Edik Andreasyan

Did you know Nikol Pashinyan Party was called civil pornography
Yes in 2015, civil pornography was born, which Pashinyan wisely called “Civil Contract”.

This story can be said to have started a long time ago, from the days when the happy Vano Siradeghyan left Armenia. The first president, in fact, created a new structure on the basis of the Armenian National Movement, which was named the “Armenian National Congress”. Political scientists claim that it did not even occur to Levon Ter-Petrosyan that a beautiful day like the CP, civil pornography, would be formed on the basis of the ANC created by him.

I consider this the careless omission of the Pope, the greatest damage done to our country and people. And so, there were many honest and smart politicians left in the ANC from the ANM. There were people gathered there, each of whom could do his job and act as a unique political force. These people, however, could not, perhaps they did not want to be more ideological than their ideological father, they still spend their days in the safe, living shadow of the Pope. The Pope made a mistake in 2007-2008 when he created the position of Deputy Minister for Street Riots in the ANC. It is true that the ANC’s affairs were coordinated by a completely different person, again named Leon, but the deputy in charge of the mentioned cases was directly subordinated to the Pope, in that sense he was one of the most hypocritical in the ANC. That person was Nikol Pashinyan, a rare phenomenon not only in the ANC, but also in the Armenian reality.

Until the spring of 2012, Pashinyan Nicole honestly performed her duties as a deputy. During that time he sat down in the fortress, from where he was released by Serzh Azatich, meeting the pleading requests of Nikol’s immediate boss, Leon Ter-Petrosyan. Appearing in the parliament with the ANC, Nikol Pashinyan, however, became arrogant, tired of being the editor of “Haykakan Zhamanak” newspaper, left the Pope and decided to do his job. Thus, already in 2015, civil pornography was born, which Pashinyan wisely called “Civil Contract”.

I am often asked, “Are you sure that Pashinyan knew what he was founding when he founded his party? Maybe the party he founded later became pornography?” The answer is yes, I’m almost 99% sure Nicole knew what she was up to. Moreover, Nicole, whom I knew, simply could not create anything normal. And you can find out who Nicole I know from the testimonies of the modern Roman historian Michael Minasyan (MM, Kitchen details – discoveries from abroad, the last one).

And what is the difference between “civil pornography” and “civil contract”? If we look at the legislation, it will turn out that in Armenia, pornography – the creation and distribution of pornographic materials – the involvement of Armenian citizens in this field is strictly prohibited. Nicole found the word “contract” so she would not have problems with the law. But we know that the so-called “contract” is nothing but a “verb”, a verbal phenomenon in human societies. Some go to the army under a contract, some are employed in construction, and some enter the service of politicians who have achieved “political success.” This is exactly what happened in the case of Nikol, as a result of whose verbal attack the ranks of the CP became stronger.

Starting in 2018, the business founded by the Pashinyan family has turned into a pornographic holding, absorbing not only small and medium-sized political brothels, but also allowing the immoral to crawl into other political stables. To tell the truth, many representatives of the Armenian National Movement-ANC were also part of political pornography, due to which the sphere became almost complete. Could the holding led by Pashinyan have won the 44-day war? No. To date, there has never been a case in the history of mankind where prostitutes, whether ordinary or political, have been able to win. They never aim to win. ” This is the specifics of this field.

Prostitutes usually avoid conflicts, try to settle issues with fake smiles and sweet conversations. This situation, however, can change dramatically on the domestic political ground, when the prostitutes exercise power typical of their physiognomy and mental world. They remain a cat outside, but inside they break the bonds and turn into something you do not know. Vivid evidence of this is the unprecedented attack on the journalistic community in recent days, carried out by the youngest representatives of political pornography, Vigen Khachatryan and Vahagn Aleksanyan.

And why journalists became the target of political pornographers, in particular, is a completely different story, which, I hope, I will have the opportunity to address in the near future. And before that, let me say that verbal prostitutes can not take journalists for purely genetic reasons. The fact is that their profession originated earlier than journalism, but over the centuries it has become so that journalists have begun to call a spade a spade.

