"Deep betrayal": Türkiye, Pashinyan and "Nemesis"
Serhey Bohdan's opinion

ANALYTICS  08 May 2023 - 12:04

On May 3, Türkiye closed its airspace for flights from Armenia to third countries. This was in response to the unveiling of a monument in Yerevan to the Dashnak militants who carried out terrorist attacks against members of the Ottoman and Azerbaijani governments. On May 5, Pashinyan claimed that both the decision to erect the monument and its implementation were "wrong". In addition, he stressed that the government had not made the decision. But was it just a provocation by fringe elements?

Nowhere to fly

On April 25, a monument to the Dashnaks, who took part in a series of terrorist attacks known as "Operation Nemesis," was unveiled in central Yerevan. They assassinated members of the government of the Ottoman Empire and the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan in the early 1920s.

Later, faced with Ankara's reaction, Pashinyan, and his team pretended that the installation of the monument was an act of arbitrariness. On May 4, Armenian parliament speaker Alen Simonyan, who flew to Ankara in a hurry, said he was "sorry that the installation of the monument has provoked such a response in Türkiye. I have also discussed the issue with my Turkish counterpart. The decision was made by a local authority, and I don't want the installation of the monument here to be seen as a manifestation of Armenia's foreign policy or as an unkind social step".

There is, however, a nuance. The installation of the monument was not an isolated incident. On April 28, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, presumably at the invitation of Armenian officials, visited the "Yerablur" military pantheon in Yerevan. She laid flowers for the dead separatists, but the pantheon also houses a monument to the ASALA fighters who carried out terrorist attacks against the Turkish state and civilians in the 1970s and 1980s (who would later play a major role in the seizure of Azerbaijani lands). The arrival of a French visitor there was unusual since foreign visitors stay away from the site, aware of its scandalous nature. In all likelihood, Colonna was the second foreign official to arrive there, the first being the Greek defence minister in 2018.

In this vein, on April 29, Türkiye banned FLYONE ARMENIA planes from flying through its airspace. It was a tangible blow in terms of impact, as it was the Armenian branch of the Moldovan low-cost airline FLYONE, clearly linked to someone in Armenian power. The Turkish sanctions have brought this company to the brink of collapse: for low-cost airlines such extra costs are like death. This allowed for the expectation that Yerevan would take criticism of it seriously.

But that was not enough. On May 3, Ankara imposed a ban on all flights from Armenia. By the way, some experts immediately started saying that this was "an attempt to score extra points for Erdogan before the elections". But a look at the various Turkish media indicates that the topic is marginal to Turkish politics. They have written very little about the ban, and Turkish officials have spoken sparingly on the topic and in the margins of statements on other topics.

What on earth do you want?

Ankara clearly sought a solution to the problem, not a scandal. The process of normalisation of Armenia's relations with Türkiye has been moving forward recently. Yes, Yerevan has tried to manipulate the normalisation of its relations with Ankara to gain concessions from Baku and vice versa. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has even had to point out that the process of normalising relations between Türkiye and Armenia cannot proceed in isolation from a peaceful settlement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. In any case, the processes of normalisation between Ankara and Yerevan were underway. For example, since the beginning of this year, direct air freight has been possible.

Although relations with Armenia are not critical for Türkiye as a whole, it would be an opportunity for the country's eastern regions to gain new development opportunities through integration with the South Caucasus. There is interest in restoring the communications in the Turkish border region, which were severed in 1993. That is why, incidentally, even now the Turkish leadership has tried to warn Pashinyan first through careful "pinpointing" rather than bringing down the whole negotiation process. Apparently, such pinpoint influence on business has worked in the past - last May Türkiye already forbade FLYONE Armenia to fly through its airspace, but less than a month later the ban was lifted - apparently after adjusting positions. It's hard to accuse Ankara of seeking to escalate.

But the actions of the Armenian side look ambiguous. The impression is that someone in the Armenian establishment is trying to stage a series of provocations "for the elections" in Türkiye. Yerevan's problem is that although the Armenian establishment has long wanted to "go to the West," it has failed to do so since there are no positive, constructive interests of Western countries in Armenia. There are only negative interests primarily to use Armenia against Moscow and Ankara. This leads to paradoxical situations in which the Armenians themselves become the victims, finding themselves pawns in the inter-imperial showdown. As Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev noted on May 5, on the issue of official recognition of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity, "Armenia itself is now more open than some of Armenia's friends in the West about actually recognising it". Indeed, on May 4 the same French Foreign Ministry said that "the position of France, the EU and the UN International Court of Justice is that the Lachin corridor should open fully and without preconditions".

This is the kind of arrangement Pashinyan and his team have to work in. Making shows like hinting at Putin's arrest in Yerevan, or provoking Türkiye by demonstratively honouring extremists. The liberal establishment of the global West is hoping to get rid of an undesirable Erdogan. By playing this role and representing themselves as the "Christian victim of the Turks", radical Armenian nationalists hope to rely on the West for their goals.

