It is clear that political forces are now absorbed in the election campaign, and any normal citizen’s wish should be to halt our state’s deadly trajectory. That is possible only if Pashinyan is removed from power.
At the same time, however, we must think about our fundamental issues, one of which is, of course, security. I don’t think any sober-minded person believes that the risk of war has decreased under Pashinyan—or will decrease after him. I have written before that for this, we need a shared narrative with our neighbors. The current authorities believe that simply adopting the other side’s discourse will resolve the issue.
If we look at today’s reality, that discourse boils down to this: “If in 1915 we had behaved ourselves, had not listened to the Russians, there would have been no genocide.” From a moral standpoint, this sounds monstrous. Neither in Soviet times nor in independent Armenia would I have imagined that any Armenian could say such a thing. And yet today, this is the official position of Armenia—perhaps disguised under somewhat convoluted wording. And this is how tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Pashinyan’s supporters think.
But could it be that this degradation is somehow useful from the standpoint of some super-duper pragmatism? No, it is not. Repeating Turkish narratives does absolutely nothing to restrain Turkey’s ambitions, nor does it divert that country from its strategic objective—the elimination of Armenian statehood in the region. It cannot be ruled out that Pashinyan is at peace with that prospect.
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So how should the Armenian Genocide be addressed at the state level, while at the same time not turning its recognition into a tool of geopolitical games? We have that experience. I would advise rereading Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s speech of April 21, 1995, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Genocide.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
