By Vicken Cheterian
The discussion the Armenian Prime Minister had with representatives of the Armenian community in Switzerland, especially his revisionist comments on the extermination of the Ottoman Armenians, caused a wave of debate. As someone present at the meeting, I was confronted about what I thought about it and whether I shared the thesis of the prime minister.
On Friday, January 24, the Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met over a dozen Armenian community members in a hotel in Zurich. Pashinyan was in a good mood and seemed relaxed on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos; he had cut his visit short and was returning to Yerevan.
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I was among those present and had a long list of questions, expecting clarifications from the leader of the Armenian Republic. The first evident question concerns Armenia’s security and whether 2025 will witness yet another war, or peace? Did he meet the Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Davos, mediated by the Swiss Foreign Minister Ignacio Cassis, or not? What is his administration doing to liberate the Armenian hostages in Baku? How to rebuild trust between Armenia and the Diaspora after several difficult years, war and the loss of Karabakh? I also had more specific questions, as my work with my colleagues in the Armenian Society of Fellows (ASOF) to develop science and education in Armenia had encountered numerous difficulties, dangerously slowing down our common efforts.
I was expecting the Prime Minister to have a political conversation, share with us his insights. Yet, the conversation took another turn.
Pashinyan has been going through a revisionist period since the 2020 war and the Armenian defeat, and his answer to the current security dilemma of Armenia could be summarized by his concept of Real Armenia (Իրական Հայաստան). “When we say homeland and we understand different things” (երբ ասում ենք հայրենիք ու հասկանում ենք տարբեր բաներ), he said. Pashinyan then went into a theoretical discussion on the differences between nation, people, citizens, and how to define state interests. He gave a legal definition of the “people” – the Armenian people are those who have the right to vote in the Armenian Republic. He said he had come to the conclusion that “the interest of the state is its development – economic development.”
Experts on international relations and political theory would dispute this statement. The world has shifted away from this liberal thesis of “it’s the economy, stupid!”, especially in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, it’s “Security First!” and in its old, classical sense of protection of people and territory from external threats.
Genocide and Diaspora
If the legal definition of “people” restricts it to those within the Republic, then who is the Diaspora Armenian, the Western Armenian?
Pashinyan immediately moved on to the diaspora’s “out-migration” problem (արտագաղթ սփյուռքից) saying that “there is greater migration out of the Diaspora then out of the Republic of Armenia.” If fifty years ago 90% of those in diaspora were associated with national organizations, today it is the other way around, only 10% relate to diaspora Armenian organizations. Less and less people attend church, associate with the political parties. “Today we are losing the diaspora, and the only way to save the diaspora is the Armenian Republic, and the association of the diaspora with the Armenian Republic as its fatherland.” Pashinyan added: “Those who consider the Armenian Republic their fatherland would remain diasporan.”
Thus, in this brief two-hour discussion, we witnessed three-decades worth of accumulated misunderstanding between the political leaders of the nation-state and the diaspora.
Pashinyan repeated more than once that we needed an honest discussion. He answered a question on Armenian schools in the diaspora by saying that Yerevan could only provide methodological support, the rest is the responsibility of the diaspora.
This statement by the Prime Minister should serve as a wake-up call for diaspora decision-makers who have abandoned their communities, closed schools, cut funds from their newspapers, stopped funding Western Armenian literature, and turned away from the problems of a new generation. Concentrating all programs in Armenia did not lead to a solution, something we should have already seen by the mid-1990s.
But isn’t the diaspora’s weakness also Armenia’s problem? If the diaspora is the strategic depth of the nation-state, shouldn’t Armenian politicians worry about the diaspora’s “out-migration” and how to address it? Why did the Armenian state for 34 years refrain from directing a single sociological study about this colossal problem?
“Our identity is generated in the Armenian Republic” Pashinyan said. I wonder if a sociologist specializing in diaspora studies agree to such a statement?
The leader of the independent Armenian state, 34 years after independence, should know that it is impossible to reduce diasporan experience, collective identity, and political mobilization to simply being at the service of the changing policies of the Armenian Republic. Diaspora identity cannot be defined in Yerevan (the opposite is also true, evidently) and any attempt to do so is an affront to Armenian diaspora sentiments. The richness of the diaspora is in its organic, ever-changing social forms, stretched around the globe and with its roots deep in history, going back ten centuries, that is much before the birth of the modern nation-state.
Next, the prime minister made a quick reference to the genocide, which caused much controversy. He said – in passing – “We must also revisit the history of the Armenian Genocide, what it was and why it happened, and how we perceived it, through whom.” «Պետք է հասկանանք՝ ինչ է տեղի ունեցել և ինչու է տեղի ունեցել։ Եվ ինչպես ենք մենք դա ընկալել, ում միջոցով ենք ընկալել»). Pashinyan’s implication was that it was the Soviet leadership who decided to coin the term genocide or raise the problem of genocide , for their own political purposes.
This thesis cannot be substantiated by the rich historiography of the Armenian genocide.
