Stephan Astourian
It
has been a month and a half now that an unpleasant controversy has been
raging in Armenia around the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute (AGMI),
its director Dr. Harutyun Marutyan, and a member of the museum’s Board
of Trustees, Dr. Hranush Kharatyan. Among the accusations, one could
enumerate the following: Dr. Marutyan avoids using the word “genocide”
on purpose, preferring “Medz Yeghern” (Great Crime); his goal
is to dilute, if not annihilate, Armenian legal claims, and to encourage
rapprochement with denialist Turkey; he must be an agent of some
obscure forces, if not of Turkey itself, and probably of the government
of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, which has been accused of “destroying
Armenian values and statehood” after coming to power in late spring
2018. Of course, diluting Armenian Genocide claims must have been part
of these vicious purported goals, according to the allegations.
Dr. Hranush Kharatyan, in turn, is accused of having “installed”
Marutyan as director of the AGMI precisely to achieve the aforementioned
goals. She is portrayed as a Soros-affiliated person, whose Hazarashen
NGO-Armenian Center for Ethnological Studies is allegedly receiving
funds from George Soros to reorganize the archival fonds [collections]
of the AGMI—separating published materials from archival documents, a
common international practice—in order to share copies of these with an
Azerbaijani colleague and endanger the supposed “security” of the
published materials. Given that the son of Dr. Kharatyan is a well-known
activist who is close to the leadership group surrounding PM Pashinyan,
everything starts becoming plausible.
Over the past thirty years, I have refrained from commenting in
writing on various developments in Armenia, including on many serious
economic, social and political issues, on attacks on diasporan scholars,
and on some cases of utter academic incompetence. I happen to be a drsetsi
[outsider] and I believe that Armenia’s problems must be solved first
and foremost by the population living in that country. The Armenian
Genocide, however, does not belong only to post-Soviet Armenians and the
AGMI is too important a pan-national institution, in my mind at
least—what some people would call the only quasi-sacred non-religious
institution in Armenia—to let muddy political games dirty it. I also
feel there is much to be learned from what has been going on over the
past month and a half about hybrid warfare in Armenia against the
current administration. Finally, it should be clear that this article
deals only with the AGMI’s current problems; it does not imply any
overall judgment about the individuals involved on all sides of the
current controversy or about the current political administration.
At the forefront of the accusations and “explanatory” narrative, one
finds Dr. Hayk Demoyan, the previous director of the Museum-Institute
(2006-2018).[1]
During Dr. Demoyan’s tenure, the AGMI expanded and modernized and
there is little doubt that he had something to do with those
developments. A protégé of former two-term President of Armenia (and
briefly also Prime Minister) Serzh Sargsyan, Demoyan was a candidate for
the position of director in 2018, all the while claiming that he was
not interested in it and that the transition to the new director was not
fully legal from an administrative perspective. Even though he received
a few votes from the members of the Board of Trustees, they were far
from matching those of Dr. Marutyan. Whether Dr. Demoyan was angered by
his failure to get re-elected, is a bit unclear and would require
mind-reading. However, most officials in post-Soviet republics who have
held state positions for many years tend to feel that their state
institution belongs to them. Any succession is thus a cause for trouble
as democratic values and a sense of what the French call “devoir de réserve”
[reserve duty or duty of discretion] is totally absent in most
post-Soviet republics. It may also well be that Dr. Demoyan believes his
statements about the AGMI and the persons concerned. Who knows? On the
other hand, Dr. Marutyan, whose daughter was elected to the city council
of Yerevan on the list supporting PM Pashinyan, is also viewed as a
partisan of the Velvet Revolution. In the context of the attacks against
the AGMI director and Dr. Kharatyan, personal and political motivations
thus seem intertwined. It is Dr. Demoyan who spun the yarn accusing
these academics of being, more or less, traitors working for others.
Ironically enough, Dr. Demoyan was a member of the committee that
gave the “President of the Republic of Armenia Prize in the nomination
of persons having made a valuable contribution to the recognition of
the Armenian Genocide” to Dr. Marutyan on May 29, 2012, “for his
methodologically innovative research into the continuity of the memory
of the Armenian Genocide and its relationships with the Karabakh
Movement.” From 2007 on, Dr. Marutyan was also a member of the
Scientific Council of the AGMI, when Dr. Demoyan was its director. It is
therefore strange that Demoyan had not noticed he had a dubious
character sitting right at the heart of the Museum and that he was
willing to award that person a prestigious prize dealing with the
Armenian Genocide. It is even more disconcerting to read the official press release
from President Serzh Sargsyan’s office, dated 20 September 2012, which
pertains to the second session of the State Commission on Coordination
of the Events dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
Genocide. It mentions that Hayk Demoyan himself “proposed to include
into the Group Mr. Harutyun Marutian [sic].”
