The Armenian Apostolic Archbishop, Bagrat Galstanyan of Tavush, is leading mass demonstrations against Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Archbishop Galstanyan is leading anti-government protests. Bagrat Galstanyan/X
Today, a cheerful, lively-eyed and quick-witted Armenian Apostolic Archbishop, Bagrat Galstanyan of Tavush, is leading mass demonstrations against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The demand: the autocratic Pashinyan should be replaced by a prime minister heading a government of national unity. Why? The existence of Armenia as a nation state is endangered. The immediate threat comes from a revanchist Azerbaijan’s armed aggression. Meanwhile, Pashinyan operates within an echo chamber of his own making, sidelining open debate on fundamental constitutional issues, as he pursues messianically a divisive ‘Peace in our Time’ appeasement policy.
The protests began in the archbishop’s rural diocese. They were a response to the prime minister’s arbitrary and unreciprocated give away of local land to Azerbaijan. The demonstrations in Tavush turned into a modern-day ‘Peasants’ March’ on the capital, Yerevan. They have since morphed into the ‘Tavush Homeland Movement’ (THM), a trans-party opposition organization. It calls for strikes and non-violent civil disobedience. Superficially, the upheaval looks much like the Washington-backed ‘Velvet Revolution’ that catapulted Pashinyan to power in 2018. In the absence of strong political institutions it is on the street, not in parliament where the decisive political battles for power are fought.
The charismatic archbishop, donning his clerical robe and cross, is in the vanguard. He has become the Movement’s candidate to replace Pashinyan as prime minister. The opposition to Pashinyan now has the hitherto missing force of religious faith and a friendly, scandal-free face.
The archbishop’s protest actions have struck a powerful chord throughout the whole of Armenia. Fear abounds that Pashinyan will concede to Azerbaijan the Republic of Armenia’s ability to fulfill its constitutionally enshrined raison d’etre: to serve as a secure homeland for a nation emaciated by the great Armenian Genocide (1915-18) and its bloody aftershocks, and to defend the interests of all Armenians wherever they may be in the world. This national mission is not altogether unlike that of the post-holocaust State of Israel.
Armenian fears are not unfounded. The publicly proclaimed goal of Azerbaijan’s revanchist dictator, Ilham Aliyev, is Armenia’s incorporation into a ‘Greater Azerbaijan’ standing at the center of a Muslim pan-Turkic nation stretching from European Turkey in the West to the Great Wall of China in the East. Already Aliyev and Turkey’s Erdogan speak of Azerbaijan and Turkey as ‘one nation’. Christian Armenia physically stands in the way of geographic unity.
Aliyev calls Armenia ‘West Azerbaijan’ and claims Muslim Azeri-Turks are the rightful possessors of the land. He moreover assures his people that they will one day reclaim it. Azerbaijan’s celebration of the ideologues and perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide as national heroes does nothing to allay Armenian forebodings. Territorially reducing Armenia and obliging it to become a de facto vassal state is part of the process. Fulfillment will take time, perhaps decades, but Alijev is well on the way to success.
A shrewd tactician, Aliyev holds a handful of trump cards. Among them are phenomenal oil wealth; strong Turkish and Israeli support for his military; pan-Turkic and pan-Muslim credentials that count internationally; a population of over ten million compared to Armenia’s less than three million; a public that is easily aroused to extremism by the regime’s chauvinistic anti-Armenian propaganda; and institutionalized financial corruption that carries with it considerable political influence in the western world.
Brute force is Aliyev’s ultimate weapon. His predecessors used massacres to eradicate Azerbaijan’s Armenian Christian minority as both Azerbaijan and Armenia were emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Aliyev himself deployed brute force to ethnically and religiously ‘cleanse’ the unrecognized Armenian Christian Republic of Nagorno Karabakh in two stages. The first took place during the 44-day Nagorno Karabakh War in 2020. The second took the form of a nine-month blockade capped by a two-day blitzkrieg last autumn. Meanwhile Azerbaijan has militarily occupied over 80 square miles of the territory of the Republic of Armenia and periodically shells borderland areas. The Aliyev regime furthermore holds dozens of Armenian hostages as bargaining chips.
A Republic of Armenia that looks much like post-Genocide Turkey, or post-ethnic cleansing Nagorno Karabakh, without Armenians, is not a far-fetched nightmare. It could happen quickly blitzkrieg-style, or Azerbaijan could degrade Armenian statehood gradually by deploying more measured means of military, economic and diplomatic coercion. Aliyev appears to prefer the latter option. In either case, the outcome would be essentially the same: The deconstruction of Armenia’s barriers to economic and demographic colonization by Azerbaijan and its Turkic Muslim ally, Turkey, the unrepentant successor state to the genocidal Ottoman Caliphate.
Aliyev has managed Azerbaijan’s economic, military, and geo-political advantages exceedingly well. He has placed himself securely as the regional Trans-Caucasian kingmaker in the broader power struggle between Moscow and the Washington–Brussels axis for ascendancy on Russia’s eastern and southern borders. All the great and regional powers are dependent on Azerbaijan’s goodwill for fulfilment of their own aspirations. The world is eager to do business with Azerbaijan and turns a blind eye to its military aggression and atrocity crimes. Azerbaijan enjoys impunity.
Pashinyan’s response to Azerbaijan’s aggression has been capitulation, marked by an endless stream of concessions. He tries to sell them to an increasingly doubtful public as an all or nothing proposition with the claim that any alternative to submission will provoke Azerbaijan to wage a devastating war.
