YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan urged Armenians to “overcome the trauma” of their ethnic kin massacred by the Ottoman Turks and stop yearning for their “lost homeland” as they marked the 109th anniversary of the genocide on Wednesday, April 24.
In a statement issued on the occasion, Pashinyan claimed that the enduring trauma prevents many of them from objectively assessing international affairs and challenges facing Armenia.
“Maybe this is also a reason why we get new shocks, reliving the trauma of the Armenian Genocide as a legacy and as a tradition,” he said, risking more opposition allegations that he is helping Turkey deny the 1915 genocide as part of Yerevan’s ongoing rapprochement with Ankara.
The unusually worded statement came as tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial in Yerevan to commemorate the genocide victims.
The daylong procession followed an official wreath-laying ceremony at the hilltop memorial led by Pashinyan, parliament speaker Alen Simonyan and President Vahagn Khachaturyan. Catholicos Karekin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with Pashinyan’s government, was again excluded from the annual ceremony.
The genocide began with mass arrests on April 24, 1915 of Armenian intellectuals and activists in Constantinople. An estimated 1.5 million Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or starved to death in the following months and years. About three dozen nations, including Russia, France, Germany and the United States, have recognized the genocide.