The yarn spun by Dr. Demoyan was immediately seized upon by a network
of newspapers and news websites affiliated with or sympathetic to the
former regime: 168.am; tert.am; hraparak.am, 7or.am; yerkir.am, etc. A
well-known political operative and publicist, Narek Malian, leader of an
anti-Western, anti-liberal, extreme-right organization called
Veto—whose targets include George Soros and the Open Society
Foundations, LGBT advocates, the European Union, and the Pashinyan
government—kept the Soros-centered narrative rolling (along with its
twin organization, Adekvad) with remarkable energy. Officials of some
political parties and even a few academics also joined in this
well-orchestrated campaign. One scholar, Haykazun Alvrtsyan, even went
so far as to accuse Dr. Marutyan of being a Turkish agent, no less.
To sum up, developments at the AGMI related to Dr. Marutyan and Dr.
Kharatyan were promptly transformed into issues endangering national
values and the validity of the Armenian Genocide, threats to the
national security of Armenia, and evidence of Turkish and Western
“penetration.” The well-orchestrated controversy became a tool in the
hands of those favoring the previous regime and trying to destabilize
the current one. And it is not surprising that both of the targets—Dr.
Marutyan and Dr. Kharatyan—seem to be partisans of the Velvet Revolution
and, more importantly, are perceived as such.
“Facts” and Facts
There are, however, factual problems with the narrative about these two individuals. Despite some awkward statements to which I shall return later, Dr. Marutyan is far from refusing to use the word Genocide. And lest there still be any doubt about his patriotism, this is the synopsis in English of an article in which he raises a significant issue:
There are, however, factual problems with the narrative about these two individuals. Despite some awkward statements to which I shall return later, Dr. Marutyan is far from refusing to use the word Genocide. And lest there still be any doubt about his patriotism, this is the synopsis in English of an article in which he raises a significant issue:
Consequently, by emphasizing the mass murder of Christians, that is the followers of a particular faith, we push back Christians’ national, ethnic affiliation, their national identity; thereby reducing the political value of the genocide. Genocide is actually equalized to “faith slaying,” but it is a much broader phenomenon. Let us not forget that the Armenian Genocide was accompanied with deprivation from the homeland, which in the case of Armenians was direct manifestation of ethnic genocide. These and many other questions show that the proposed solution and the implementation of collective forms of canonization at least need a thorough study at multiple levels. (p.64) [2]
By referring quite frequently to Medz Yeghern, Dr. Marutyan
seems to try to name the “Armenian Genocide” in a unique way, like
“Holocaust” or “Shoah” in the case of the Jewish Genocide. To be sure, Medz Yeghern
(Great Crime) was also the term commonly used by the survivors of the
Armenian Genocide to name the unnamable, that is, the genocide of their
people. There is, however, a key difference with the use of the terms
Holocaust or Shoah: not only did and does Germany recognize the genocide
committed by the Nazi regime, it has also paid massive reparations.
Such is not the case with Turkey in relation to the Armenian Genocide.
Besides, some world leaders have also used the term Medz Yeghern
(with a distorted translation, “Great Calamity”) precisely to avoid
using the term “genocide,” which has legal implications. Therein lies
the problem which might deserve a discussion, not in Dr. Marutyan’s
alleged evil intent.
As a proud descendant of Vaspurakantsis, his roots are in Western
Armenia. His own research—besides the prize-winning book mentioned above
that demonstrated the linkage between the Armenian Genocide and the
perceptions of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by the tens of thousands of
demonstrators in Yerevan in 1988-90—deals with a subfield of genocide
studies focusing on issues of memory. Dr. Marutyan has also been a
longtime and very active member of Armenia’s Vaspurakan Compatriotic
Association, of which he was a board member from 1995 to 2001
(responsible for scholarly works) and vice-president from 2006 to at
least the end of 2017. Dr. Marutyan has addressed Dr. Demoyan’s
accusations in a short essay entitled “Memory is Changeful, but in Hayk Demoyan’s Case ‘Forgetful.’”
The accusations against Dr. Hranush Kharatyan are even farther from
the truth. What hidden power and status is she endowed with to be able
to force the more than a dozen members of the Board of
Trustees—including academicians, representatives of ministries and major
organizations, a prominent foreign historian, etc.—to vote for Dr.
