By Harut Sassounian

Talaat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, wrote in a letter in 1915: “We wanted to leave behind one Armenian, and only in a museum.”

If the current disastrous trends in Armenia continue, what Talaat planned to carry out, but did not fully succeed, is being accomplished by the Armenian government.

Arsen Torosyan, a high-ranking official of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government, announced in the Armenian Parliament in May: “We need to organize immigration, even if it doesn’t fit with the so-called national ideas. Tens of thousands of people need to immigrate here. It won’t happen without that. We also need to change this monoethnic mindset in our heads. Because there’s no other way to survive in this region.” Torosyan is the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs of Armenia. He previously served as Minister of Health, Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, member of Parliament, and is a board member of the ruling Civil Contract Party.

This is an anti-Armenian notion just like Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s almost every other action. Any sensible Armenian leader, before rushing to import tens of thousands of non-Armenians to Armenia, would try to entice some of the seven million members of the Armenian Diaspora to immigrate to Armenia.

Instead, Pashinyan is busy rejecting Armenia’s history and culture, and now diluting its demographics. He first gave away the Armenian region of Artsakh to Azerbaijan, after sacrificing thousands of young Armenian soldiers. He then permitted Azerbaijan to occupy parts of the Republic of Armenia starting in 2021 and 2022. He is now talking about giving Tigranashen to Azerbaijan.

Pashinyan went on to devalue sacrosanct Armenian nationalistic symbols like Mount Ararat.

Before we worry about the Armenian government welcoming Diaspora Armenians, we should be more alarmed about the blocking of its own citizens from coming to Armenia to vote on election day. The Armenian Parliament just passed a law that requires that those citizens who are coming home to vote must first live in Armenia for one year. This is an abuse of the citizens’ most basic democratic right.

The government is also making it much more difficult for Diaspora Armenians to acquire Armenian citizenship, instead of offering them inducements to move to the homeland, which would increase Armenia’s population.

Several years ago, when Zareh Sinanyan, the High Commissioner of Diaspora Affairs of Armenia, was on his way to visit Lebanon, he told the media that he would like to arrange for Arabs to settle in Armenia. He does not seem to know that his job is working with Diaspora Armenians, not encouraging the emigration of Arabs, Chinese or any other nationality to Armenia.

The scariest part of the Armenian officials’ talk about bringing non-Armenians to live in Armenia is paving the way for 300,000 Azeris to move to Armenia which would be the end of the Republics of Armenia. For months now, Pres. Aliyev has been demanding that the Armenian government accept 300,000 Azeris to emigrate to Amenia. Aliyev has already renamed Armenia “Western Azerbaijan.” Would Torosyan and Pashinyan extend their anti-Armenian positions to welcoming the 300,000 Azeris to Armenia? Sadly, I think this is a distinct possibility. If that is not enough to destroy Armenia, there are millions of Turks who live across the border from Armenia. Would Armenia’s leaders to be so brazen as to invite a very large number of Turks to move to Armenia? I am afraid they may.

A non-Armenian analyst, Javier Villamor, wrote in The European Conservative that Torosyan’s remark “has opened a fierce internal debate about national identity, demographics, and the country’s strategic direction…. Armenia has spent decades defining itself as a demographic exception in a region marked by ethnic fault-lines, wars, and mass displacement. A small country of barely three million inhabitants, with a population that is homogeneously 97-98% Armenian, it is built politically around national survival in the wake of the Ottoman genocide, the Soviet collapse, and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Now, for the first time, figures close to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan are beginning to speak publicly about breaking that model.”

If the Armenian government were truly interested in increasing Armenia’s population, it would do everything possible to keep those who already live there to remain in the country. It should also provide the necessary housing and employment to keep in the country those Armenians who moved to Armenia in recent years from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Artsakh to remain in the country: Regrettably, tens of thousands of them have left Armenia already.

Rejecting the Armenian government’s announced intent to bring a large number of foreigners to Armenia is not racism. It is based on the fact that the Armenian nation, after suffering multiple massacres and even genocide needs to preserve its several millennia-long civilization from extinction.