A significant value of the Armenian experience is that we know why and how a genocide may happen, and what is the cost of a century of denial of a historic event. The Armenian experience can help humanity avoid such calamities and even survive and preserve the memory of a victimized people in the face of denialist states. Even as the genocide was taking place, Armenians were documenting those crimes: Aram Andonian documented the genocide while himself a deportee in the Syrian desert, and his collection is the core of the Nubarian Library archives in Paris; so is the documentation collected by the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul. Armenian intellectuals in the Caucasus like Zabel Yesaian and Hovhannes Tumanyan were recording the eyewitness accounts of deportees who reached Russian territory; their records can be found at the Armenian National Archives. We know in detail what happened in 1915: one of every two Armenians was killed by the Ottoman state. We know that 200,000 refugees who had reached today’s Armenia by 1918 died of starvation. The Armenian Foreign Ministry web page informs us that in 1912-1913 there were more than 2,300 Armenian churches and monasteries in the Ottoman Empire; now there are only 36 active Armenian churches, and 300 ruins, the rest are completely erased. Armenians know what a genocide is; we did not wait until the 1950s to learn it from others.
Pashinyan is a politician, and not a historian. What he is saying should be contextualized in the aftermath of the 2020 defeat, Armenian strategic isolation, the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, and continuing threats by neighbors east and west. Armenia needs creative ways, needs solutions to its security dilemma, which is not an easy task. But questioning the veracity of the 1915 genocide is not an answer to the strategic challenges of Armenia. On the contrary, it will only cause more pain to Armenians, and more harm to its state interests.
I did research on the consequences of the genocide and its denial for my book Open Wounds – not only for Armenians, but also for Turkey. And I can assure you: even if Armenians close their eyes, the past with all its cruelty will not disappear. The Turkish State will continue to remember. By researching the history of Armenian-Turkish relations since 1991, many illusions might be dissipated.
Science and Education
After the 2020 war, Pashinyan said, he concluded that Armenia should transform itself “through education and work” (կրթության և աշխատանքի միջոցով). I wish we had talked more about this, than about identity politics. With a group of Armenian scientists and academics from the diaspora and Armenia, we have come to the same conclusion and created the Armenian Society of Fellows (ASOF) which now includes over 350 members. After three years of concrete work with the Armenian government and educational institutions, we have accumulated precise knowledge about the difficulties of the Armenian state administration and the educational system in its modernizing drive. I raised one example with the prime minister, the question of the supercomputer Armenia bought from Nvidia for $8.5 million, with public funds, with several individuals from the diaspora providing invaluable assistance to make this deal possible. The supercomputer is essential infrastructure for the development of Armenia’s tech industry, to develop research in Artificial Intelligence, which has not only economic and scientific significance, but also directly concerns the republic’s security. Procurement laws delayed the purchase for six months, and even after two years of preparatory work, the institution that should host the supercomputer is not ready, and administrative formalities could paralyze the machine for the next 9-12 months, with a financial loss for Armenia equivalent to $3 million. A directive by the prime minister to set up a data center that hosts the supercomputer could cut the long and unnecessary delays.
This is one among many other problems, and Armenia urgently needs to reform its administrative procedures, by creating direct contacts between organizations like ASOF to overcome bureaucratic machinery and secure not only the success of individual projects but also develop a new and efficient work culture.
The prime minister’s response to this problem was less than satisfactory. While recognizing that Armenian governmental institutions work slowly, he said that other governments face similar problems. He brought the example of the James Webb Space Telescope – the largest telescope in space – which witnessed years of delay and exceeded the original budget.
This comparison is not relevant. The James Webb Telescope is a groundbreaking innovation. Buying a supercomputer is not.
Pashinyan said that despite its shortcomings, his government is determined to move forward and learn from its own mistakes. A listener wonders – should this not be done professionally, and not through experimentation, trial and error?
If Armenia decides to have an ambitious modernization program, then it will find the necessary resources available in the diaspora. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel: we have experts on education reform, on establishing and managing higher education centers. We have historians who know well what happened in 1915 and sociologists who understand what the diaspora is, who have studied the nuances of changing group identities. We have experts on mediation and negotiations, on strategic communication, and many other associated fields. We do not need to reinvent the wheel.
In a democratic system, the leader of a state does not need to pronounce what history is and is not, nor develop linguistic theories, and impose his taste on culture on the rest of the society. A republic is governed by the functioning of institutions, where policy choices should be evidence-based and not speculation and personal opinion. What we need foremost is to reform the political realm, in the diaspora, but more urgently in Armenia.
Armenians do have the legacy of victimhood – of the first modern genocide. But this heritage is a political and security threat, not a historic one. We collectively need to answer the question: what are we to do with such a heritage in the face of a denialist Turkey, aggressive Azerbaijan, cynical Russia, and an indifferent West?
We need to articulate this answer after the defeat of 2020 and after Biden who uttered the G-word, stood indifferent towards the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, and the ongoing war in Gaza.
The urgent next step is a political answer that needs to be taken collectively, and not by an individual leader. The political leaders of Armenia will not solve these problems by questioning the history of the 1915 genocide.
Vicken Cheterian is an author and journalist who teaches international relations at the University of Geneva.