Marutyan? As a matter of fact, published reports show that Dr. Demoyan
received two votes. As for the Hazarashen NGO, it just has nothing to do
with the AGMI and the reorganization of the archival fonds. Nobody has
provided a single shred of evidence documenting this invention. To be
absolutely thorough, the Hazarashen NGO-Armenian Center for Ethnological
Studies did get a couple of small grants from the Open Society
Foundation: the first one in 1998,
to “conduct research on current economic, political, and cultural
status of the Bosha ethnic minority group in Armenia;” the second one in
2014,
to study the “underlying reasons for soviet repressions of 1949 and
raise general public awareness on the subject; to generate public demand
for responsibility of the soviet Armenian political and administrative
power with the aim to generate change in the public behavior, overcome
fear from political power and create understanding of the need for civic
approach when dealing with state power.” Together, the two grants were
worth $25,000.
Dr. Kharatyan has also worked on a project of the Open-Archives.org online platform
aimed at “an interactive ranking of archival openness from post-Soviet
countries. The platform also includes blogs on archive-related issues,
methodology by which the assessment is done as well as research findings
on existing archival legislations and practices in target countries.”
This project was sponsored by the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information,
an organization located in Tbilisi and funded by numerous Western
organizations and countries, including the Open Society Foundations.
Mr. Malian also mentions in his videos another grant received by the
Hazarashen NGO. This was a grant from “DVV International (the Institute
for International Cooperation of German Adult Education Association) and
partners [which] implemented a series of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation
projects [from 2009 to 2016] through funding support by the German
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The main result of these projects was an
ethnographic book based on oral histories of how Turks, Kurds, and
Armenians remember the past, that is, the Armenian Genocide and its
consequences. Entitled Speaking to One Another: Personal Memories of the Past in Armenia and Turkey,
this work is made up of two ethnographic sections: the Turkish one,
“Wish they hadn’t left” by Leyla Neyzi, and the Armenian one “Whom to
forgive? What to forgive?” by Hranush Kharatyan-Araqelyan. The volume
does not reach a conclusion, does not preach forgiveness or forgetting,
and does not touch on the issue of various forms of reparation. It is
strictly ethnographic and quite enlightening.
In her own introduction to the Armenian section of the book, Dr. Hranush Kharatyan states:
The perception, and to a significant extent, the attitude of Armenia’s present population to Turkey and the Turkish people, along with the possibility of developing Armenia-Turkey relations, has been largely shaped by the Armenian Genocide; massacres and deportations that started in Ottoman Turkey at the end of the 19th century and reached its obvious conclusion in 1915-1922, followed by the lengthy “official reticence” of the USSR and Soviet Armenian authorities in regard to the massacres. (p. 77)
She sums up the content of her section of the book thus:
Family memories of the present generation of Genocide survivors among the population of the Republic of Armenia, along with their apprehension about Turks and their influence on general public opinion, are represented in biographical materials which were used as sources for this work. (p. 79)
Nothing broader is dealt with in this volume. In addition, it is
ironic that the timing of this project coincided with the so-called Armenian-Turkish Protocols,
which the government of then-President Serzh Sargsyan signed in Zurich
on October 10, 2009. Those protocols called for the creation of “a joint
commission of independent historians to study the genocide issue,” thus
making the nature of the 1915-1917 extermination of Armenian Ottomans a
matter for discussion. Those raising an uproar today, such as Dr.
Demoyan, Mr. Malian, and others were silent then: they did not see any
problem with those protocols.
To sum up, the two above-mentioned accusations against Dr. Kharatyan
have no validity. And if anybody still has any doubts, they should read
her recent volume entitled Armenophobia
as a Factor in Turkish Identity Construction: Armenians in the
Provinces of the Republic of Turkey in the Mid-20th Century. Not
only is this massive work one of the very few historical/ethnographic
books published in post-Soviet Armenia whose scholarship matches that of
the best international historians, its content is simply damning for
Turkey. Besides her well-known liberal attitude and the political
activities of her son, there might be another reason why Dr. Kharatyan
became a target in this campaign: the focus of some of her research and
publications. I am referring here to her numerous writings on the one
hand on Bolshevik-Kemalist collaboration in the demise and Sovietization
of the first independent Republic of Armenia (1918-1920) and, on the
other, on Stalin’s Great Terror in Armenia and his post-World War II
persecutions.[3] These topics do not sit well with various academic and
political circles close to the previous regime, and even less so with
the current Russian authorities.
Chronological Development
But how did this problem start and is it totally artificial? The
answer to the latter question is no. Mistakes were made that were
subsequently manipulated to produce the alleged scandal. The first
indication of trouble came at the end of last year. A young researcher
who worked at the AGMI, Ani Voskanyan, was told suddenly by Director
Marutyan, twenty-four hours before the end of her contract, that she
would be dismissed the next day.
