Andranik Kocharian, a senior member of Pashinian’s ruling Civil Contract party and lawmaker who heads the parliament’s defense committee, said on Tuesday that his statements in this regard were his “personal approach” and that Pashinian had “nothing to do with it.”
Kocharian’s remarks sparked a wave of criticism from the opposition as well as Armenian scholars who accused the pro-government lawmaker of advancing one of the narratives of Turkey that not only denies the Ottoman-era killings of 1.5 million Armenians constituted genocide, but also puts the number of Ottoman Armenians, who, it claims, died during the years of the First World War along with many innocent Turks, at only 300,000.
Kocharian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday that he did not question either the fact of the genocide or the number of genocide victims. He explained that his approach was that “the existing information should be supplemented with additional facts, which will help not only to have the data about the genocide victims emerge, but also to pursue demands, because those people also lost their wealth.”
In an interview with Azatutyun TV’s Sunday Analytical Show aired on April 14 Kocharian said that Pashinian’s goal was to build “real foundations” related to the Genocide and “make the entire list of compatriots subjected to genocide more objective.” The pro-government lawmaker repeated the same thought during a news briefing in parliament on Monday.
Genocide expert Suren Manukian, who formerly served as deputy director of the Genocide Museum in Yerevan, described Kocharian’s remarks as “very dangerous”, reminding that the idea of “making lists” has been advocated by Turkey since the 1960s.
About three dozen countries, including the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Canada and others, have recognized the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey. Switzerland has also criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide.
U.S. President Joe Biden has characterized the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians as genocide in his statements issued annually on Armenian Remembrance Day on April 24 since he assumed office in 2021.
The Armenian Apostolic Church canonized 1.5 million victims of the Armenian genocide, collectively declaring them to be saints, when the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide was marked in 2015.
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