Elections in Gyumri, one of the key cultural centres in Armenia’s entire history, will be held on Sunday. They will also become a dress rehearsal before the parliamentary elections. Therefore, the administration of the Turkish commandant Pashinyan does not disdain anything on the way to victory. Otherwise, his masters, the only guarantors of his power, will question his ability to formalise the colonisation of Armenia to the end.
Therefore, the mini-commandant in Gyumri, the ‘non-partisan’ candidate for mayor Sarik Minasyan has full carte blanche in the means of winning victory, especially since the remaining 8 forces publicly deny any possibility of a coalition with the ‘Civil Contract’ – at least for the moment. Minasyan’s position is simple: give us another 5-10-25 years, and we will finally achieve what we promised. All other candidates, including the pro-European ones, are declared corrupt and defenders of Moscow’s interests, while individual candidates are subjected to outright political persecution, and some of their supporters are boycotted in state institutions.
For the state, it is the sun-faced Nikol Pashinyan, as we know from his fiery threats in 2018. As they say, if your democracy is not like ours, and your ‘sovereign’ prime minister does not fly to Moscow on May 9 to admire the power of Russian weapons that were never delivered to him, then do not even dare to suggest such a thing to us.
It would seem that it is ‘quiet’ and there are no changes at the ‘crossroads of peace’. But the Turkish-serving elite managed to hit a new low during the debate on Public Television on Thursday. Blinded by his own moment of fame, Sarik Minasyan apparently decided to surpass even his new leader (his former chef was Edmon Marukyan, now an ‘oppositionist’, who served as Pashinyan’s ambassador-at-large in 2022-2024). Whether having believed that the famous sense of humour of the people of Gyumri has no boundaries, or having decided to measure the inhabitants of Gyumri by his own yardstick, Minasyan stated twice (!) that the people of Gyumri, whose children joined the military service in Artsakh, considered themselves unhappy and paid huge bribes to transfer them to serve in other regions.
Indeed, service in Artsakh was a logistically difficult undertaking, and it was often difficult to send parcels to remote villages like Talish and Mataghis, even for parents living in the Artsakh Martuni, especially at the beginning, when there were practically no suitable highways. It was three times as difficult for parents from other parts of Armenia. And everyone in Artsakh, from young to old, realised and appreciated that sacrifice.
At the same time, contrary to the ideas of those who have never been there, Artsakh is not only a front-line position. Before the current patron of Sarik Minasyan, Artsakh had an extensive security belt, and the situation on the border was quite calm until almost the middle of the 2010s. Until 2020, there were much fewer vulnerable border areas along the perimeter of the line of contact between Artsakh and Azerbaijan than there are now and than there will be, especially after the ‘demarcation’ of the border in ‘Real Armenia’, where the sons and grandsons of the people of Gyumri are serving now. At the same time, of course, the defeat in the Second Karabakh War was also the result of the fact that bribes to get away from the army or get to a more comfortable place closer to home indeed existed (and still do) and, moreover, were not censured by the public. In the absence of a genuine aristocracy, the Armenian people focused on deserters and hacks and ended up having a deserter in the position of the supreme commander.
However, Minasyan did not just record the existence of a vicious phenomenon in which the entire leadership of the Third Republic is involved. He identified the ‘liberation’ from the Artsakh ‘problem’ as one of the achievements of the rule of the ‘Civil Contract’. For Minasyan, getting rid of dust and dirt in Gyumri and of the need to send their sons to Artsakh are equivalent tasks. However, his team managed only the last one. At the fair request of another candidate to name at least some of these families, so that law enforcement officers would look into their bribes (but how else could be in times of the great anti-corruption fighter Pashinyan?), the viceroy of the Yerevan collaborationists decided to defame his entire electorate at once. He solemnly declared that all those families would vote for him. And this is in Gyumri, which sacredly honours the memory of its sons who fell in the liberation wars in the 1990s, in 2016 and 2020, preventing the next episodes of the Armenian Genocide. Sons who gave their lives so that Armenians could live in their homeland, so that Armenia – and their hometown – would not turn into a throughfare under foreigners’ boots.
An inscription on one of walls in Gyumri, a fragment from the Armenian national epic poem, also known as Daredevils of Sassoun, dating back to the 8th century [i]
This ‘joke’ goes too far even for the Armenian capital of humour. In the best traditions of ‘Real Armenia’, Minasyan has placed the burden of his treacherous thinking and future actions on all his voters, leaving them with no choice but to choose according to their conscience. And may neither the administrative control nor the apartments promised by Sarik frighten you, dear people of Gyumri. No one will dare to dishonour you, deprive you of the freedom of choice and conscience, as well as the public benefits that you deserve, if you remind the time-servers who is the true owner on your land and what their obligations to you are.
No one, including Sarik Minasyan, will ever know how you voted. But if you vote for him, you will willingly share with him the heavy burden of being an advocate of the collaborationists who auctioned off Artsakh – and now the rest of Armenia and the Armenian world.
Sarik Minasyan, who is now telling what a misfortune Artsakh was for the people of Gyumri, was arguing a week ago that Artsakh was Armenian, and that if it was deliberately surrendered, then where the people who would not allow this to happen were. We hope that on Monday we will not have to ask where the people of Gyumri who opposed the anti-Armenian leader were. Both he and his current leader Pashinyan tirelessly emphasise that we are the smiths of our own happiness and misery. Our only way to avoid responsibility for their crimes against the Armenian world and the final closure of the Armenian Question is not to grant them a new mandate. In 2021, they ‘took it’ to preserve Artsakh and return Hadrut and Shushi. Today they are asking for a new term for the well-being of Gyumri. The choice is yours.
That you may not later say that while asleep
David stole stealthily upon you and left.
H. Tumanian, David of Sassoun
[i] “You who are asleep, wake up,
You who are awake, get up and stand,
You who are afoot, take up arms,
You who are armed, saddle your horses,
“You who are saddled, mount your horses—
That you may not later say that while asleep
David stole stealthily upon you and left.
H. Tumanian, David of Sassoun