This issue raises many questions. Was there a previous evaluation of
Voskanyan’s work, say six months or a year earlier, mentioning that her
work needed improvement, or did the director’s decision stem from
academic disagreements? Indeed, Voskanyan had openly raised somewhat
justified concerns about the content of the AGMI’s announcement of a conference
entitled “Struggle for Armenian Cilicia: Cilicia and Cilician Armenians
in the Aftermath of World War I (1918-1922)” and about the director’s
too-frequent use of Medz Yeghern, instead of Armenian Genocide.
The title of the conference seems to have changed since then, and even
though the reference to “Armenian Cilicia” is no longer mentioned, some
non-academic wording still appears in the text. These issues could and
should have been addressed to the Scientific Council, of which I happen
to be one of the many members, but it seems that the director rejected
that solution and dismissed Voskanyan. Then, the latter started
expressing her concerns on Facebook in the first half of April, which is
the time when the AGMI director came up with a call for Armenians
everywhere to replace their Facebook profile photos with photos of their
relatives, either victims or survivors with a special frame created for
that purpose, on the occasion of the 105th anniversary of the Armenian
Genocide with a simple caption, “I Remember,” a big mistake on his part. Thus, around mid-April the politicized campaign described above started.
There are several problems stemming from Voskanyan’s dismissal.
First, academic freedom is of utmost importance if the scholarly level
of Armenia is to improve. If Voskanyan’s abrupt dismissal resulted from
divergent academic views, then there is no doubt that her academic
freedom was infringed upon. Second, how come it is possible to dismiss a
scientific worker with a mere one-day notice? I am not a specialist on
Armenia’s labor laws, but I am under the impression that something is
wrong, and I am therefore not surprised that Voskanyan is now suing
the AGMI and its director. Third, how come Dr. Marutyan is also the
chair of the Scientific Council and thus decides when a meeting is
needed? This is not a problem that pertains only to the current
director; it is an inappropriate way of structuring an academic
institution in general. As a matter of fact, this Scientific Council
exists only on paper. Fourth, the way Voskanyan was dismissed might not
have been a good idea as it suggested that other scientific workers
could be treated the same way. The fewer than ten AGMI full-time
scientific workers are a tight-knit group of promising young scholars,
fully devoted to their academic mission and to the memory of the
Armenian Genocide. A good manager would know that this way of laying off
people will generate resentment and animosity among at least some of
the other scientific workers, if not all of them. Authoritarian
reactions might appear impressive, but they tend to be
counterproductive. Finally, it is unclear whether Voskanyan pursued an
agenda broader than her academic concerns, such as agitation against the
director, which might explain the latter’s reaction.
The controversy then erupted, focusing on the caption, “I Remember.”
The only problem with this caption was that, in 2015, on the occasion of
the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, a pan-national logo was
adopted by the government and representative organizations of the
Armenian people worldwide: “I Remember and Demand.” Immediately, this
change led to significant reactions. For instance, a young leader of the
Supreme Council of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in
Armenia wondered
whether it resulted from dilettantism or the type of “peace-loving”
with Turkey that characterized the 1990s, that is, the regime of the
first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan. As the opposition to
the current government often portrays PM Pashinyan as the pupil and
protégé of Ter-Petrosyan, the allusion to the past could be read as a
reference to the present. The idea was that the director was dropping
the just Armenian demands for reparations from Turkey. Shortly
thereafter, Dr. Demoyan developed this theme more thoroughly, arguing
in particular that this change undermined the authority of the AGMI.
Among the many articles that dealt with this issue, only one avoided
casting aspersions on Dr. Marutyan and provided a dispassionate,
rational analysis of the director’s mistake. As an exception in an ocean
of dirt, it is worth referring the reader to that article/interview of historian Armen Marukyan.
This issue (“I Remember”) has become a godsent gift that keeps
giving, up to now. Did Dr. Marutyan’s change stem from a governmental
directive? No. Did the Board of Trustees approve his change? No. Was
this change discussed by the Scientific Council? No. But did Dr.
Marutyan mean to get rid of “I Demand?” Strangely enough, he really did
not. He came up with the idea about memorabilia and remembrance and made
a decision without taking into account the environment in which he is
operating on the one hand and people’s sensitivities on the other. In
view of the massive reaction against his decision, the AGMI had to revert to the pan-national logo promptly. On the website of the AGMI, a rather feeble explanation
for “I Remember” was offered, which tends to corroborate the above
analysis. It might have been simpler to state that this was just a
caption for a day of remembrance, which was not meant to replace the
national logo, and to apologize for the bad impression it had left.
