagh. Monte's life embodied the agony and the follies of the end of the Cold War and the unraveling of the Soviet Union. Yet, who was this man, really? A terrorist or a hero? My Brother's Road is not just the story of a long journey and a short life, it is an attempt to understand what happens when one man decides that violent deeds speak louder than words
My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia FROM THE PUBLISHER
What do 'Abu Sindi', 'Timothy Sean McCormack', 'Saro', and 'Commander Avo' all have in common? They were all aliases for Monte Melkonian. But who was Monte Melkonian? In his native California he was once a kid in cut-off jeans, playing baseball and swimming in irrigation canals. Monte turned his back on Oxford University and a promising career as an archaeologist, and headed for the working-class slums of Tehran and the bomb-shattered streets of Beirut. He joined roadside prayers in Afghanistan, stood with rebels in Kurdistan and gritted his teeth through surgery without anesthesia in a Red Brigades safe house. He organized prison strikes, spurned the emissary of President George H.W. Bush, and marched with a million demonstrators while the Soviet Union collapsed around him. Finally, in Spring 1993 he led a force of 4000 men to victory in the Armenian enclave of Nagomo-Karabagh in an assault that stunned the UN Security Council and provoked generals and politicians in Russia and Turkey to threaten nuclear war. By the time of his death at age thirty-five, government mouthpieces consigned him to hell as a terrorist, while millions of his adopted compatriots revered him quite literally as a warrior-saint.