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Vilayet Armenia? The internal war on the Church and national sovereignty

By now, it is clear that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s recent attacks on the Armenian Apostolic Church are neither spontaneous nor merely political—they are deliberate, targeted and strategically aligned with foreign powers intent on eroding Armenia’s national identity. The Church, still widely regarded as a symbol of Armenian continuity, is under siege not only from Azerbaijan’s spiritual and political leaders, but, more disturbingly, from Armenia’s own head of government and his i

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Ara Nazarian, PhD

Ara Nazarian is an associate professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Tennessee Technological University with a degree in mechanical engineering, followed by graduate degrees from Boston University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He has been involved in the Armenian community for over a decade, having served in a variety of capacities at the Hamazkayin Armenian Educational and Cultural Society, the Armenian Cultural and Educational Center, Armenian National Committee of America, St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

2 Comments

  1. According to the Turkish media, Nikol Pashinyan is going to Ankara tomorrow on Friday 20 June 2025, to pay a visit to the Turkish dictator Erdogan. It will be like a client ruler, satrap or vassal visiting his overlord, listening to his demands, conditions and whims, not to contradict and oppose him, but to flatter and oblige to his demands, conditions and whims. If you think this is a fantasy, look at the Turkish puppet state of Northern Cyprus and the new Turkish satellite state of Syria, where Turkey is calling the shots, is ruling the former like a colony and the latter like a semi-colony (the northern parts of Syria are directly controlled and ruled by Turkey).

  2. And Pashinyan has finally visited his future boss, Erdogan, in Istanbul today for talks. He has visited Turkey once before in 2023, for Erdogan’s second presidential inauguration in Ankara. In addition to that, he was one of the first foreign leaders to congratulate Erdogan on his rigged re-election. (Why is he almost always the first foreign leader to congratulate or to send condolences to Turkey and Azerbaijan, who don’t reciprocate?) Adding insult to injury, in order to curry favor with Erdogan, Pashinyan said earlier this year, that Armenia would halt its campaign for the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Thus he has thrown one of Armenia’s main foreign policy objectives and its raison d’etre to the garbage, just to please the two genocide perpetrators, Turkey and Azerbaijan, in his foolish and futile hope, that this will benefit Armenia. No chance of that. Armenia aligned with Russia and became almost totally dependent on it, because it had very little choice as a landlocked country in this geography, with two hostile Turkic neighbors which want to wipe it off the map (Azerbaijan openly expresses it). While this dependence on Russia was in no way desirable, Pashinyan recklessly ruptured it without any alternatives and security guarantees in sight, and the rest is history. Nobody should even entertain the idea, that Armenia’s possible dependence on Turkey and Azerbaijan, will bring it benefits. It will be much worse than Armenia’s previous dependence on Russia.

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