Pashinyan on His Controversial Statement

Recently, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addressed the uproar surrounding his statement regarding the Armenian Genocide, emphasizing that we must understand there are indeed forces whose primary tool is to make our independent living in our environment impossible, in order to keep us manageable. He made this remark during a meeting with representatives of the Armenian community in the United States.

"Moreover, I want to sincerely tell you that I wish I had been wise enough to draw this conclusion from different books, textbooks, and so on from what I’ve read and learned. Unfortunately, I am not that smart to grasp this information independently. I realized this during my tenure as Prime Minister through various meetings addressing practical problems and hearing different situations, conversations, and statements that express certain patterns of thinking," he noted.

"I have the same conversation with various leaders, who express that every person has their role in this world, and your role is to be a martyr. People, why are you intermingling? We understand that we have been martyred, that in many cases, you have helped us become martyrs, but we do not want to be martyrs; we want to be a normal living people. We want the ordinary person in Armenia to live in a normal way, and their role should not be to represent a martyr nation. I believe this is a very important issue, and we must discuss it on a national level. I do not want this to define our historical mission, our role, or our place in this world. As much as we can, we will fight against being martyrs. This is the public change that is happening, and I consider making this public discourse a historical mission. We will fight to realize this mission,"> said Pashinyan.