Several weeks ago, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, speaking about the mass killings of Armenians during that historical period, for the first time replaced the usual term “genocide” with the phrase “great massacre” (in Armenian “mets yeghern”), emphasizing that the conflict between Armenians and Turks was provoked by Tsarist Russia. Moreover, he noted that modern-day Türkiye does not bear historical responsibility for these events.
Following this, one of Pashinyan’s allies, Armenian Parliament member Andranik Kocharyan, stated that one and a half million Armenians died in the events of 1915, but a list of their names has not yet been compiled. As a result, the parliamentarian proposed preparing this list and clarifying the actual number of victims of the “great massacre.”
Subsequently, concerns were raised in Armenian opposition circles that in his message of April 24, Nikol Pashinyan, in order to facilitate normalization of relations with Türkiye, might again avoid using the term “genocide,” replacing it with “mets yeghern.”
And today, in his message, Pashinyan partially confirmed these fears, using both the term “genocide” and the phrase “mets yeghern.” However, the main feature of his address to the nation was that for the first time since the formation of the Republic of Armenia, its Prime Minister, referring to the events of 1915, did not attribute responsibility for them to the Republic of Türkiye.
Specifically, Pashinyan stated that “…during the years of World War I, a massive tragedy occurred, and the Armenian people, having lost statehood centuries ago and essentially forgotten the tradition of statehood, became victims of geopolitical intrigues and false promises. They were deprived, primarily, of political wisdom, capable of making peace and its rules understandable to themselves.”
This quote contains a fairly transparent hint from Pashinyan that the Armenians, who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire, believed in false promises from Tsarist Russia and, by rebelling against the Ottoman Empire, allowed themselves to be turned into tools of geopolitical intrigues.
Thus, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan became the first Armenian leader to effectively blame the Armenians themselves for the events of 1915, as well as to use the term “mets yeghern,” which is usually used by leaders of countries that do not recognize the “Armenian genocide.”
“Mets yeghern has become a national tragedy and trauma for us and, without exaggeration, a factor that defines our social psychology,” continued Pashinyan. “Even today, we perceive the world, our environment, ourselves under the influence of the trauma of mets yeghern: we have not overcome this trauma. This means that, as an internationally recognized state, we often relate to and compete with other countries and the international community in a state of trauma, and for this reason, we sometimes cannot properly distinguish realities and factors, historical processes and projected horizons.”
The official response from the Turkish authorities to Pashinyan’s message of April 24 has not yet been announced. However, its essence is contained in a statement made yesterday by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“In the South Caucasus, a new order is being established,” said the President of Türkiye. “It is time to discard groundless memories. It is always better to act in accordance with the realities of the time than to rely on fabricated histories that have no connection with reality. Now Nikol Pashinyan has understood this as well.”
Ilkin Shafiyev
