I Have Banned Sending Used Clothes, Cars, and Worn-Out Items to Armenia: Pashinyan

We need to stop perceiving Armenia as a forward post. This was stated by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan during the World Armenian Summit.

“Armenia is a sovereign state, and its sole function should be to ensure the safety and well-being of its citizens. Well-being includes freedom, justice, and democracy,” Pashinyan noted.

According to him, the happiness of citizens should also be formulated as a political objective. “However, people ask, how will you make families happy? It’s not about making them happy, but enabling happiness; each person should decide for themselves how they can be happy,” said Pashinyan.

He also cited an example: an artist is happy when they have an audience, but in Armenia, artists are mostly unhappy because the audience is very limited.

According to him, peace, prosperity, and a spiritual life are important for a person's happiness, which, according to Nikol Pashinyan, has a distorted perception in our country—understood only in a religious sense, while cultural life is also an inseparable part of spiritual life.

Pashinyan emphasized that a person is happy when they can go to the theater, attend concerts, and when events take place on stage that are worth the effort and money spent.

“In a forward post, happiness is not a goal; struggle is the goal. I also want Armenia to emerge from being an object of pity,” the Prime Minister stated.

“For example, I have banned sending used clothes, cars, and worn-out items to Armenia. The Armenian government is capable of ensuring a certain minimum for the institutions under its responsibility. In other words, we need to move beyond the notion of sending worn-out items to Armenia and covering them for months. I have a conflict with that perception of Armenia,” the Prime Minister said.