Nikol Pashinyan’s ploy about the need for a new revolution in Armenia has fueled a fresh debate over whether Armenia actually experienced a revolution in 2018 or merely a change of government.
In reality, this is a trap — yet another trap into which society is being drawn as a result of propaganda tricks. What happened in 2018 generated enormous public energy and a significant wave of positive expectations. Harnessing that energy and giving it a constructive direction should have been the main — indeed, the only — task of those who came to power through the revolution. The one and only task, including the task of strengthening Armenia’s resilience and flexibility on the issue of Artsakh.
Those people failed — they failed at their one and only major task, with the war and the tragic loss of Artsakh being among the consequences. And in order to prevent any substantive discussion of responsibility for that failure, they are using various tricks to fuel a false argument, or dilemma: was there a revolution or wasn’t there?
Many people seem to think that Nikol Pashinyan and his government are troubled by the conclusion that what happened in 2018 was not a revolution but a change of government. Pashinyan is not troubled by this in the slightest. Nor does he care in the least when people claim that he came to power as a result of an arrangement with Serzh Sargsyan.
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For his electorate, Nikol Pashinyan has a “weighty” explanation for all these assessments, whether they are grounded in reality or based on a misunderstanding. What matters to him is that he should never be confronted with responsibility for deliberately or incompetently squandering the enormous public energy unleashed in 2018.
Let them call it a revolution if they want; let them say that it was “brought by Serzh”; let them call it “Turkish-Azerbaijani.” He simply does not care.
The only thing Nikol Pashinyan cares about is filling the public discourse and agenda with unproductive “dilemmas” and “debates,” rather than allowing specific questions to be raised and demanding specific answers to them. And to make sure that this does not happen, people must either actively argue over whether there was a revolution or not, or sit back with their popcorn and watch the argument unfold.
Hakob BADALYAN
