Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has provoked a storm of criticism from his political opponents and historians after questioning the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey and the decades-long Armenian campaign for its international recognition.
“We must also revisit the history of the Armenian genocide,” Pashinyan told a group of Swiss Armenians at the end of his visit to Switzerland late last week.
“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?,” he added.
Suren Manukyan, an Armenian scholar specializing in genocide studies, deplored the statement, saying that Pashinyan lacks elementary knowledge of the World War One-era slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians recognized as genocide by dozens of countries and most international historians.
“Semi-literacy is one of the most dangerous things,” Manukyan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “I think the prime minister just needs to read a little.”
One thing Pashinyan will learn, he said, is that the term “genocide” was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin after 1939, during the Jewish Holocaust. Lemkin also drew on the events of 1915.
In Manukyan’s words, Pashinyan hinted that Armenian started calling the 1915 mass massacres a genocide and campaigning for its international recognition at the behest of the Soviet Union. The scholar countered that Soviet Armenia was allowed to mark genocide anniversaries only in 1965, more than a decade after the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan meets with Switzerland Armenian community members in Zurich on Jan. 24
Armenian opposition leaders went farther, accusing Pashinyan of openly denying the genocide on Turkey’s orders.
“Armenia is ruled by a collaborationist regime that serves only Turkey and Azerbaijan,” said Gegham Manukyan of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a pan-Armenian party that has for decades been at the forefront of genocide recognition campaigns in the United States and Europe.
“This is an insult to the memory of the victims of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, one and a half million Armenian martyrs canonized by the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church,” read a statement released by AR Supreme Council of Armenia on Monday.
Tigran Abrahamyan, an opposition lawmaker representing the Pativ Unem bloc, likewise said that Pashinyan’s “denial of the Armenian Genocide” is part of Turkish-Azerbaijani efforts to wipe out the “historical memory of the Armenian people.”
Vartan Oskanian, another vocal critic of Pashinyan who had served as foreign minister from 1998-2008, charged that he committed “treason” by “parroting” Ankara’s continuing denial of the genocide.
“By hinting that perhaps Armenians themselves are also responsible for what happened, Pashinyan repeats one of the most dangerous theses of genocide denial which has been propagated by the Turkish state for more than a century,” Oskanian said in a Facebook post.
Pashinyan was accused by his detractors of casting doubt on the Armenian genocide even before his latest comments.
In his statement on the 109th anniversary of the genocide commemorated in April 2024, Pashinyan no longer called for its wider international recognition. He also put the emphasis on the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern” (Great Crime), rather than the word “genocide.”
Earlier in April, a senior Armenian pro-government lawmaker, Andranik Kocharyan, called for “verifying” the number of the genocide victims and ascertaining the circumstances of their deaths. He said Pashinyan wants to “make the entire list of compatriots subjected to genocide more objective.” Faced with an uproar from opposition leaders, civil society figures and genocide scholars, Kocharyan claimed the following day that he only expressed his personal opinion.
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