BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 5. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan gave a practical cry of the soul without any quotation marks during his recent speech in the parliament. The Prime Minister lamented the “fashion of historical Armenia”. Where one of its inhabitants, 30 years old, says he is from Sasun, another says he is from Van, and so on. Then he would ask, “Very well, I understand very well, but people, I want to understand who is from Dilijan in this country and who is from Yerevan in this country?” As Pashinyan assured, “We don't understand the simple thing that when we live in Dilijan, we say, ‘I am from Van, we lose Dilijan. We lose Dilijan; we open a corridor for them to say: come on, there are no Indigenous people there; they came from here, from there; it's an old Turkish town; it's an old Azerbaijani town; it's because they listen; yes, what are we talking about from the pulpit? So we're losing our state. We have lost our state.” Translating into Russian, Pashinyan asks not to play along with the Azerbaijanis, who rightly call these lands Western Azerbaijan.
Now, that's interesting.
Another thing is important. People in Armenia are careful to plug their ears when they are reminded of this, but the fact remains that there was no Armenian presence in the South Caucasus before the Russian troops captured the Irevan fortress. Except for church employees of the Echmiadzin Church, who moved here at the beginning of the 15th century, as documents of Matenadaran tell us. Later, in the 19th century, the resettlement policy of the Russian Empire started, and ethnic Armenians, mainly from the Osman Empire and Persia, began to move to the lands of Irevan, Nakhchivan, and the Karabakh Khanate. Yes, there were some Armenian quasi-states throughout history, but none of them were located where today's Armenia is located. Even later, a large-scale, pardonable, twisting of history began, when the city of Irevan, founded by order of Shah Ismail Khatai, suddenly turned into “ancient Armenian Erebuni,” Sardarabad became “Sardarapat,” Istisu - “Jermuk”, Hamamli - “Spitak”...
Now, the whole story invented for Armenia is a tough roll with the family memories of the majority of local residents. Who continue to live, “without feeling the land beneath them”. And it comes as a complete shock to them when historical Azerbaijani names of towns and villages of Armenia suddenly appear in school history textbooks, when excavations started in the main square of Yerevan and artifacts of obviously Muslim origin are discovered there, when, finally, Azerbaijan recalls those pages of the history of neighboring Armenia, which local nationalists wanted to destroy so much.
Indeed, it is possible to invent a new Armenianized history for Armenia, which was created on the historical Azerbaijani lands of the Erivan Khanate. It is possible to declare that the capital Yerevan is not the fortress Revangala founded by Shah Ismail Khatai but “ancient Armenian Erebuni”. You can erase Azerbaijani names from the map. It is possible to wipe off the face of the earth fortresses, mosques, dams, bridges... But it will not be possible to invent a fake story for every single family in Armenia! And every such family will say that their great-grandfather once moved here from Van or Bitlis, Erzerum, or Diyarbakir.
About the fact that family genealogy in Armenia does not coincide with the official history, four years before Pashinyan's speech, the Yerevan newspaper lragir wrote: “The center of Yerevan has been a ‘lodge’ of one of the castes, which calls itself the ‘aborigines’ of Yerevan for more than a century. The “aborigines” all have tragic family histories that go back to Van, Bitlis, and Constantinople. Their ancestors found in Yerevan salvation from death and exodus and were able to realize themselves—to become academicians, doctors, and architects in their native country—but sacralization of fear and salvation gave rise to a lot of complexes. The song “Aragil” begins with the words “I am no longer a wanderer, and I already have shelter.” Home and neighborhood become homeland without growing into a sense of a larger homeland—the state. The non-institutionalized casteism spills over into snobbery and does not allow the state to be glued together from different parts.”
Once it is already clear. Building Armenia as a state is impossible without reconciliation with its own history. There are plenty of quite successful states in the world, created, in general, by immigrants, starting from the US and ending with New Zealand. However, first of all, in the same Mexico, they do not assure that Spaniards lived here before the Aztecs and Incas. Secondly, the states built on fakes are really doomed to disaster. This means that the citizens of Armenia simply need to open access to the true history of their country. Otherwise—and here Pashinyan is really right—the chance to build their statehood will be hopelessly lost.
Fuad Akhundov
Political scientist