By Ruzanna Stepanian
YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has provoked a storm of criticism from his political opponents and historians after questioning the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey and the decades-long Armenian campaign for its international recognition.
“We must also revisit the history of the Armenian genocide,” Pashinyan told a group of Swiss Armenians at the end of his visit to Switzerland late last week. “We must understand what happened and why it happened, how we perceived it and through whom we perceived it. How is it that in 1939 there was no Armenian genocide [recognition] agenda and how is it that in 1950 the Armenian genocide agenda emerged?”
Suren Manukyan, an Armenian scholar specializing in genocide studies, deplored the statement, saying that Pashinyan lacks elementary knowledge of the World War I-era slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians recognized as genocide by dozens of countries and most international historians.
“Semi-literacy is one of the most dangerous things,” Manukyan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “I think the prime minister just needs to read a little.”
One thing Pashinyan will learn, he said, is that the term “genocide” was coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin after 1939, during the Jewish Holocaust, based on the events of 1915.