Voting Rights by Turkish Propaganda Coverage

Just as we warned, the Berlin Wall between Armenia and the Spyurk (worldwide Armenian communties) is hardening into an Iron Curtain.

Just days before heading off to their well-deserved holidays at Turkish resorts, Yerevan’s pseudo-parliament voted to disenfranchise Armenian citizens who had spent more than six months outside the country over the previous year.

We should note that this is no longer about sharing such ‘burdens’ as military service. As a citizen, one could have served in the Armenian army for 2 or even 3 years. Whether they can help shape the country’s future over the next five, ten, or twenty years depends solely on whether they happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Well, the feudal clan system is true to itself as always. At first, Levon Ter-Petrosyan completely isolated himself from the old Spyurk, leaving the Armenian world essentially lawless within the newly formed Armenian state. Then Robert Kocharyan forbade Armenian citizens to vote in embassies abroad or to cast their votes remotely (for example, by mail). Serzh Sargsyan rewrote the Constitution to suit himself, but not to include the Spyurk. Instead, he insulted it with the Zurich Protocols and his ‘football diplomacy’ with genocidal Turkey. Finally, Turkish satrap Pashinyan freed himself from the last shackles of decency by shutting down the pseudo-ministry of the ‘diaspora’, putting up for sale everything the Armenian world fought for, and outlawing it in the colonial ‘Real Armenia’ without any hesitation.

It therefore comes as no surprise that the next logical step has now been taken. And even in this matter, the pseudo-opposition played along with Pashinyan. A few videos from airplanes and airports, a couple of publications with offers to buy tickets for all interested Russian nationals – and just like that, the unconstitutional disenfranchisement of Armenian citizens around the world has been given a veneer of legitimacy. At the same time, stigmatising Russian Armenians as a community came as a convenient bonus. Indeed, such services may even be rewarded when the new ‘parliament’ is convened. And there is still one more task ahead: legitimising the adoption of a Turkish-issued ‘Constitution’ and completing the dismantling of Armenian statehood.

Thus, everyone is busy with more pressing matters, while Armenian students and professionals accumulating human, social, and financial capital to return home – if there is still a country to return to after the next snap elections – should keep their long-term plans to themselves. ‘Real Armenia’ is bread and circuses here and now. And those who dare to think about tomorrow are told they have no place there. After all, the pinnacle of patriotism in today’s geographical Armenia is paying taxes and watching them being used to fill the same holes in the asphalt with enviable regularity.

But asphalt repairs are visible – especially when entire streets and bridges are closed for two or three months to carry them out. Lions confiscated from Gagik Tsarukyan are also visible. In Armenia, everything is visible – except the rights of Armenians and Armenian citizens.

We have repeatedly warned that the global Armenian world is being cut off from the remnants of the Armenian state – both outside and inside. Maybe, at least now, those who buried their heads in the sand, entrusting the national project coveted by hundreds of generations of our ancestors to the ‘taxpayers’, will turn on their institutional and genetic memory and remember how and why their ancestors alternately found themselves outside Western Armenia, Nakhijevan, Syunik, and Artsakh?

Perhaps, they did not pay taxes to foreign rulers very diligently? Or maybe because it was necessary to build one’s own state with such dedication, and not to feed others’ ones? Or should we have voted even more actively for hundreds of thousands of Armenians to be deprived of even a formal voice today?

We no longer have space for experiments and time for ‘amends’ within the current system. Even the new red passports bearing Khor Virap, with no Ararat behind it, have no place left on the ruins of the Third Republic.