In a statement issued on the occasion, Pashinian claimed that the enduring trauma prevents many of them from objectively assessing international affairs and challenges facing Armenia.
“Maybe this is also a reason why we get new shocks, reliving the trauma of the Armenian Genocide as a legacy and as a tradition,” he said, risking more opposition allegations that he is helping Turkey deny the 1915 genocide as part of Yerevan’s ongoing rapprochement with Ankara.
The unusually worded statement came as tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakabert memorial in Yerevan to commemorate the genocide victims.
The daylong procession followed an official wreath-laying ceremony at the hilltop memorial led by Pashinian, parliament speaker Alen Simonian and President Vahagn Khachaturian. Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with Pashinian’s government, was again excluded from the annual ceremony.
The genocide began with mass arrests on April 24, 1915 of Armenian intellectuals and activists in Constantinople. An estimated 1.5 million Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or starved to death in the following months and years. About three dozen nations, including Russia, France, Germany and the United States, have recognized the genocide.
U.S. President Joe Biden has repeatedly used the word “genocide” to describe the mass killings and deportations. By contrast, his predecessors anxious to not anger Turkey used only the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern” (Great Crime) in reference to the events of 1915.
Pashinian seemed to put the emphasis on “Meds Yeghern” in his latest April 24 statement. The 440-word statement mentions the term for 11 times, compared with four references to the “genocide.”
Pashinian also did not condemn the regime of the so-called Young Turks that ruled the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He said instead that Ottoman Armenians “became victims of geopolitical intrigues and false promises.”
“For us, commemoration of the martyrs of the Meds Yeghern should symbolize not the lost homeland but the found and real homeland, the Republic of Armenia, whose competitive, legitimate, thoughtful and creative policies can preclude a repeat [of the genocide,]” Pashinian went on.
“Never again. We should say this to not to others but to ourselves. And this is not an accusation against us at all but a point of view where we, only we, are responsible for and in charge of our destiny.”
Earlier this month, a senior Armenian pro-government lawmaker allied to Pashinian, Andranik Kocharian, called for “verifying” the number of the genocide victims and ascertaining the circumstances of their deaths. Kocharian said Pashinian wants to “make the entire list of compatriots subjected to genocide more objective.”
The remarks sparked uproar from Armenian government critics, civil society figures and genocide scholars. They accused Kocharian of echoing the official Turkish narrative that Armenians had died in much smaller numbers and not as a result of a premediated Ottoman government policy.
Kocharian stated the following day that he expressed his personal opinion, rather than the Pashinian government’s position. He denied casting doubt on the Armenian genocide. Opposition leaders dismissed the explanation, continuing to accuse Pashinian of planning another far-reaching concession to Ankara.
Pashinian’s wife, Anna Hakobian, was jeered by several dozen people when she visited the Tsitsernakabert memorial later on Wednesday. The hecklers, who apparently included opposition supporters, chanted “Genocidal Nikol!” and “Nikol the Turk!” as Hakobian and one of her daughters surrounded by bodyguards laid flowers by the memorial’s eternal fire.