The same impression of a person “owning” the Armenian Genocide appears in an interview
Dr. Marutyan gave in Greece. He explains to the journalist that he
wants to change the memory of the Armenian Genocide, suggests vaguely
that people want to change it and asserts that he will emphasize
self-defense and Armenian acts of kindness and solidarity. Of course,
restoring Armenian “agency” during the genocide (to use academic jargon)
is long overdue and a conference or an exhibit on such actions and acts
is more than justified. The problem, however, lies in Dr. Marutyan’s
missionary attitude and the premise of his argument. He explains that
the Armenian youth is alienated from the issue of the Armenian Genocide
because it does not want to feel it belongs to a group of victims. Two
questions are in order. First, what are the large-scale studies on which
Dr. Marutyan bases his impression, showing that the Armenian youth in
Armenia and the diaspora are alienated by the feeling of victimhood?
There might be some; I am not aware of any. Second, even if there were
such studies, who exactly has given a mandate to the AGMI director to
reshape the Armenian memory of the genocide? The government? The
diaspora organizations? The Church? The AGMI Board of Trustees? The
Scientific Council? I suspect nobody. Finally, it should be stressed
that, if he were simply still a scholar working in an institute in
Armenia, Dr. Marutyan should be free to emphasize whatever academic
issue or approach he wants about the Armenian Genocide and its
aftermath. That is academic freedom, and it is to be cherished, even if
one disagrees with his choices and perspectives. Once he agreed to be
the director of a state institution, however, this freedom became
constrained by the existing decisions of the state. The same applies to a
politician or a scholar of international relations who agrees to be the
foreign minister of his state. That person might have had valuable
ideas about foreign relations as a scholar or politician; however, once
she joins the government, she must carry out the policies of her
president or prime minister.
In that same interview, the Greek journalist states: “The matter of genocide is huge and has a lot of aspects. Wrongdoings on all sides
[the boldface is mine]. So, it’s better to state everything in order to
move forward as you say.” He does not reply. However, he continues by
displaying a slightly scornful attitude toward historians:
“And I’m an anthropologist. I have a deal with people [sic]. And historians have a deal with documents only, documents, books, books, then documents. So, it’s other [sic]. You need to understand what to feel, and how to feel people. Do they want changes? Do they have other views, other aspects maybe they are interested more [sic]? So, you need to catch [sic] and to suggest maybe some other aspects.”
First, does Dr. Marutyan know that, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a
handful of historians—most of them still graduate students—who fought
denial at various major conferences in the West until some senior
scholars joined them around the year 2000, once ethnic conflicts and
genocides had suddenly become trendy topics? Where was he at that time,
what was he doing? For sure, it is not the scholarship produced in
Armenia that changed anything in the West—for the struggle took place
there—as European or American genocide scholars who are not ethnically
Armenian do not read Armenian. Thus, they cannot benefit from some
interesting publications written mostly by Armenia’s younger scholars.
There is also another problem: the pitiful section on the Armenian
Genocide published recently by the Institute of History of the National
Academy of Science.[4] Except for a couple of very minor publications by
the late Professor Vahakn Dadrian, it shows no knowledge whatsoever of
the scholarship of the past forty years, no less, and of the current
debates. In a nutshell, it could have been written in Soviet Armenia in
1967. To his credit, Dr. Demoyan was the only scholar in Armenia who
raised substantial questions about this publication. Second, whether
people want some mysterious changes or not does not change the
historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, or the Holocaust for that
matter. Yes, a genocide is an event characterized by the immense
victimization of the target group.
Unfortunate lack of judgment is also obvious elsewhere. Dr. Marutyan
concluded a lecture in Turkey, at the Hrant Dink Foundation, by appealing
for funding help. Not exactly the right country for such an appeal and
for appearing as a supplicant. Another gift to his detractors. Thus, an
unsigned article
on tert.am claimed that he was trying to get funding from Turkey! Narek
Malian, the leader of Veto, did not miss the opportunity for further stressing
this distortion: did it not make sense that an imagined Turkish “agent”
would want funding from Turkey? The artificial narrative had accrued
one more “convincing” piece of pseudo evidence. By the way, if the AGMI
needs funds, Dr. Marutyan should have been a bit more forthcoming a year
ago when everything was in place to launch a worldwide fundraising
campaign to establish a multi-million-dollar endowment for the
Museum-Institute.[5]
If getting rid of Ms. Voskanyan on short notice was aimed at imposing
the director’s authority, then the attempt was futile. I was told, and I
could subsequently verify, that another scientific worker, Ms. Arevik
Avetisyan, complained on her Facebook page that the state had not funded
the benefits (sotspatet) of the AGMI workers after the Museum-Institute
was transformed into a foundation in March 2018. She views this
situation as discriminatory because the state is apparently paying such
benefits to the workers of the Matenadaran, which is also now a
foundation. While the complaint was not targeted directly at Dr.
