Removing Serzh Sargsyan from power and removing the Catholicos of All Armenians from office are not the same in any sense. The Catholicos, the bishops, and the clergy are not state officials. They do not live off our taxes. We, the citizens, do not elect them—and therefore we cannot remove them from office. The problems of the Church—of which, undoubtedly, there are many—must be resolved within the Church, through the Church, and not by the order of the executive branch or at the whim of its leader. That is how it works in all democratic countries.
The current situation is also fundamentally different from that of seven years ago. In 2018, Nikol Pashinyan had broad public support. Many hoped that a change of power would help us get rid of the vices that had long hindered our development. But not only did we fail to get rid of those vices—we also fell into a pit from which, frankly, even Pashinyan’s removal would not guarantee escape. Public support has significantly decreased.
There is another crucial difference. In March or April of 2018, Pashinyan held no levers of state power. If he had said at a rally—or written somewhere—that a certain person was a thief, the entire state’s punitive apparatus would not have sprung into action to catch that alleged thief. Today, however, his hope no longer lies in the “people” (whose ranks, I repeat, have thinned), but in the “powers”—in the prosecution, the courts, and the rest of the state system that carries out his personal whims.
If the Prime Minister writes a Facebook post saying that someone should be imprisoned, the entire state system “stands on guard” to take action. The declared attack on the Mother See was preceded by the arrest of two bishops—an act not carried out by “the people,” but by state structures.
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So even if a mass of people—three million, say—marches toward the Cathedral, that action is not “the people’s” but the executive branch’s, executed by a government whose leader wants to replace the head of a religious institution.
Europeans, and those who call themselves pro-Europeans—how do you feel about this?
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
