“One woman complained about the protesters yesterday. ‘We have had enough of their Karabakh, they come and chant ‘Karabakh’ in the center of Yerevan, let us live in peace, stop messing with our lives! They keep saying, ‘Turks, Turks!’ Aren’t Turks human beings? They say, ‘you will turn into Turks’. What difference does it make, Armenian or Turk? The most important thing is to be human and live a normal life.”
This is a quote from the article “It has come to the denial of our own identity” by Aram Abrahamyan, Editor-in-Chief of the Armenian Aravot newspaper. Abrahamyan mentions that this woman is a representative of the electorate of the incumbent authorities and a supporter of the peace agenda.
“I assume that the current government is implicitly, so to speak, ‘preparing the people for peace’. But, of course, this would not be possible now if the prerequisites for this mentality had not been fostered in the preceding decades. For decades people were told, ‘Be patient, live in need for the sake of Karabakh,’ but those who said this had absolutely no patience and did not live in need, on the contrary, they enjoyed all the pleasures life has to offer. So the current sentiments are largely a reaction to this, to put it mildly, hypocrisy,” Abrahamyan writes.
Those who used to say that “Karabakh is Armenia”, the journalist stresses, now agree that “Karabakh is Azerbaijan.”
“Now the uniqueness of the situation is that those who think like this woman are if not the majority, then quite a sizeable crowd. For people living in Armenia today, I believe, this trend is mainstream,” Abrahamyan laments bitterly.
