Yesterday, Pashinyan and the bishops in his pocket circulated a text whose author is, undoubtedly, the prime minister himself. In my view, its most shocking formulation is the following: “condemning and considering unacceptable the practice of dragging the Church into politics.” In other words, they are condemning precisely what they themselves are doing.
Since the level of legal literacy (as well as any other kind) within this government is, to put it mildly, far from adequate, I would like to remind them that a statement signed by the prime minister and a process led by the prime minister cannot be non-political. Unlike a king, emperor, or sultan, a prime minister derives his authority not from the will of God, but from elections held in a given state — that is, from a purely political process. In our case, the prime minister represents the political force that received the most votes in parliamentary elections. That force, too, has no “divine mandate” and does not even represent the multimillion Armenian people as a whole, but merely the majority of those citizens who participated in the elections.
It is not God, but the Constitution that has granted the prime minister state authority. These levers — including the police, the National Security Service, investigative bodies, ministries, and so on — are used by Pashinyan for his political purposes. The same purposes are now served by state institutions that are not legally subordinate to the prime minister, most notably local self-government bodies and the courts.
Pashinyan will use all these levers to appoint his own obedient figure to the post of Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church (which, naturally, stands in blatant contradiction to the Constitution). And after all this, to claim that this process is not political is, at the very least, ignorance.
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Against whom is this process directed? Of course, against the Church — against the networked institution that unites the majority of Armenians worldwide. The political objective here is obvious. But dismantling this structure is beyond the capacity not only of Pashinyan, but even of leaders of far more powerful states.
At the same time, in my opinion, this conspiracy is directed first and foremost against the state itself — against the constitutional order and internal stability. And in this case as well, it is perfectly clear what this is being done for.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
