On the eve of the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, we are facing new existential challenges. Today, more than ever, there is a need to renew the issue of protecting our inalienable rights.

In the last few years, the Turkish-Azerbaijani tandem’s hostile attacks against Armenia and the Armenian people have gained new momentum. It is obvious that the demand to refrain from pursuing the international recognition of the Genocide is one of the preconditions that are consistently dictated.

The representatives of the Armenian government have already openly started promoting the Turkish denialist approaches. Recently, statements —which until today had been put forward by official Ankara and were exclusively Turkish theses— were made regarding the genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey against the Armenian people. This position of the Civil Contract authorities is an intolerable step aimed at questioning the reality of the Armenian Genocide.

In turn, the country’s political leader characterizes the Genocide committed against his own people as “Mets Yeghern”, effectively rejecting the legal and political assessment, which is asserted by Armenian and foreign historians and genocide scholars and is accepted and condemned by the UN Human Rights Commission and by several other international organizations, by the courts, by the parliaments and governments and heads of states of many countries, including of superpowers.

In this same context, an attempt is being made to contrast historical and real Armenia, our past and present, homeland and state.

This behavior of the current authorities of the Republic of Armenia, supposedly aimed at the normalization of relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and to achieve peace, not only will not contribute to the establishment of peace and stability in the region but will validate the precedent of resolving issues using force or the threat of force, which is contrary to international law.

It is noteworthy that this reprehensible policy is carried out in conditions when the Ankara-Baku axis committed genocide against the Armenian population of Artsakh and subjected Artsakh to ethnic cleansing. At this very moment, Azerbaijan is continuing the cultural genocide in Artsakh with the same handwriting with which Turkey has been erasing Armenian traces in Western Armenia for decades.

There is no doubt, however, that the Armenian people, in Armenia and in the Diaspora, resolutely uphold their just rights, and no government in Armenia has the prerogative to relinquish those rights.

Armenian Revolutionary Federation Bureau

23 April 2024