A group of ethnic Armenian migrants from Syria joined on Tuesday employees of Armenia’s Ministry of Diaspora in protesting against its closure planned by the government.
A government bill publicized this week calls for reducing the number of ministries in the country from 17 to 12 in line with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s pledges to streamline the state bureaucracy. The Ministry of Diaspora would be liquidated as a result.
The ministry employing 90 or so people was set up in 2008 by then President Serzh Sarkisian. It is tasked with maintaining and strengthening the country’s cultural, educational and other ties with the worldwide Armenian Diaspora.
Some ministry officials again marched to the prime minister’s office in Yerevan to demand that the government reconsider its plans. They were joined by Syrian Armenians who have taken refuge in their ancestral homeland after the outbreak of the bloody conflict in Syria. One of them, Aleksan Garatanayan, is the deputy chairman of a non-governmental organization representing such migrants.
“We are not staging a political demonstration,” Garatanayan told reporters. “This is our sole means of gratitude to the ministry and its staff that have patiently helped us for the last seven years. For seven years we have approached the ministry on a daily basis.”
“It’s wrong to scrap this ministry without taking into account the opinion of major Diaspora organizations,” said another Syrian Armenian man taking part in the demonstration.
Thousands of Syrian Armenians have relocated to Armenia since 2012. The Armenian government’s modest financial assistance to them has been mostly channeled through the Ministry of Diaspora.
Hovannes Aleksanian, the head of a ministry desk dealing the “repatriation” of ethnic Armenians from Syria and other countries, was also among the protesters. “We will need the Ministry of Diaspora as long as we have a Diaspora,” he said.
“The repatriation desk has only two employees: myself and its leading specialist,” argued Aleksanian. “Hundreds of families come [to the ministry] and all that work is done by our small division.”
“Our expenditures are so modest that they cannot serve as an argument [in favor of closing the ministry,]” he said, adding that the ministry’s annual budget is an equivalent of just $500,000.
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