In the service with the Entente

When talking about Yerevan's actions, it should be noted that this is not just a risky political combination. It is also a continuation of attempts to manipulate history. As the Armenian media explained, the scandalous monument "has the names of the knights of national dignity who avenged the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians" engraved on it.

Let us start with the "knights". Upon closer inspection, even the most elaborate episodes of terrorist attacks turn out to be far from romantic legends. That same former Ottoman Interior Minister Mehmet Talat Pasha was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 after he had emigrated to organise Turkish resistance against Entente invaders and made contacts with Moscow and the Comintern. Following this, a week before the assassination, the British secret service sent a man to him under the cover of a journalist to "talk" to him. They failed to persuade him to obey the Entente. And then they turned to the Armenian nationalists. Their role was not great, they were performers in the service of the imperialist powers. The same story about Talat's murder, for example, was accompanied by a PR legend, alleging that his killer had done it after "the Turks killed his family". Later it turned out that this was not the case, the killer lived in Serbia.

There is no less manipulation around the deaths of Armenians. Over long years the Armenian radical circles have built up an ideology of "genocide of thirty years". But this is the result of a careful dissection of history and a selection of facts because at the same time, as American historian Justin McCarthy notes, there were massacres and deportations of millions of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. McCarthy, known for his rigorous research of demographic data, has estimated that from 1821 to 1922, as a result of large-scale ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the Caucasus about 5.5 million Muslims were killed.

These figures are only corrected in the scientific community, but not denied, even by supporters of the "genocide concept". The main objection is simply to say that all cannot be counted together, as the victims belonged to different peoples. But they were killed as Muslims. Christians - hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians and others - were being killed in parallel because violence can easily spread around. This was happening in the context of a big drama in which the European empires (of which Russia was one) decided to crush the Ottoman state by fomenting inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife. Armenian ethnic nationalism is a product of that time.

Were those who organised the destruction of Armenians as a nation (i.e. genocide) the men who were killed by Armenian fighters after the First World War? As even Hans-Lucas Kizer, author of a recent, far uncomplimentary biography of Talat Pasha admits that Armenians were killed along with others in the region in events spawned not by anyone's "master plans" but by the war itself. The weakness of the Ottoman authorities, along with the brigandage of the Kurdish tribes, was coupled with inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatred spread by the extremist actions of Armenian nationalists in particular, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Turks and others in the region.

This was the result of irresponsible political games of ethnic nationalism of the de facto Armenian minority in a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional region at the crossroads of empires. The same McCarthy points out quite lucidly that the proportion of Armenians in the lands that the Armenian nationalists intended to seize was lower than they later began to claim. Under such circumstances, the Armenian groups of the time nevertheless began a suicidal policy, betting on armed violence, the most natural banditry and counting on the support of the world empires. At first it seemed they had it. But then came the reaction, and worse, came World War I, in which everyone already had guns, with obvious consequences. Mostly innocent people died as a result - Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Turks, Assyrians, Kurds...

A chance to have a state

The Armenian establishment, as we can see, is in no hurry to learn the lessons of that time. Influential circles within the Armenian state are still betting on foreign countries and the aid of powerful distant empires. Pashinyan on May 5 outlined his views on sovereignty to the Armenian diaspora in the Czech Republic, stating that "over 70% of the countries in the world are not capable of ensuring their own security. Countries that can provide their own security can be counted on the fingers of one hand". The conclusion is clear - the West will help us.

Although the Armenian leader further said that "Armenia's historical experience and current realities show that peace is the only guarantee of security", de facto they continue to stake on confrontation, even after losing in the confrontation with their neighbours. At the same time as these steps, which look exactly like a strain on relations with the neighbours, Yerevan has again started talking about new foreign missions and the enlargement of the Western police-civilian mission.

There are encouraging steps as well. Speaking in the Armenian parliament on May 3, Pashinyan stressed that Armenia must declare that not only does it have no territorial claims, but that it will not. "This is the only principle that will give us a chance to have a state. Otherwise, all four parties will do everything to ensure that we are not a state."

Moreover, Pashinyan admitted that his team was aware of the possible consequences, especially given that there had previously been problems with the erection of a monument to the famed Armenian racist and collaborator with the Nazis, Nzhdeh. Nevertheless, the government did not dare to stop the crazy idea of the monument. "Why was this monument (to Nemesis) erected? For one simple reason: when this topic went from table to table, everyone thought that if there was no agreement, we would be told: you are traitors. We all act with the following logic: if we do something wrong we will be called traitors, but in fact, we are betraying the national and state interests. The most important thing is to have an alibi that we have not committed treason. But no one says we are committing deep betrayal," Pashinyan said.

In a word, Azerbaijan is not just facing the task of signing a peace treaty, but of leading the region out of the pernicious "spell" in which the South Caucasus has found itself as a result of the aggressive chauvinist project launched by Armenian radical nationalists many decades ago. Türkiye is also interested in the same. As the events of recent years have shown, they have the means to do so.

Caliber.Az