Pashinyan’s appeasement policy contains, to be sure, elements of sloppy ‘one-man show’ diplomacy. This has created nervousness and high-level resignations within the foreign ministry. But appeasement as a policy arises less from ineptitude than from an anti-national, globalist ideology.
Pashinyan views the Armenian nation through ultra-materialistic, post-Christian ‘End of History’ spectacles of the sort exported from Washington during the Clinton-Bush-Obama years. Those who gaze at the world through them see power deriving from multiculturalism and the opening of borders for the energy pipelines and the mass movement of goods, services, and people. Christian Armenia will thus be transformed, he prophesies, from being the ‘Crossroads of Empires’ of the past to a secular ‘Crossroads of Peace’. It is to be achieved through what he calls an ‘epoche-making’ twin-track foreign and domestic reorientation of the country.
On the foreign policy front, Pashinyan has quickened the pace of Armenia’s military, economic and political disengagement from Russia and its comprehensive Euro-Atlantic integration. Moreover, he is doing so with a panache of the sort calculated to provoke hostile responses from Russia, Armenia’s most important partner and protector from Azerbaijani aggression. It’s essentially the same path followed by Ukraine in the aftermath of the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 – one that could easily turn Armenia into a new military front in the still escalating conflict between Russia and the Washington–Brussels axis. The prospect of such an outcome must make all thoughtful Armenians shudder.
Pashinyan’s domestic priority is to satisfy Azerbaijan’s, and Turkey’s, demands for the de-nationalization of Armenia’s Constitution. This national charter projects a state standing on four pillars: a self-governing Armenian Nagorno Karabakh, the Army, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Diaspora. Pashinyan sees these constitutional pillars as obstacles to Armenia becoming the regional ‘Crossroads of Peace’ and has not waited for acceptance of a new Constitution before hammering them. As former Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian has observed:
“Today those pillars have been either destroyed or completely weakened. Nagorno Karabakh has been destroyed, the army has been pulverized, the constitution is violated, the church is persecuted, the diaspora is despised and humiliated.”
So far, Pashinyan’s policy of ‘creative destruction’ has not produced what Armenia needs most. The prime minister was obliged to admit at the beginning of May: “We still have no security guarantees” – not from the United States, the EU, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan or anyone else.
With little to show for his highhanded methods and his anti-national radicalism, Pashinyan has alienated much of the Armenian nation, including its Church. Many Armenians sense that another blow to those constitutional pillars could bring the fragile Armenian national state tumbling down. Should that happen, the most likely outcome will be Armenia reliving its past as the trampled on ‘Crossroads of Empires’ and not embarking on a new secure and prosperous life as the ‘Crossroads of Peace’.
The Armenian Apostolic Church sees in Pashinyan the likes of leaders who destructively proclaimed in the Prophet Jeremiah’s day: “Peace, Peace, when there is no Peace”. In the absence of a strong, unified political opposition, the Church has stepped into the breach. The Catholicos has given the green light to Archbishop Galstanyan to take the lead in the national movement to change what they see as a fatal national trajectory.
The Armenian Apostolic Church and the Armenian nation have become so interwoven since the latter’s conversion to Christianity in 301 A.D. that the two are mutually dependent. The symbiosis has become so great one cannot survive without the other. For centuries, after the collapse of ancient Christian Armenian kingdoms, the Church was the only functioning Armenian national institution.
The national Church stood with and represented the Armenian nation throughout all the devastating jihads, the interconfessional wars, Islamist and communist persecutions, and especially the great Armenian Genocide and subsequent orgies of anti-Armenian ethnic and religious cleansing. The nation would not have survived without it. Without the Christian faith and its national institution, the Armenian people are reduced from being a nation to a mere linguistic group. This ancient manifestation of the Armenian nation is again engaged in crisis politics but in a modern age to which it has yet to fully adapt.
The challenge undertaken by Archbishop Galstanyan and his Church is enormous. The gloves are now off. Pashinyan claims Galstanyan’s movement seeks to “incite war” and the “de facto dissolution of Armenian sovereignty and statehood,” and is moreover acting under the influence of “drug lords, criminals and foreign special services.” Pashinyan-inspired analysts and journalists suggest the archbishop acts as a Russian agent.
Such vilification by authoritarian regimes is customarily a precursor to the use of violence against political opponents. Already over 150 protesters have been arrested. Heavily armed police physically prevented the Catholicos from participating in the public commemoration of the founding of the first Republic of Armenia in 1919. The publicized arrival of the deputy director of the CIA, David Cohen, in Yerevan during the protests sends a message to Galstanyan’s movement: Washington is serious about combating domestic political threats to Pashinyan’s power.
By assuming the leadership of a fragmented national opposition movement without a powerful external backer, the Church has placed itself in a vulnerable position in a bruising power struggle with global implications. The geopolitical plates on which Armenia stands clash ever more violently. The great Armenian Genocide took place in the context of such geopolitical struggles. Today, the plates of geopolitics are again clashing beneath the foundations of the Armenian state and its structures are trembling. Nothing short of a miracle will produce success.
Western Christians’ awareness of the threat to Armenia and its Church – to say nothing of prayer support, public expressions of constructive solidarity, and material aid – is currently weak or nonexistent. Must Armenia’s Christians, descendants of victims of genocide, face yet again dehumanizing powers and principalities alone at the ‘Crossroads of Empire’?
John Eibner, Ph.D. (London), is a historian and President of Christian Solidarity International. Thirty years ago, he and the Baroness Cox authored Ethnic Cleansing in Progress: War in Nagorno Karabakh.