Marutyan, it clearly expressed discontent. And then came an interview
with Ms. Gohar Khanumyan, AGMI chief archivist, who expressed serious
concerns about the reorganization of the museum’s archival fonds. The
aim of this reorganization was, as mentioned above, to separate
published from unpublished archival materials and to check the integrity
of the existing documents.
The details of her concerns are mostly irrelevant for our purpose.
Dr. Marutyan invited in early 2019, if I am not mistaken, a group of
external experts to get advice about how to organize all the fonds,
including the archival ones, in accordance with the best international
practices. He followed their advice and did not act arbitrarily. In
addition, Khanumyan’s concerns could have been referred to the
Scientific Council or the Board of Trustees, instead of being leaked to
the uninformed public and thereafter manipulated for political purposes.
Suddenly, the reorganization of the archival fonds became intertwined
in some people’s imagination with George Soros—who is supposed to have
given directives to support Turkish President Erdoğan—with funding from
Soros’s Open Society Foundations via the Hazarashen NGO and Dr.
Kharatyan, and with alarming concerns about the security of the
published materials.[6]
It is a bit ironic that there was no such uproar about national
security when the policies of the previous semi-authoritarian
kleptocratic regimes were leading to the emigration of at least 1.3
million Armenians from Armenia; to the pauperization of large segments
of the population; to the exploitation of its vital small farmers; to
corruption everywhere, including in the army, the judiciary and higher
education; to the transformation of late-Soviet high culture into vulgar
mass culture; and to Armenia becoming a colony, to name just a few
problems. It would seem these issues were insignificant threats to
Armenia’s national security, compared with the current “scandal” around
the AGMI.
After a month and a half devoted to dirtying and undermining the AGMI
and the two scholars affiliated with it, the actors involved got tired.
The “scandal” lost traction. Lilit Galstyan, a member of the ARF
Supreme Council, made a last-ditch effort to keep the issue alive at the
very end of May, on artificial ventilation so to speak in the current
circumstances, but in vain.[7] The campaign died out, as suddenly as it
had started, a good indication of some likely background coordination.
In the context of the ongoing attempts at destabilizing and
delegitimizing Pashinyan’s government, it was time to focus on a new
topic (Armenia’s handling of COVID-19, the regime’s alleged political
persecutions, etc.), or to choose a new “target”—ideally a valuable
institution or respectable people—and to drag its [their] name in the
mud, before moving on to something else…
Conclusions and Analysis
What conclusions can we draw from this sad story?
1-There is no nefarious treason, but there is a serious problem of
governance at various levels: the director first, and then the Board of
Trustees and the Scientific Council. For instance, the Scientific
Council exists only on paper; it is useless. The director should not be
its chairperson and more independent members should be part of it as
there is no culture of free debate. There is also no strategic or
academic thinking. What is more, there is no sense of devoir de réserve
and no discipline internally at the AGMI. This also results from failure
in governance. Problems, sometimes real and at other times imaginary,
are made public, feeding the agenda of some actors who want to create
“scandals” to destabilize the existing regime. Whether there is some
coordination between some of the internal and external actors is
unclear, but it is telling that the leaks are put to good political use.
2-The institutional structure of the AGMI and its statutes need to
change to ensure checks and balances and continuous, effective
supervision of and accountability from the AGMI leadership. This is not
suggested to belittle the leadership, but to avoid mistakes that will
unavoidably damage that leadership and, even worse, the institution
itself.
3-Even the proclamation published
by the AGMI workers in defense of the institution barely devotes a few
lines to its director. As for the Board of Trustees, it did not even
publish a short statement to defend the honor of Dr. Kharatyan and Dr.
Marutyan during these six or seven weeks of defamatory attacks against
them. What that could mean is open to conjecture.
4-The AGMI, one of the only two pan-national institutions located in
Armenia, besides the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, has become part of the
current effort to destabilize the existing regime. This pan-national lieu de mémoire,
has de facto been smeared by those who claim to protect “national
values.” If anybody is happy, it is the two neighboring countries of
Armenia who deny the Armenian Genocide.
5-The mentality of the Stalinist period seems to survive in Armenia
as two scholars have essentially been accused of being traitors and,
thus, enemies of the Armenian people. In some circles, this mentality is
complemented by hooligan-like, or fascistic behavior. On May 10, Mr.