The old structure, courtyard, and other premises of Bushehr Gregorian Church have recently been rearranged and cleaned as local authorities plan to reopen the historical place to sightseers in near future, The Tehran Times reports. 

“The Gregorian Church of Bushehr is one of the most important and significant historical monuments of the southwestern Iranian port city. It is now fully cleaned in preparation for reopening to sightseers,” a local tourism official said on Monday.

In addition to the main building, the courtyard and other premises of the church have been landscaped, the official said. Furthermore, tombstones of the church were treated to become documented in near future, the official explained. 

The source reminds that the term Gregorian Church is an exonym not preferred by the church itself, as it views the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus as its founders, St. Gregory the Illuminator was merely the first official primate of the church. It is also known simply as the Armenian Church.

The FBI raided Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar’s home and campaign office in Texas as part of a wide-ranging federal probe relating to Azerbaijan and several U.S. businessmen, a source familiar with the matter told ABC News, the latter reported.

A federal grand jury in Washington is investigating the matter, but it’s unclear if Cuellar is a target of the grand jury’s probe, ABC News was told.

After FBI agents executed a search warrant at Cuellar’s home in Laredo, Texas, an aide to Cuellar said in a statement that the congressman “will fully cooperate in any investigation.”

“He is committed to ensuring that justice and the law are upheld,” the statement said.

An FBI spokesperson emphasized that any “law enforcement activity” at Cuellar’s home and campaign office was “court-authorized.”

Cuellar, who represents Texas’ 28th Congressional District along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in Congress since 2005. In recent years he has served as a co-chair of the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus, and repeatedly met with Azerbaijan officials, including the ambassador of Azerbaijan to the U.S., Elin Suleymanov.

Over the past year, Cuellar has frequently criticized the Biden administration for some of its border-related policies.

‘There’s a lot of allies in Congress for the Armenian story to be told’ By Ida Mojadad Examiner

Rep. Jackie Speier, who has represented the Peninsula on the local, state and federal levelfor more than 40 years, will be remembered for many things long after she retires this year. But to Armenian Americans, it will be that she was one of their own —that she was able to elevate issues important to them and serve as a role model for youth.

She is one of just two Armenian members of Congress, the other being Rep. Anna Eshoo.

“The pipeline hasn’t grown as much in Congress,” Speier told the Examiner. “But here’s a whole generation of Armenian Americans who are in elected office on the local level and in state legislatures. Over time, I think their voices are going to be heard. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of allies in Congress for the Armenian story to be told.”

Speier’s district is home to the Krouzian-Zekarian-Vasbouragan Armenian School, a bilingual private K-8 school by Lake Merced, two Armenian churches and a senior Armenian community center. Besides Speier, who is Armenian through her mother’s side, the Bay Area is home to an estimated 50,000 Armenians, many in San Mateo County, and a few dozen Armenian American community organizations.

Speier’s long and storied political career somewhat overshadows her heritage. She survived being shot during the 1978 Jonestown massacre while working for Congressman Leo Ryan, who was assassinated. She served in the California state legislature, supporting its assault weapons ban and became the first in the governing body to give birth while in office. In Congress since 2008, she’s known for fighting against sexual assault in the U.S. military, supporting humanitarian causes and abortion rights — which includes talking about her own.

Along the way, Speier and Eshoo repeatedly advocated for the United States to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915, when Ottoman authorities killed or forced ethnic Armenians from Turkey — including their family members.

“Typically, we spend quite a bit of time educating our public officials as to what the Armenian community is all about and what our concerns are,” said Roxanne Makasdijian, co-founder and executive director of the Genocide Education Project. “She came into office knowing all of those and fully willing to act on behalf of the Armenian community. You have a head start with Jackie Speier.”

Speier credits Eshoo with feeling the time was right in 2019 to shepherd the recognition through in Congress, assisted by the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff, who represents the Armenian community of Glendale.

President Joe Biden followed in recognizing the genocide in April 2021, the first sitting U.S. president to do so.

It was a long time coming for the Armenian diaspora. It could have taken longer.

“It really, really helped for her and Congresswoman Eshoo to tell family stories,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of ANCA, based in Washington D.C. “These are things that had not been possible when there weren’t Armenian American representatives in Congress. Personal testimony carries a lot of weight.”

