On June 9, in Yerevan, at a joint press conference with RA Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that the Russian side decided to increase the number of Russian schools in Armenia at the request of Armenian partners. The RA Foreign Minister did not respond to this statement of the Russian Foreign Minister.
At the meeting held on July 26, the chairman of the European Party of Armenia, Tigran Khzmalyan, said on this occasion, “I directly asked Prime Minister Pashinyan whether something like this happened or not. I cannot quote him because it was not an official statement, but I will allow him to abuse the scope of that conversation and say that the Armenian government, the Armenian authorities, did not take such an initiative, that is a lie. It is a false claim from a high-ranking Russian official.”
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The initiators of the meeting announced that a new political-social initiative is being launched in Armenia: “No to Russian mass media, no to Russian schools.” It will come out with the slogan “The borders of the Armenian state will start from Armenian schools.” According to Tigran Khzmalyan, Armenian society, intellectuals, and civil society are sharply against the implementation of two big threats. “The first is the free circulation of Russian, Russian-language official information, TV channels, as well as various computer websites, the on-air pre-attack on RA. They act here as racist, Putinist, misanthropic, as well as Armenian-hating propagandists. And we cannot accept their existence and presence in our country. We are also strongly opposed to the fact that, as Russian officials have announced, they are allegedly planning to expand the presence of the Russian language in school programs and increase the number of Russian schools in Armenia. We are launching a public, political and social initiative directed against these two evils.”
According to Hranush Kharatyan, a member of the initiative and ethnographer, the idea of increasing the number of Russian schools in Armenia will be just another political attack on our country, culture, and people. The speaker believes that in our country such cultural measures against others, such as films, dialogues, sermons, analysis, which are presented constantly on scattered TV channels, which have the secret purpose of promoting ideas of absolute intolerance towards others, should not find a place.
“The idea that Armenia should choose its cultural orientation under political pressure must absolutely face serious public resistance. In particular, I would like to talk about the language problem. No language in this world can avoid being considered cultural. No language can be considered unimportant. For us, the Russian language is one of the important languages, and our society should learn and know it, but it should be our society’s choice. The problem of any language and the status of that language, the volume of that language should come from our agenda, not be imposed on us. Any political coercion will bring new coercions, the problem of identity change, and additional problems in the public discourse. And under political pressure, by political considerations, by political coercion, our society should change any decision imposed on us.”
Nelly GRIGORYAN