Malian posted an ultimatum on Facebook demanding the resignation of the
AGMI director, of his daughter from the Yerevan city council and Dr.
Hranush Kharatyan from the AGMI Board of Trustees. To these demands, he
added another one: that Gandhi’s statue not be installed in Yerevan. It
so happens that Dr. Kharatyan’s son is involved with the installation of
that statue, in the context of increasingly cordial Armenian-Indian
relations. The opposition to PM Pashinyan, however, portrays Gandhi as a
great friend of the Turks because of some of his post-World War I
anti-colonial statements, in particular about the Treaty of Sevres. This
Gandhi-related alleged “scandal” was one more case meant to demonstrate
that the “Sorosakans” and their apazgayin (anational) agenda were undermining the national honor and values of Armenia.
Like all good ultimata, this one had a deadline, May 13, and a strong concluding punchline:
“Նեղանալ չլինի, մերումանուկ եմ անելու առանց խղճի խայթի: Ժամանակը գնաց!!!!”
The expression մերումանուկ անել (merumanuk anel) seems to be a relatively new idiomatic
expression used in vulgar language. Being metaphoric, it is quite
difficult to translate it precisely. These are four translations that
educated friends of mine from Armenia have proposed:
1- “No offense. I will f*** your mom and kid without any remorse. The countdown is on.”
2- “Don't be offended, I will remorselessly spare neither mother nor child. The time is up.”
3- “Don’t feel offended, I will start the ‘mother-and-child treatment’ without remorse. The clock is ticking!!!!”
4- “Don’t be offended, I will deal with your mother and child without any remorse. The countdown is on.”
The beauty of this expression lies not only in its obvious elegance,
but also in its lack of precision, which makes it difficult for the
police to charge the utterer. Nonetheless, however vague the expression
might be, it implies some kind of threat. As a result, Dr. Hranush
Kharatyan, Dr. Marutyan and his daughter Arpenik lodged a complaint with
several law enforcement and other bodies.[8] After examination, it was
referred to the police, which charged Malian under Article 137, Section
1 and Article 144 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia. The
former pertains to threats “to murder, to inflict heavy damage to one’s
health or to destroy property of big volume,” whereas the latter deals
with the “illegal collecting, keeping, use and dissemination of
information pertaining to personal or family life.”
The charges have now been referred to the Investigative Committee of
the Republic of Armenia, which will conduct a preliminary investigation
into the criminal charges.
6-Apart from the researchers
of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy
of Sciences, Armenia’s academic establishment has remained silent. A
few scholars even participated in this campaign, but in veiled terms.
One could perhaps invite all these silent scholars to read Julien
Benda’s short 1927 book, La trahison des clercs (The Treason of
the Intellectuals). They should know that the fake and calumnious
accusations leveled today at Dr. Kharatyan and Dr. Marutyan could be
leveled at them tomorrow. Outside academic circles, Dr. Kharatyan received the support of an NGO called Women for Democracy.
7-Even the site of the Eternal Flame, symbolizing the 1.5 million
victims of the Armenian Genocide canonized in 2015, was desecrated. Two
so-called “flash mob” events took place there, right in front of the
flame: the first one by Mr. Narek Malian, on May 14; the second one by
the ARF Nikol Aghbalyan Student Union, on May 27. It is likely that
these patriotic, or nationalistic, young students, like many others,
were not fully aware of Dr. Marutyan and Dr. Kharatyan’s writings and
meant well. In any case, the symbol of the Armenian Genocide should
certainly have remained immune from political activities.
Concise Comments on Hybrid Warfare and Disinformation
How does hybrid warfare, disinformation, and “scandal-creation” work?
That is, what is the essence of what happened in this case? First, one
needs a broad “master-frame.” In the case of this “scandal,” that
master-frame had already been elaborated as early as June-July 2018: the
followers of Mr. Pashinyan were destroying “national values” and, as
corollaries, they were apazgayin (anational) individuals.
