Pashinyan accused of ‘ignorance’ after controversial statement on Armenian Genocide

Pashinyan accused of ‘ignorance’ after controversial statement on Armenian Genocide

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Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has caused outrage after questioning why the Armenian Genocide only became a public issue in 1950, stating that ‘we need to understand, what happened and why it happened. And how did we perceive it, through whom did we perceive it?’.

Pashinyan’s statement came last Friday, during a meeting with the Armenian community in Switzerland.

‘How is it that there was no agenda for the Armenian Genocide in 1939, and how is it that the agenda for the Armenian Genocide appeared in 1950? How did it happen?’, Pashinyan said.

Pashinyan’s controversial statement received harsh criticism among Armenians and the diaspora, while historians and opposition members accused him of disseminating Turkish genocide-denial narratives.

The Armenian Genocide, orchestrated by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, resulted in the mass killings of nearly 1.5 million Armenians living in Western Armenia — modern-day eastern Turkey.

‘In this regard, I simply, as a scholar, want to emphasise that the Prime Minister does not have a command of the subject […] I would like to happily inform him that this topic has been studied’, Suren Manukyan, an expert on the Armenian Genocide and the former Deputy Director of the Genocide Museum in Yerevan, told RFE/RL.

Manukyan added that if Pashinyan was interested in reading more about the topic, he could be provided with the respective materials, after which he would ‘perhaps understand what the Armenian Genocide was and why it occurred’.

Manukyan also responded to Pashinyan’s question about how the ‘agenda’ for the Armenian Genocide appeared only in 1950. He noted that the term ‘genocide’ simply had not appeared until 1943 — in relation to the Holocaust. In addition, after the death of Joseph Stalin certain topics, including the Armenian Genocide, began to be opened up within society.

On Monday, the Armenian National Committee — International, a body of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation advocating for global recognition of the Armenian Genocide, among other things, released a statement criticising what they described as Pashinyan’s ‘ignorance’.

‘Especially after 1952, when the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide had already entered into force [...] the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide also became an issue on the agenda of Armenians’, read the statement.

‘By suggesting that Armenians should investigate the “causes” of the genocide, he [Pashinyan] shifts the blame from the perpetrators to the victims — a cunning ploy often used by genocide deniers’, the former Foreign Minister of Armenia Vartan Oskanian wrote on Facebook.

He also noted that Pashinyan ‘parrots’ Turkey’s ‘carefully crafted’ narratives of denial, adding that such behaviour ‘not only disqualifies Pashinyan as a leader but also raises serious questions about his motives’.

‘Should we let them try to sell our tragedy to us?’

Following his statement, other members of the ruling Civil Contract party made social media posts countering the criticism.

Vahagn Aleksanyan, an MP from the ruling Civil Contract party, suggested that ‘the imperial [pro-Russian] information cavalry has been foaming at the mouth’ to present that Pashinyan questioned the Armenian Genocide.

‘In my opinion, [Pashinyan] tried to say that we need to understand who tried and how they tried to “use” the genocide that happened to us for their own interests and needs. [...] Should we look at our tragedy through our own eyes or through the imperial decrees sent our way? Should we let them try to sell our tragedy to us, and then bring a new tragedy upon us at the price we paid, or should we put an end to it?’, Aleksanyan wrote on Facebook.

This is not the first time Pashinyan’s government has faced accusations of Armenian Genocide denial.

In April 2024, Andranik Kocharyan, the chair of the Armenian Parliament’s Defence Committee, claimed that Pashinyan aimed to make a complete list of victims to ‘build real foundations’ for documentation of the Armenian Genocide.

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Following this, Pashinyan, on the occasion of the Armenian Genocide’s 109th anniversary, stated that ‘we have not overcome that trauma’ and ‘for this reason, sometimes we cannot correctly distinguish the realities and factors, historical processes and projected horizons’.

‘Maybe this is also the reason why we get new shocks, reliving the trauma of the Armenian Genocide as a legacy and as a tradition’, Pashinyan added.

In October 2024, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said that the Armenian Genocide international recognition process ‘is not our number one priority’.

The Armenian Genocide has been one of the main stumbling blocks in Armenia’s relations with Turkey, which as the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, denies that the genocide took place.

Pashinyan’s government is currently involved in the normalisation process of bilateral relations with Turkey. However, Turkey has conditioned its relations with Armenia with the Armenia–Azerbaijan normalisation process.

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