Speier reflected on the impact the genocide had on her mother that she sensed growing up. Speier visited the Eternal Flame, a memorial to the genocide in Tsitsernakaberd, Armenia, to commemorate the 100th anniversary. There, she said she left a pin cushion, which her mother used to make using stuffed tuna cans, and a program from her mother’s funeral.

“There was always this cloud that she kind of carried around with her, of sadness,” Speier told the Examiner. “It speaks to the anguish about the Armenian genocide. In some respects, I feel that I have completed the journey for her that didn’t happen when she was alive.”

She also just discovered on Wednesday that her grandfather on her father’s side spent one month in a German concentration camp, making both sides of her family touched by genocide.

The effects of obscuring history and what happens in present-day Armenia continues to have ripple effects for the Armenia diaspora. In 2020, Bay Area churches and the KZV Armenian School were vandalized as deadly conflict emerged again in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in Azerbaijan — backed by Turkey. The area is known as Artsakh to the ethnic Armenians who governed it.

Rep. Jackie Speier hugs a group of schoolchildren at KZV Armenian School. (Courtesy KZV Armenian School)

Speier condemned Azerbaijan for “military aggression” at Artsakh, which she visited in 2019, and called out disparities in aid to Armenia compared to Azerbaijan. A border crisis between the two countries has been ongoing since April 2021.

“More than 100 years later, that hate is still being fanned and reaching us here in the farthest corner of the world from that region,” Makasdijian. “It really brought home the reality of the fact that if the international community does not hold each other accountable and responsible for their misbehavior [that] denial [was] allowed to foment over so much time.”

Speier also co-chairs the Armenian Congressional Caucus, which has helped bolster aid to the country, including $40 million for democracy assistance in 2019. The congresswoman added that while Turkey and former Soviet Union territories have become more authoritarian, Armenia’s democracy has strengthened and the United States must protect it.

“Congresswoman Speier has been an extraordinary advocate for Armenia and the Armenian community here in the U.S.,” said Eshoo in a statement. “She has strengthened ties between both nations, helped secure vital funding to bolster Armenia’s democratic institutions, and has grown the Armenian Caucus into a powerful force for change on Capitol Hill. As the only two Armenian-American Members of Congress, I’m losing my best partner with her retirement.”

Hamparian noted that Speier has been very eager to mentor and that the community will now lean more on Congresswoman Eshoo, who is also Assyrian and represents the district just south of Speier’s, to elevate Armenian issues and foster mentorship.

KZV Armenian School takes “great pride” in being represented by someone also Armenian American, said principal Grace Andonian. Students have seen Speier in Washington D.C., at their school and many community events. Some alumni have also interned for her.

“We are fortunate to have Congresswoman Speier as a real-life representation of the type of person we want our students to be in the future,” Andonian said. “Our students, from our kindergarteners to our middle school students, are always excited to see Rep. Speier. She is a true role model who embodies what it means to be principled and compassionate leader.”

Senekeremian believes the foundation built by Eshoo and Speier, who said she will continue to use her voice and stay involved, will grow. And Hamparian sees great promise in upcoming Armenian American leaders to step in, like Michigan state legislator Mari Manoogian and Peter Koutoujian, a sheriff in Massachusetts and a former state legislator.

“We’ll just miss her terribly,” Hamparian said. “She’s been such a treasure and a role model and a leader for our community.”

imojadad@sfexaminer.com

Recent media reports suggest that the monument to Armenian revolutionary and soldier Soghomon Tehlirian in the town of Maralik in Armenia’s Shirak Province is set to be dismantled. The reports have not yet been confirmed or denied officially, however people have concerns: if there are such rumors, the issue must have been discussed somewhere.

Artak Gevorgyan, head of the enlarged community of Ani, which includes Maralik, told Panorama.am that they haven’t received such an order, and “don’t pay attention to rumors”.

A monument to Soghomon Tehlirian was erected in Maralik on April 22, 2015, as part of the events marking the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The author of the monument is a sculptor and Honored Artist of Armenia Samvel Petrosyan.

