A week after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, once again, called into question the veracity of the Armenian Genocide, during a press conference on Friday, he attempted to walk back those statements, claiming that he had “meant something completely different.”
Speaking to representatives of Switzerland’s Armenian community in Zurich on January 24, Pashinyan said that the history of the Armenian Genocide must be revisited.
“We must understand what happened and why it happened, how we perceived it and through whom we perceived. How is it that in 1939 there was no Armenian genocide [recognition] agenda and how is it that in 1950 the Armenian genocide agenda emerged?” Pashinyan added.
The comments drew immediate backlash by not only opposition figures in Armenia, but also genocide scholars, academics and diplomats.
His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, on Thursday urged Pashinyan not to “make the undeniable fact that the Armenian genocide was masterminded by the Ottoman Empire a subject of discussion.”
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention also criticized the prime minister saying that Pashinyan is helping Turkey deny the genocide.
“By implying that basic questions about the Armenian Genocide, such as ‘what happened and why it happened,’ have not yet been adequately answered, Pashinian’s statement works to challenge the Armenian Genocide as an established historical fact,” the Lemkin Institute said.
The Armenian National Committee-International, in a statement issued Tuesday, accused Pashinyan of denying the Genocide.
During a press conference on Friday, a reporter asked Pashinyan whether he could imagine a high-level Israeli official questioning the veracity of the Holocaust. Another reporter asked whether “external forces” were pressuring him to downplay the Armenian Genocide.
He also said that the denial of the Armenian Genocide is a crime in Armenia, saying the “fact of the Genocide is indisputable and undeniable.”
In addition to claiming that he “meant” something different when he said last week that the history of the Genocide must be revisited, Pashinyan on Friday said he simply wants Armenia and the Diaspora to he simply wants Armenia and its worldwide Diaspora to rethink their “formulas for perceiving the world.”
“We may not have accurately perceived the realities at the beginning of the [20th] century, in the middle of the century, at the end of the century and even today,” Pashinyan said. “Perhaps we place too much hope in some external encouragement.”
Pashinyan conceded that he did not have the answers to these question, but said he believes that answering the question will ensure Armenia’s sovereignty in perpetuity.
“Even before the genocide, during other massacres, (…), when we had formulas for perceiving the world, at various conferences, maybe those formulas are wrong, maybe those formulas are still wrong. I see such comments on today’s international events, sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes redemptive, that I realize that it may turn out that our perceptions of international relations and the world have not changed (…). And it may turn out that some topics, some circles, some of our sore points have been and are being used in order to make our independent sovereign state impossible in our homeland, in Armenia,” Pashinyan added.
Yet, it was not the first time Pashinyan’s remarks on the Armenian Genocide have raised concerns and condemnations. In his official statement on the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide last year, he referred to the events of 1915 as “Medz Yeghern,”—the great calamity—a phrase used before the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, who cited the the crime against Armenians basis for his work.
