YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has made it clear that Armenia no longer strives to get foreign countries and international bodies to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
“Our official position is that international recognition of the Armenian genocide is not among our foreign policy priorities today,” he told Turkish journalists in an interview published by his office late on Thursday, March 13.
What is more, Pashinyan questioned the wisdom of genocide resolutions adopted by the parliaments of dozens of nations and resented by Turkey, saying that they undermine stability in the region.
“When even very distant countries make such decisions and when enthusiasm or joy [in Armenia] from that decision fades, the next question arises: what do those decisions give us in our relations with our immediate neighborhood?” he said: “When we have tensions in our immediate neighborhood, to what extent do those tensions contribute to stability, peace in our country, in our region, etc.?”
Pashinyan provoked a storm of criticism at home when he essentially questioned the genocide during a visit to Switzerland on January 24. Pashinyan said Armenians should “understand what happened” in 1915 and what prompted the subsequent campaigning for international recognition of the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians as genocide. He seemed to imply that foreign powers, notably the Soviet Union, were behind that campaign.
Armenian historians, opposition figures and retired diplomats expressed outrage at the remarks, saying that Pashinyan cast doubt on the fact of the genocide officially recognized by over three dozen countries, including the United States. Some of them claimed that this is part of his efforts to cozy up to Turkey, which continues to deny a deliberate government effort to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Some Armenian Diaspora groups that have long been at the forefront of the recognition campaign also deplored Pashinyan’s remarks.