Speaking to Panorama.am, Petrosyan, too, noted that he doesn’t have any official information and stated that the monument belongs to the people. “So how can we be guided by the Turks’ desire?” he says.

“Soghomon Tehlirian is our avenger, a prominent figure and a unique hero. How can his monument be dismantled? It’s about historical truth. We should not be guided by the Turks’ wish, should we? Can the Armenian Genocide or the Karabakh conflict be ignored at the request of the Turks? How is it possible?” Petrosyan stressed.

Please help free Armenian sign the Petition, We demand Pashinyan’s Resignation now! Մենք հիմա պահանջում ենք Փաշինյանի հրաժարականը https://www.change.org/We-Demand-Pashinyan-Resignation-Now

Soghomon Tehlirian killed Talaat Pasha, the former Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire and one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide, as part of Operation Nemesis in Berlin on March 15, 1921.

The assassination took place in broad daylight and led to Tehlirian’s immediate arrest by German police. He was tried for murder, but was eventually acquitted by the German court.

The trial examined not only Tehlirian’s actions but also his conviction that Talaat Pasha was the main author of the Armenian deportation and mass killings. The defense attorneys made no attempt to deny the fact that Tehlirian had killed a man, and instead focused on the influence of the Armenian Genocide on Tehlirian’s mental state. When asked by the judge if he felt any sort of guilt, Tehlirian remarked, “I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer.”

It took the jury slightly over an hour to render a verdict of “not guilty.”

After the assassination, Tehlirian moved to Serbia and married Anahit Tatikian, who was also from Erzincan. The couple moved to Belgium and lived there until 1945 when they moved to San Francisco.

Tehlirian died of a brain tumor in 1960 and was buried at the Ararat Cemetery in Fresno, California.

There are also monuments dedicated to him in Fresno, the village of Mastara in the Talin region and Yerevan.

We call on all Armenians worldwide to sign this Petition demanding Nikol Pashinyan’s and his government’s resignation. #DePashification

We need to reunify the Armenian Nation and undo Pashinyan’s divisive efforts: those who care for him vs. those who oppose him calling them blacks and whites, those who are in Artsakh vs. those who are in Armenia, and those who live in Armenia vs. those who live in the Diaspora.

Կոչ ենք անում աշխարհասփյուռ հայությանը ստորագրել այս հանրագիրը՝ պահանջելով Նիկոլ Փաշինյանի և նրա կառավարության հրաժարականը։

Please Sign the Petition https://www.change.org/We-Demand-Pashinyan-Resignation-Now

Nikol Pashinyan began his aggression on the Armenian Nation in 2008 by launching a massive violent attack in the streets of Yerevan. Ten people were killed, hundreds injured, and cars and buildings burned. But he failed to overthrow the government. He then got engaged in another takeover in 2018, under the guise of a “Velvet Revolution.” As a result of his mismanagement, he lost most of Artsakh and its surrounding seven regions. Thousands of Armenians were killed and wounded.

He signed a capitulation agreement on Nov. 2020 without consulting anyone: neither the Parliament nor the Constitutional Court nor the Foreign or Defense Ministers. After saying that he is NOT in charge of Artsakh, he agreed to give up Artsakh to Azerbaijan. As a defeatist and failed leader, he allowed Azerbaijan to conquer parts of the eastern border of Armenia ever since May 2021. He is now trying to give away Armenian historical rights by succumbing to Erdogan’s pressures to negotiate the opening of the Armenia-Turkey border. If we remain silent, we become complicit in Pashinyan’s devious scheme to destroy the Armenian Nation.

What Turkey was unable to accomplish, Pashinyan did. He succeeded in destroying Armenia from inside.

Despite Azerbaijan’s obvious resolute intentions, Armenia was hesitant to respond militarily during the 2020 War. On the first day of the War, men between 18 and 55 were barred from leaving Armenia. No general mobilization was announced, and no decision was made to send large numbers of Armenian regular army forces to Artsakh. From the beginning, the Armenian leadership tried to get out of the situation with half-steps, apparently hoping that the Artsakh forces would overcome the enemy’s attacks.

The Armenian Nation Must Unite and remove Pashinyan before further destruction.

Your signature today will save Armenia.