(Among the other master-frames, one can mention that they were going to
sell out Artsakh or destroy statehood.) This master-frame, however,
needs to be filled with a painting, which itself requires various
“elements” and persons. It is important to understand that, while the
master-frame is permanent, the elements (like pieces of different
puzzles) vary. These “elements” cannot be imaginary; most of them must
be real, like the grants received by the Hazarashen NGO. The
manipulation lies in the interpretation of those elements and of their
links with the persons involved.[9]
To illustrate this with two examples, the same
master-frame—destruction of national values—was used against the
Pashinyan government in two totally unrelated cases: when Armenia’s
National Security Service charged an archbishop with swindling and money
laundering and when the Parliament ratified the Council of Europe
Convention on Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and
Sexual Abuse, known as the Lanzarote Convention. In the former, it was
stated that the asserted “pillar” of Armenianness and national identity,
the Apostolic Church, was being undermined; in the latter, that
Armenian “family values” were being destroyed… The Veto organization and
Mr. Malian were at the forefront of the struggle for the defense of
these “national values.” In our case, the “elements” include the “I
Remember” issue, Dr. Marutyan’s intermittent use of Medz Yeghern, his
reference to the need for funding in Turkey, the reorganization of the
archival fonds, and the aforementioned grants. The persons needed are
obviously the AGMI director, but especially Dr. Kharatyan. Just as a
classical painting needs good composition, “scandal” and disinformation
require a convincing narrative tying the persons and the “elements” in
with one another.
This is where Soros, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Dr.
Kharatyan come in. As Dr. Kharatyan’s Hazarashen NGO had received OSF
grants for a few projects and Dr. Marutyan had participated in at least
one of them, things were getting promising. As these two scholars’
offspring are well-known partisans of PM Pashinyan, things were getting
even better. And as both of these scholars are known for being favorable
to the Velvet Revolution, things were reaching perfection. There
remained to add a creative dimension to the painting. This creative
narrative is akin, in fact, to the composition of a painting; without
it, the “elements” are meaningless, for they can easily be addressed
through rational, fact-based civil discourse. Dr. Demoyan and Mr. Malian
took care of that creative task; others repeated the same artificial
narrative, either deliberately or unwittingly. Thus, Dr. Kharatyan had
imposed Dr. Marutyan as the AGMI director. Not only was the latter
actively undermining the genocidal nature of the Armenian Genocide by
using Medz Yeghern, he was also rejecting the nation’s demand
for reparations by erasing “and Demand” from the 2015 logo: “I Remember
and Demand.”
As for Dr. Kharatyan, her Soros-funded NGO was behind the
reorganization of the archival fonds and she was going to share crucial
information with an Azerbaijani. It does not really matter that nobody
has provided a shred of evidence that the Hazarashen NGO has anything to
do with that reorganization; what counts is the intricate beauty of the
composition, its credibility for the uninformed. These two apazgayin,
Soros puppets and Turkish-reconciliation lovers were thus actively
sapping one of the highest “national values” of the Armenian people: the
consciousness of the Armenian Genocide and the demands stemming from
it. Unsurprisingly, they are partisans of the Velvet Revolution.
Behind all these manipulations and fake, pseudo-patriotic narratives
about the defense of “national values,” there are goals that are being
pursued. The first of these is a broad strategic goal: the creation of a
“Western Liberal Scare,” not unlike the Red Scare in the United States
in the 1950s, to keep Armenia in the hands of a semi-authoritarian,
corrupt, political-economic oligarchy that benefited from post-Soviet
Russia’s cultural, economic, and political sphere of influence and that
shares the mentalities and “values” of the current nomenklatura of that
important country. In this context, people viewed as infected with
”Occidentosis,” to use the title of one of Iranian writer Seyyed Jalāl
Āl-e-Ahmad’s books, are ideal targets on political grounds, which can
also merge sometimes with personal motivations.
The second goal is aimed at destabilizing society and hopefully the
current government: the endless pseudo-scandals about the supposed
destruction of “national values” aim at promoting anomie, that is, a
feeling of things falling apart, of the center not being able to hold
(to paraphrase a line from W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, “The Second
Coming.”)
The final goal pertains to culture and mentalities: it aims at
preventing the emergence of a society and state based on legal-rational
norms that protect the population and give it a sense of its own rights.
How else to make sense of the uproar against the ratification of the
Lanzarote Convention or that against the possible ratification of the
Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence
against women and domestic violence (the Istanbul Convention), signed
ironically enough by President Serzh Sargsyan’s government?
To conclude, what exactly did almost seven weeks filled with
accusations in the media and unfortunate actions achieve, besides
undermining the AGMI, trampling on the symbolic grounds of the Eternal
Flame and sullying the reputation of two scholars? Nothing. If Dr.
Marutyan and Dr. Kharatyan were working for foreign states or getting
ready to share with Azerbaijan the contents of the archival fonds (that
apparently have some mysterious national security value), why didn’t the
scandalmongers lodge a complaint with the police or the National
Security Service? Why did they suddenly stop their campaign at the end
of May, when they had not yet achieved any of their goals? And there are
so many other such questions.
Who benefited then from all this? Certainly not Armenia, the AGMI or the Armenian Genocide issue.
The pity of it all...
NOTES
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