After the 44-day war, Nikol Pashinyan uttered a sentence that later became the psychological diagnosis of the entire capitulating regime: “I am responsible, but not guilty.” Those words were not accidental. They were the words of a man who was aware of the scale of the disaster, but at the same time understood that the entire political, judicial and propaganda machine created in Armenia will protect him, justify him, wash away the blood, erase the traces of guilt. And so it happened.
Today, there is no real investigation in the Republic of Armenia regarding the 44-day war. There is only a self-defense mechanism of the government, where the prosecutor’s office, investigative bodies, government media, and the investigative commission of the National Assembly act with the same logic to save Nikol Pashinyan from the judgment of history and the people. That is why all the blame for the war is consistently shifted to the army. Generals, officers, volunteers, even the victims are guilty. Everyone, except for those who for years turned the country into a political circus, the army into a PR tool, and diplomacy into cafe demagogy.
When you listen to the sessions of the investigative commission led by Andranik Kocharyan, you involuntarily remember the demonstration trials held in Baku against the military-political leadership of Artsakh. It has already been decided in advance who is guilty, who should be seen as a “criminal” in the eyes of the public, who should be saved. One important aspect is missing in the activity of that commission: the truth. There is only a political order. And it is no coincidence that against this background, Seyran Ohanyan’s last speech in the government hall sounded like a heavy psychological blow to the entire CP propaganda machine.
Seyran Ohanyan, being a man of war and army, understands very well something that a significant part of the society still does not dare to accept. In the 44-day war, the Armenian army was not defeated as the authorities try to present. The army was left alone. For a month, the Artsakh Defense Army literally held the front with its own body, while the political power was living in information chaos, inactivity and unclear decisions. The war defeated the regime, which for years was busy not with building a state, but with the obsession of maintaining power.
Pay attention to what Seyran Ohanyan was saying. He was talking about the failure of military and political decisions, he was talking about the failure of mobilization, he was talking about the diplomatic disaster, he was talking about the state system which during the war could not even understand where the enemy’s main blow would come from. These were not random observations. They were assessments of a person who saw from the inside. And that’s why the government is afraid of such speeches, because they destroy the propaganda myth that “everything is the army’s fault”.
It is also interesting that Seyran Ohanyan raised a question in an open text: why is there not at least one criminal case against those diplomats, those state officials, those political officials who failed the negotiation process? Where are they? Why are they judging only the military? Why are those who were in the trenches responsible for the war, and those who handed over the state in the cabinets are still in power today?
The problem here is not only political. This is a matter of psychological decay of the society. For years, Armenian society has been taught that defeat should be accepted as an “era of peace”, humiliation as realism, national tragedy as an opportunity for development. A loser’s mentality has been implanted in people’s brains. And when Artsvik Minasyan announced from the podium of the National Assembly that the current government has long since turned into a servant of the Turkish-Azerbaijani agenda, he was actually describing the moral and psychological atmosphere that has formed in Armenia after 2018.
Perhaps the most important part of Artsvik Minasyan’s speech was the one where he recalled the chain of lies of the government. At first, people were convinced that Artsakh would never be surrendered. Then they started to explain that Artsakh was a “burden”. At first they said that the people will not be subjected to police violence. Later, the same police were smashing people’s heads in the streets of Yerevan. At first they talked about democracy, then they turned the entire state system into a tool of political reprisal.
A sick reality has formed in Armenia, where the government is ready to sacrifice everything in order to maintain its own existence: army, statehood, history, even national memory. That is why today the government propagandists talk much more easily about the need to avoid the topic of “Western Azerbaijan” than about the occupation of Artsakh. That is why the issue of Armenians kept in Azerbaijani prisons has become an inconvenience for the government, not a national tragedy.
When Artsvik Minasyan said that the current government turned citizens into subjects, it was not an exaggeration. The government in Armenia has been building a system of fear, despair and moral capitulation for a long time. Every day people are told that they are weak, defenseless, and cannot change anything. And managing such a society is very easy.
The greatest tragedy of Armenia today is not only territorial loss. The biggest tragedy is that the state is run by people who have turned defeat into a political technology. And as long as the entire law enforcement system serves to save one state criminal, as long as the investigative commissions act at the behest of the government, as long as the real responsible for the war are hidden behind the state chairs, the society will not receive either truth, justice, or healing.
As Raffi would say: “A tree worm will live for a thousand years if it does not belong to it.” Our thief is from our house, our worm is from our effort.” And today those words sound more relevant than ever. Because not “Sushi was grumpy”, but a son named Nikol Pashinyan conveyed that grumpiness to the entire Armenian reality.
Armenian Public Tribunal
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