Insults and curses addressed to the member of the National Assembly Civil Contract faction, Arsen Torosyan, are unacceptable to me. Everyone has the right to express their opinion, no matter how unacceptable it is to us. First, you need to understand what he says, and secondly, why he says it. The MP said the following: we, the Armenians, made a mistake in 1915, and if we had accepted the correct behavior, the genocide would not have happened. We also made a mistake in 1991 by entering into a war with Azerbaijan. “We made a mistake 100 years ago when we subordinated the reality on the ground to some documents signed in European cities and lost a part of the real homeland again. We were also wrong 30 years ago when during the agony of the crumbling empire, we again chose death and war and became “victorious” and became blinded by pride.”
I, unlike the deputy, do not reserve the right to make such drastic judgments about the events in Ottoman Turkey since 1878. I prefer to give the floor to people who have studied the issue. This is what Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first president of Armenia, said in 1995 at the international conference dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide: “The view that the Armenian people could have avoided the catastrophe by giving up the idea of contributing to the intervention of European countries in Turkey’s internal affairs and trying to solve the issue of reforms of the Armenian states with direct cooperation with the Turkish authorities, I think, is far from realistic.” To tell the truth, I am not familiar with any serious Armenian, Turkish, or Western researcher studying the Armenian Genocide who would express a different point of view on this matter than Ter-Petrossian. Maybe Arsen Torosyan knows.
I can speak more confidently about the “mistake” made 30 years ago, because I was one of the “mistaken,” first as a journalist covering the war, and then as the press secretary of the first president. Was there an option to stay out of that war? Yes, but in that case, 150,000 Armenians living in Artsakh would face the same fate that befell the Armenians of Sumgait and Baku: death by cruel torture. So, in this matter, I can unequivocally claim that Mr. Torosyan is wrong: at that time we chose life, the life of our compatriots from Artsakh.
A more important question is why Arsen Torosyan says that. The opponents say that he wants to please Aliyev and Erdogan. I do not agree; they cannot be interested in the opinion of one deputy.
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A legislator representing a political majority is simply expressing the opinion of his electorate. And what is that electorate like? In order not to spread too much, I will quote from the poem of the great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky: “We are only mice. We are waiting for feeding. Close your mouth, time! We are citizens – you put us in your shoes, and we are already in your power.”
Aram Abrahamyan
