From the heights of his Beirut throne, the Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia has suddenly noticed that Armenia’s ‘friends’ are playing along with the distortion of historical facts in occupied Shushi. Apparently, this particular provocation was hard to miss: even the most loyal, pro-Azerbaijani attack dogs of the Turkish collaborationist have noticed it and spoken out. Among them are the leaders of the ‘Peace Bridge’ initiative and young Janissary Ruben Rubinyan. Even they, it seems, did not expect such a blatant betrayal from their Azerbaijani ‘friends’. As the old joke goes, someone got fired from the Gestapo for being too cruel. But those who once claimed the mantle of spiritual leadership in the Armenian world should, after all, be held to a higher standard than rootless traitors who make no particular effort to disguise what they are.
Armenia’s ‘pacifists’ will, of course, get a few knocks from both the Baku administration and its Yerevan branch. But what won’t one do for ‘friendship between two brotherly nations’ – especially when there are grants to be had for promoting it? But then whom, exactly, is Aram I afraid of? His ‘fierce’ indignation is rarely audible to begin with. And now that he has finally found his voice, it is still not directed at those responsible for driving Armenians out of Artsakh and desecrating some of our oldest sanctuaries. Instead, it is directed at some amorphous collective entity called a ‘people’. Who, then, is included in his ‘we’ and ‘our’? Whom does he claim to represent? Who, in his view, has divided ‘us’, and who has made ‘us’ so ‘short-sighted’? Perhaps what we really need is a little more ‘unity’ – at cycling events, blood-soaked festivals, and prayer services for our enemies? There is an even more curious question about this supposed national unity. If Aram I himself were suddenly forced to evacuate Lebanon, then under the new laws of ‘Real Armenia’, he and his flock, despite being ethnic Armenians, would have to satisfy the same requirements for Armenian citizenship – and, by extension, ‘protection’ – as, say, Pakistanis or Belarusians. One can only assume that Azerbaijanis will be treated rather more generously.
So whom, exactly, does Aram I fear, once again taking shelter behind ‘the people’ and refusing to name those truly responsible for what is happening? Most likely not God. After all, it was hardly out of fear of God that he first sent his ‘warm greetings and blessings’ to the man whose government bears political responsibility for the suffering of his compatriots and for the abandonment and desecration of Armenian heritage in Artsakh and Armenia proper – only to then condemn diplomats working in Azerbaijan for visiting sites that the very Pashinyan he had blessed has himself recognised as Azerbaijani.
And why, then, should an EU representative like Magdalena Grono not have travelled to occupied Gandzasar, when only a few days later she was received with full honours at the Armenian Matenadaran? In a country where people implicated in the blockade of Artsakh have been welcomed with open arms, it would hardly be surprising if Grono were denied entry next time for her ‘authoritative’ opinion that Artsakh is home, among other things, to Armenian heritage. So whom shall we anathematise first, Your Holiness Aram I? Mrs Grono, who condescendingly tells us that some of our heritage is indeed Armenian, but that ‘the truth lies somewhere in the middle’? Or the Yerevan collaborationist who has washed his hands of Artsakh – and of Armenian heritage altogether?
All of this brings us back to the real problem. If you sell the cow, you sell her milk, too. Azerbaijan is the only party to this arrangement acting in its own interests. Everyone else – the Armenian world above all – is busy reacting to the latest, entirely predictable consequences. These events, incidents and statements have long since become a humiliating feature of our reality. They will continue to do so for as long as we treat each new episode as a crisis in its own right, while ignoring the existential challenge facing Armenia and the Armenian world: the feudal-clan system that governs the Third Republic. There is no shortage of people eager to condemn, disrupt, or rename tours to occupied Artsakh. What seems to be in rather shorter supply is the courage to take responsibility for defending it, confront those who surrendered it, and fight to preserve and enforce Section 907 of the American Freedom Support Act.
The problem, then, lies not so much in the ‘peace agenda’ itself – nor in its terms, nor in the visits of foreign diplomats to surrendered Shushi, nor even in the continued ceding of Armenia’s own territory. These are merely symptoms, the dying gasps of an organism with a suppressed immune system. We can keep running a fever over every pronouncement by some third-rate official, reassuring ourselves that as long as our temperature keeps rising and our body still responds, we must still be alive. But in the reality into which the leaders of the Third Republic have plunged us, there will never be a shortage of reasons for the fever to spike.
The time for putting band-aids on countless wounds and taking fever reducers passed long ago. Yet Noubar Afeyan, with his Moderna, and other eminent biotechnologists and physicians still refuse to publicly acknowledge our diagnosis, let alone treat the disease or work to prevent it. They and their ilk, Aram I, and all the useful idiots who are now genuinely outraged by official visits to Artsakh while continuing to shake hands with the collaborationist regime that handed it over to the enemy are doing nothing but worsening the disease and condemning us to certain death.
The process of self-destruction cannot be stopped while the brain of the Armenian organism remains in the grip of a clique hostile to Armenia, kept alive by the current ‘opposition’ and their sponsors across the Armenian world. As long as you obsess over the falsification of history coming from Baku rather than the disease festering in Yerevan; as long as you are afraid to name the diagnosis out loud; as long as you keep searching for healthy cells within diseased tissue, you are squandering the precious time we have left.
Blessing the Capitulation, Anathematising a Tour
There is no shortage of people eager to condemn, disrupt, or rename tours to occupied Artsakh. What seems to be in rather shorter supply is the courage to take responsibility for defending it, confront those who surrendered it, and fight to preserve and enforce Section 907 of the American Freedom Support Act.