We are officially launching A Petition Today We demand Pashinyan Resignation now! Մենք հիմա պահանջում ենք Փաշինյանի հրաժարականը https://chng.it/2YLZFwsHmR Please Sign the Petition and Share

Vahe Makaryan

NA Deputy Speaker, member of “Hayastan” bloc Ishkhan Saghatelyan told journalists today that they will not give up their historical homeland, they will return the lost Hadrut and Shushi.

“Do you want the point of view of the ARF? Yes, Shushi and Hadrut must return.” I say very clearly, I say very directly. How do we see that opportunity? We can not give up our inalienable rights from our historical homeland. “If there is a national government, our army and resources are restored, all this is not a verdict yet, it is not the end of the Armenian people, Armenia,” said Ishkhan Saghatelyan.

To Hraparak.am ‘s observation that Robert Kocharyan did not say in his last press conference that he was going to bring back Hadrut and Shushi, noticing that something bad had already happened, Saghatelyan responded ․ “Robert Kocharyan said, should we refuse?”

• Dashnaktsutyun has not refused to bring Western Armenia back for 100 years.
• No, Robert Kocharyan said, should we refuse? Robert Kocharyan said it will be difficult, he was right. Of course, it will be difficult.
• Maybe we want to bring back Cilicia.
• Well, well, do we mean serious now or?
• No, I really want to understand ․․․
• I really understand, I want you to understand real too, հստակ I say very clearly, we must do everything for that, and those who will give up our rights will say, Hadrut and Shushi belong to Azerbaijan, they are traitors to us, Armenian They are people who refuse historical territories, it does not matter whether there will be an opposition or the government.

Help free Armenia to sign Petition https://chng.it/vzQrfbWRds We demand Pashinyan Resignation now! Մենք հիմա պահանջում ենք Փաշինյանի հրաժարականը

More than a year after war broke out, the country is in need of steady leadership

YEREVAN, ARMENIA — Armen Sarkissian, the president of Armenia, is incandescent with rage. “Five thousand brave and selfless Armenian soldiers were killed in this war,” he tells me at his office, referring to last year’s conflict with Azerbaijan and Turkey. “There must be accountability for their deaths.”

Sarkissian strikes me as the only Armenian politician whose anger comes with a constructive program of national revival. The man once described by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the “Vaclav Havel of the Caucasus” radiates no grievances against foreign powers. Where other politicians complain endlessly about being abandoned by allies or stabbed by foreign powers, Sarkissian appears to be animated by the cold Naipaulian belief that that “the world is what it is”: nations that are nothing, that allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

The most remarkable fact about Armenia is that it exists at all. Few countries have survived more suffering through the ages than this tiny Caucasus republic located at the strategic intersection of Europe and Asia. Armenia converted to Christianity in 301 AD, before any other state in the world, and its history ever since has been a chronicle of interminable strife. Competing empires reduced it, in Gibbon’s unforgettable phrase, to a “theatre of perpetual war” for a millennium. The Russians deluged it from above. The Arabs and Persians savaged it from below. And the Turks, having swallowed up all of historic Armenia’s western flank, inaugurated the twentieth century with the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians.

https://chng.it/7F2BHXy9FV Sign Petition

2020’s war with Azerbaijan and Turkey over Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnically Armenian territory gifted a century ago to Azerbaijan by the Kremlin, has shattered the relative stability that followed Armenia’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The economy, bruised by the pandemic, is crumbling. Blood continues to run on its disputed borders. The national morale is shaken. Tens of thousands of ordinary Armenians are pouring out of the country for opportunities abroad, reviving the tragic tradition of expatriation among a people who have seldom known protracted periods of peace and prosperity in their own land. Armenia’s population is just under three million. Its sprawling global diaspora — a legacy of the genocide perpetrated by Turkey — is thought to exceed twelve million.

In June, Armenia conducted snap parliamentary elections. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the activist turned politician who supervised the war effort, was unexpectedly returned to power. But the impression of closure conveyed by the result concealed the deadly divisions coursing through the country. In Yerevan, young men complained bitterly that they had been betrayed by their own leadership. “I kept going with my friends to sign up to fight every day when the war started,” a medical student told me. “Every time, we were told, ‘go home, we are winning.’ It was just a lie meant to fool us and make us think that the government was in control of the situation. We were completely unprepared.”

