Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan sent a message on the occasion of the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
“Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
Today, we commemorate the memory of 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide, the Mets Eghern, who were put to the sword in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 for being Armenians.
This large-scale tragedy took place during the years of the First World War. The Armenian people, who had no statehood, lost their statehood centuries ago and essentially forgot the tradition of statehood. They became victims of geopolitical intrigues and false promises, lacking a political mind capable of making the world and its rules understandable. :
The Great Genocide became a nationwide tragedy and grief for us, and without exaggeration, our socio-psychology is a determining factor. Even today, we perceive the world, our environment, and ourselves under the influence of the Great Genocide, and we have not overcome that care.
This means that being an internationally recognized state, we often relate to and compete with other countries and the international community in a state of concern, and for this reason, sometimes we cannot correctly distinguish the realities and factors, historical processes, and projected horizons.
Maybe this is also the reason why we get new shocks, reliving the trauma of the Armenian Genocide as a legacy and as a tradition.
In this sense, I consider the internal discretion of the Great Ekhern extremely important. When talking about the Armenian Genocide, the Great Genocide, we always refer to the outside world and talk to the outside world. Still, our internal conversation never takes place on this topic.
What should we do and what should we not do to overcome the concern of Genocide and exclude it as a threat? These are questions that should be the key subject of discussion in our political, political science, aesthetic, and philosophical thought, but this kind of perspective on dealing with the fact of Genocide is not common among us.
This is an urgent imperative. We must evaluate the relations between the Mets Eghern and the First Republic of Armenia and relate the Mets Eghern’s perception to the vital interests of the Republic of Armenia and our national statehood.
Genocide and deprivation of homeland are not sentences for us that we have to bear as a continuous search for a lost homeland. We must stop looking for a homeland because we have found our Promised Land, where milk and honey flow. For us, the commemoration of the martyrs of the Genocide should not symbolize the lost but the found and real homeland in the face of the Republic of Armenia, whose competitive, legitimate, thoughtful, and creative policies can exclude repetition.
Never again. We should not say this to others, but to ourselves. This is not an accusation against us at all but a point of view from which we, only we, are responsible and the director of our destiny, and we are obliged to have enough mind, will, depth, and knowledge to carry that responsibility in the domain of our sovereign decisions and perceptions.
Let the martyrs of the Armenian Genocide and all our other martyrs sleep comforted by the Republic of Armenia.
And long live the Republic of Armenia.”
