By Tigran Yegavian
In the spring of 2024, Armenia is living through one of the most serious and decisive hours in its history as an independent sovereign state.
For nearly four years, Armenia and the Armenian nation have been undergoing an interminable descent. The worst-case scenario is playing out at every level of society: defeat, mourning, territorial amputations, declining demographics, the inability of the elite and the country’s institutions to rise above disaster.
Armenia is also bearing the brunt of successive leaders’ calamitous management of power and aggravating geopolitical circumstances. Its very existence is now threatened. Armenia’s territory has shrunk to the bone.
The recent Baku-Yerevan agreement on the border demarcation in Tavush, welcomed by Western and Turkish officials, has sparked a national upsurge from this northern region of Armenia, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also hails from. Can we welcome this movement and see in it the promise of a new national awakening?
The Primate of the Tavush diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Mr Bagrat Galstanyan, who holds dual Armenian and Canadian nationality, has established himself as a figure of protest. Here he is, perched like a lively providential man, gathering a growing crowd around him. He advocates an attitude of resistance to the government’s idea of peace at all costs. He has chosen a speech with martial overtones to invigorate the nation’s morale, a speech of resistance blending sentimental patriotism, spirituality and a call to disobedience. On the other hand, the episode evokes an air of déjà vu when we recall the march of Nikol Pashinyan and his companions from Gyumri to Yerevan in the spring of 2018.
What does this phenomenon tell us about Armenia’s structural vulnerabilities?
Firstly, that it lacks a political project, a roadmap and a truly realistic strategy. This is the tragedy of Armenia’s defeat, a defeat of its leaders, incapable of uniting around a common denominator, incapable of transgressing their egos or demonstrating self-criticism.
This is the second point of the Bagrat Srpazan phenomenon. For his action revives an issue that has been stifled since the Republic of Armenia gained independence, namely the thorny question of the relationship between Church and State. In Armenia, there is no concordat between the two institutions. According to Article 18 of the Armenian Constitution,
1. The Republic of Armenia recognizes the Holy Armenian Apostolic Church for its exceptional mission as the national Church in the spiritual life of the Armenian people, its role in the development of national culture and the preservation of national identity.
2. The relations between the Republic of Armenia and the Holy Apostolic Armenian Church may be regulated by law.
Such an article leaves plenty of room for interpretation, allowing vagueness to dominate the parties. To date, relations between political and spiritual power have been governed by an unspoken rule of mutual non-interference in each other’s affairs.
But the velvet revolution of 2018 has upset the balance. The crux of the problem is not political, but economic. In the absence of a concordat, the Armenian Apostolic Church continues to receive donations and income from its various activities, but still pays no taxes to the Armenian state. For Nikol Pachinian and his team, the time has come to re-examine this relationship.
Nevertheless, Catholicos Garegin II has good reason to support the Bishop of Tavush in his fight as discreetly as possible.
Catholicos Garegin II has been far from unanimous since his election on October 27, 1999, the day of the Parliament massacre. During the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, he refrained from going to Goris to visit the unfortunate faithful of his Church, survivors of famine and war. A regrettable absence, to say the least. That his calls for N. Pashinian’s resignation and the deterioration of his relations with the political authorities mask the substance of a disagreement over the management of the Church’s material assets.
Not to mention that the Church’s capital of legitimacy and respectability has been tarnished in the past by numerous cases of corruption involving several members of the high clergy, such as Mgr Navasard Kchoyan, Primate of the Diocese of Ararat. And what about the financial scandal that tainted Bishop Bagrat himself when he was primate of the Diocese of Canada in 2013? Shortly before this, he was accused of having attempted to pawn Montreal’s Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in exchange for money.
Cited in the Panama Papers dossier, and fiercely criticized by some of the lower clergy in 2018 in the wake of the Velvet Revolution, Garegine II may know that his days are numbered and that his throne may wobble. His detractors accuse him of authoritarianism, greed, nepotism and clientelism.
So, for the first time since independence, the head of the Armenian Church has given the political authorities an unprecedented opportunity to openly interfere in the Church’s internal affairs, thanks to the resistance to further unilateral renunciations in Tavush. While many aspects of the situation remain mysterious, there is every reason to believe that the Church and the authorities are at loggerheads. A confrontation that will do nothing but considerably weaken an already battered Armenia. An Armenia where neither the Artsakhtsis, nor the Diasporics, nor the Ancients or the “others”, are welcome to take part in the effort to defend and reconsolidate the nation.
Overcoming the demon of division
One might have thought of the promise of a new awakening, but Armenians are a sentimental enough people to let themselves be bewitched by the sirens of false prophets. The episode of the Velvet Revolution has already left enough after-effects for a re-release in an even wackier scenario. The time is long gone when, in 1918, as Turkish troops massed to attack Yerevan and wipe the small Caucasus Armenia off the map, Catholicos George V Soureniants called for resistance from the Holy See in Echmiadzin. There is every reason to believe that, in the absence of civil elites with a unified discourse, the Church must in turn take its courage in both hands, put aside the quarrels of yesteryear and call for the formation of a government of national unity, a war cabinet equal to the challenges facing the state and the nation. For this, Catholicos Garegin need only respond favorably to the hand extended in fraternal solidarity by the Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, Aram I. A call that has been reiterated many times in the wake of genocide commemoration ceremonies. May the two Catholicos together travel to Yerevan and convince the executive power to open a door to dialogue, so that at last real human skills, judged on talent and not allegiance, can take charge of the country’s destinies.