How do you rebuild a nation devastated by foreign aggression and demoralized by infighting?

“You begin by looking inwards,” Sarkissian tells me. “You ask yourself difficult questions and make necessary changes.” And one change that is indispensable to healing the national psyche and securing Armenia’s future, according to Sarkissian, is constitutional reform. This can seem like an odd fixation, and I was skeptical of Sarkissian’s argument until I traveled through Armenia this past summer. The war has exposed not only Armenia’s military deficiencies but also the fatal defects in the national charter that governs Armenia’s unlikely democracy. The current constitution, written in 2015, was designed to safeguard the interests of individuals, not the prospects of the nation. And unless Armenia can entrench the idea of accountability, create co-equal branches of government and subordinate individuals to institutions, it will remain vulnerable to populism, intrigue and chaos.

The war in Nagorno-Karabakh came unexpectedly, in the early hours of September 27, 2020, when Armenian positions reported heavy shelling from the Azeri side. By the first week of November, Azeri troops were punching into Shushi — the mountainous linchpin of Armenian defense. When Pashinyan agreed last November to cede substantial tracts of territory held by Armenia as part of an armistice mediated by Russia, a mob stormed the prime minister’s office fully intending to lynch him. He survived. But the election that followed did not so much heal the national rift as harden it.

Sarkissian has emerged as a unifying father-of-the-nation figure in a land unraveling under the burden of loss and recrimination. For years Armenia’s most respected statesman on the international stage, he was elected three years ago to the largely ceremonial presidency. When war broke out, he activated his extensive international connections to drum up support for Armenia. Three separate sources told me that India had come close to airlifting a cache of arms to Armenia. But the war effort was so poorly managed that the administration in Yerevan, operating without a command structure, was unable to figure out how to receive the materiel.

Sarkissian maintains that this period of “national depression” can be converted into an opportunity for a “national revival.” To recover and rebuild, however, Armenia would have to eschew its historical habit of searching for “saviors” and assume responsibility for its own future — for no amount of foreign support can revitalize a nation that refuses to utilize its own strengths. “Azerbaijan surpassed us in large measure because it has oil revenues,” he tells me one afternoon. “What will be the value of oil in a generation’s time? In two generations?”

Sarkissian’s belief in the sanctity of self-reliance and striving, his faith in the perfectibility of the self and his contempt for self-pity, are not ideological reflexes. They are beliefs absorbed from his own life. Sarkissian grew up in extreme hardship. He was ten when his father died of cancer. His mother, Zhenya, widowed in youth, worked three jobs to give Sarkissian and his sister, Karine, a semblance of a normal life. The Soviet Union offered no avenue for unconnected individuals to rise above their station. But Sarkissian realized he could be the master of his own destiny the moment he was enrolled at school: “The classroom was the only capitalist space in the Soviet Union,” he tells me. “It was pure competition.”

And he was so competitive that Soviet grandees showered him with awards and accolades, decorated him with the prestigious Lenin Prize, and even acceded to his request to travel to England in 1984 as part of an exchange program. Sarkissian was taken first to Sussex, where he was expected to spend four months learning English; he mastered the language in two and moved to Cambridge. As a young theoretical physicist, he did research work alongside Stephen Hawking. What he most fondly remembers about his first exposure to the West, however, is the absence of hierarchies in science. The Soviet Union panegyrized the notion of equality; the scientists in England practiced it. The faculty at Cambridge, which included several Nobel laureates, treated Sarkissian as a peer and consulted him as an equal.

After returning home, Sarkissian helped develop an advanced version of the video game Tetris; the fortune it made in the West was pocketed by Soviet officials. When the USSR finally disintegrated, Sarkissian, by then based in the UK, was asked to open the newly independent Armenia’s first international mission in London. It was a provisional arrangement. But Sarkissian’s flair for diplomacy — he went on to open half a dozen embassies across Europe — earned him enough respect at home that he was invited in 1996 to become Armenia’s prime minister. Sarkissian laid the foundations of the country’s intelligence services and advanced a radical proposition intended to dissolve old animosities in the solvent of commerce: an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey running through Armenia. His tenure, however, ended before he could sell the idea to his counterparts in Baku and Ankara.

