When your citizens — your compatriots — are prisoners or hostages in the jails of a hostile state, that is your shame, and any normal government should consider it a matter of honor to do everything possible to secure their release. Armenia’s authorities are not only failing to make serious efforts to fulfill that direct obligation, but are even unwilling to express basic human compassion or concern over the effective torture of compatriots trapped in such horrific conditions. Worse still, they grow angry with journalists who dare to ask questions about the Armenian hostages.
The monstrous rhetoric of “Why didn’t you die?” belongs to the same category. Members of the Civil Contract party and their loyalists refuse to see a fellow human being as human simply because that person is a Karabakh Armenian, a “looter,” or a “Russian spy.” (Incidentally, the number of “agents” and “spies” has risen sharply during the election campaign; hopefully it will decline after June 7.) Propagandistic clichés are treated as more important than the Human Being as the highest value.
The 20th century saw such cannibalistic regimes. But they were built on some form of ideology — reprehensible, certainly, but still an ideology — which is why they proved durable. What distinguishes the regimes of Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev today is that they are not grounded in any ideology at all. There is only hatred: in the first case, toward the “former elites,” “Russian servants,” and other “internal enemies”; in the second, toward Armenians.
The signals of dehumanization come from the very top — in calls to “smash heads,” “make them kneel,” “throw them onto the asphalt,” and “slam them against walls.” (The Central Electoral Commission of Armenia has found that the Civil Contract leader violates no law by speaking this way. It was hardly surprising that they would rule so; otherwise, the former boss might have done the same to the head of the commission.) But because there are no real, positive ideas — only the constant generation of hatred — once the chief generator is removed, it may gradually become possible to restore a “human dimension” to politics.
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There are no internal enemies in Armenia.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
Photo: Ruben Muradyan
