Surreal Armenian news headlines have become the new norm. Thus, on Saturday night, Gharib Babayan, a 70-year-old citizen of Armenia, narrowly escaped arrest for distributing a sensational video of Iranian Azerbaijanis singing a song about ‘Karabakh’ on the Republic Square in Yerevan. ‘Democracy’ in Armenia under the Turkish commandant Pashinyan reached such heights that hundreds of thousands of Armenians exhaled in the middle of the night that a man, who was rightly outraged by the impunity of foreign provocateurs, was not arrested, but only subjected to administrative supervision and restricted in public speaking.
Indeed, the old, edited video was shot and distributed at the right moment – to carry out another psychological operation within the framework of the hybrid war waged against Armenia and the Armenian world. Its goals are simple: to convince us that we are powerless against the enemy, which means that resistance is useless. Finding those who orchestrated it, filmed it without interfering with the ‘singers’ and did not contact representatives of government agencies, as well as establishing why the provocation was ignored by the police officers on duty, of whom there are plenty at the Government building – these are the tasks that the National Security Service must deal with.
However, the surreality of the situation lies in the fact that a criminal case has been opened against Gharib Babayan for ‘inciting hatred’. Anyone who knowingly became a part of this and other intrusions into the Armenian information space should be punished – but not for inciting hatred, especially ‘against other citizens of Armenia’, but as spies and their accomplices. As a result of the current ‘work’ of the Armenian security services, the Armenian society does not feel safer, but on the contrary, feels completely defenceless – both before the uncontrolled flows of tourists and even new residents (and sometimes citizens) of Armenia, and before its own system of ‘rule of law’ and ‘justice’.
The absurdity of the article chosen for the prosecution proves that the one-and-done Pashinyan, in his best traditions, only wanted to please his masters. First, it is a ‘godly’ thing to start deliberately unfair persecution against an Armenian in the neighbouring country. Secondly, by doing so, Pashinyan gave his ‘partner’, the very one with whom he is going to ‘mutually’ abandon lawsuits and claims, the opportunity to demonstrate to external observers that hatred against tourists based on ethnicity is allegedly widespread in Armenia (although even the Investigative Committee did not try to stretch the point of such a baseless announcement). Thirdly, this situation is a kind of demonstration of the future prioritisation of the influx of ‘Western Azerbaijanis’. Fourth, every day we see how genuine hatred (for example, against the Artsakh Armenians) is spread with impunity by bloggers close to Pashinyan and his wife. The persecution of Gharib Babayan is illegal, as it restricts fundamental human rights and freedoms, and it must stop immediately. Calling a spade a spade is the duty, not the privilege of every Armenian.