A year into the job, en route to Yerevan from a meeting in Washington, Sarkissian made a quick stop in London to conclude negotiations on an outstanding deal with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The chairman of the bank, Jacques de Larosière, an old friend, was alarmed by the amount of weight Sarkissian had shed since their last meeting. “Armen,” de Larosière said, “I will sign this deal only if you get yourself checked up.”

The next morning, Sarkissian was diagnosed with advanced cancer. Armenia was newly independent and required stability. So Sarkissian kept the news of his illness to himself and scheduled chemotherapy around his work. One evening, however, he spied his son keeping a watchful eye on him while he received treatment — a scene that instantly exhumed memories of his own harrowing childhood, when he had seen cancer devour his father. Sarkissian immediately made arrangements for a handover. He resigned, moved to London and began intensive therapy.

Upon his recovery, he deployed his skills as a scientist and mathematician to build a lucrative career as a private businessman during the telecoms revolution. He also did stints in between as Armenia’s ambassador to the UK — making him one of the longest-serving representatives of any country to London. He returned so frequently to the post that Queen Elizabeth branded him “the champion of all ambassadors.”

What makes Sarkissian seem indispensable to many Armenians today is his deft handling of the Velvet Revolution — an upheaval that ranks second only to the war in the Armenian pantheon of recent political turmoil. In the spring of 2018, hundreds of thousands of protesters poured into the capital. Led by Nikol Pashinyan, then an anti-corruption activist and parliamentarian, they demanded the resignation of Armenia’s longtime president, Serzh Sargsyan. Barred by law from a third term, Sargsyan had rewritten the constitution in 2015, transferred executive power to the prime ministership, and engineered his election to the newly empowered office when his presidential term ended in 2018.

The brazenness of the power grab provoked a mass uprising. Everybody expected tanks to roll into the capital, as they had a decade before. It was Sarkissian, according to supporters of the revolution, who averted a massacre. “Without him, we would have had a repeat of 2008, when tanks were brought to the center of Yerevan and ten people were killed,” says Arman Babajanyan, an independent lawmaker who participated in the Velvet Revolution.

Sarkissian, sounded out for the presidency in the hope that he would endow an ornamental office with gravitas and dignity, had repeatedly spurned the offer. But the requests intensified — and with them the promise to let him steer Armenia’s foreign policy. He relented in 2018. Sworn into office just days before the protests erupted, the new president announced to his staff one morning that he was going for a stroll to Republic Square, the beating heart of the revolution. His advisers and security balked at the idea; they could not protect him from the crowd outside.

“Maintaining peace and preventing violence were my highest obligations to my nation,” Sarkissian tells me. “It would have been a cowardly abdication of my duties had I stayed in the palace.” Accompanied by a pair of guards, he emerged into streets awash in almost a quarter of a million people. Armenians at home watched in disbelief. Souren Zohrabyan, one of the country’s most respected bankers and a fervent early supporter of the revolution, remembers his elderly mother breaking down in tears upon seeing Sarkissian on the television. “This sort of thing just never happened in our history,” he says. As Sarkissian inched his way up to Pashinyan, the muted jeers that had greeted Sarkissian intensified into loud cheers.

The Velvet Revolution had sought to uproot an entrenched oligarchic order in a small nation. Its success depended on more than fury on the streets. It required also the assent of power brokers at home and the acquiescence of great powers abroad. If the old guard believed that Sarkissian would protect their interests, they were disappointed. Sarkissian returned to his office and worked the phones. He reached out to the head of the Armenian church, held talks with the Europeans and the Americans, and conducted delicate diplomacy with the Kremlin, which had profound misgivings about uprisings in its backyard.

Sarkissian’s aides tell me that the president, frustrated by the ancien regime’s refusal to accept reality, threatened to resign if order was not restored before Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, observed each year on April 24. That ultimatum paid off. Sargsyan quit days later, and Pashinyan was elected to the prime minister’s office within a week — all without any loss of life. The Velvet Revolution was not preordained to be peaceful. It was Sarkissian’s intervention that kept the peace.

Armenians tell the cautionary tale of the warrior who slays the dragon and then becomes the dragon. Pashinyan, having mobilized the masses against the accumulation of executive powers in the prime minister’s office, quietly inherited those powers. The promise of constitutional reform implicit in the revolution he spearheaded has fallen by the wayside. It is too early to call the prime minister an authoritarian — he governs with a legitimate democratic mandate — but even his loyal aides concede that he is inimical to deliberation, allergic to opinions that contradict his own and that he has incrementally concentrated decision making in his own office.

It may well be that Pashinyan is motivated more by the desire to be an effective administrator than by the impulse to drape himself in power. But the practical consequences of Pashinyan’s failure to prioritize constitutional reform, and his unwillingness to devolve power to other branches of the government, proved disastrous for Armenia during the war. When I interviewed him last year, Pashinyan described the war to me as an “existential threat” to Armenia. Yet his insistence on being the sole decider of the response to that threat on every front, military to diplomatic, did not serve his country well. His skill at dislodging the old regime did not translate into wartime leadership. A tenacious domestic street fighter, he simply lacked the dexterity to marshal international support for Armenia or negotiate with foreign powers.

Might the outcome have been different, Armenian officials and sympathetic observers abroad wonder, had Pashinyan put forward his nation’s most valuable diplomatic asset to press Yerevan’s cause at the negotiating table in Russia? Preserving the sovereignty of Armenia, an ancient civilization marooned by covetous powers, has always required a command of statecraft that, not to put too fine a point on it, the prime minister does not possess. As a foreign diplomat in a neighboring country who watches Armenia closely and interacts with its leadership explained to me:

Pashinyan is an exceptional figure in world politics for what he has achieved in this part of the world. He is sincere and idealistic, but he can be incredibly persistent and stubborn. Sarkissian is in a different league. He’s a scientist. He’s a capitalist, but he didn’t have his fingers in the pie here. He made his fortune by working hard in the West, a Soviet Thatcherite who wants to turn Armenia into the Israel of the Caucasus. He cultivated really strong relationships as a diplomat. With the exception of Erdogan and Aliyev and maybe Imran Khan, he can get a meeting with almost any world leader. For a tiny country, that is a huge asset. He was just not utilized during the war. He tried to do his best — he reached out to everybody — but he was sidelined and constrained within Armenia. The prime minister ran the show. And it was, I am sorry to say, a disaster from start to finish. Sarkissian’s office had no real authority. If he had had a say in how the war was run and how the peace was negotiated, I can confidently say that country would not be suffering so much today.

Voters in towns and villages in Armenia lamented to me that their president was not on the ballot at the last election. This perhaps explains the reluctance of Pashinyan, a once assertive leader now submerged in insecurity, to grant greater powers to the presidency via constitutional amendment. Sarkissian, for his part, is maximizing the minuscule authority vested in his office. Between consoling families of the fallen — and of those taken captive by the Azeris — his hours are devoted to forging new relationships abroad and luring innovators and investors to Armenia.

Last autumn, Sarkissian convened the third Summit of Minds, a two-day conference modeled on Davos that drew foreign politicians and business titans to the spa town of Dilijan, as part of his program to turn Armenia into a major destination. A day after the summit, he flew to Saudi Arabia, where he was received with full ceremony by Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom. The visit was made historic by virtue of the not unimportant fact that Saudi Arabia and Armenia do not have diplomatic relations. It was another example of Sarkissian using his extensive personal friendships cultivated as a private businessman to the benefit of his beleaguered country.

Perhaps the only head of state who is also a scientist, Sarkissian has embarked on an ambitious initiative to foster a technological revolution at home. The physical foundations of his plan are being laid just outside Yerevan at Advanced Tomorrow (ATOM), a cyber and scientific innovation hub comparable to Israel’s start-up village Yokneam Illit and Bangalore’s Electronic City. He spent the winter touring the Middle East, Europe and Asia to sell the idea to heads of state and investors.

Cajoling major IT and tech companies to help develop global centers of mathematical modeling, AI and machine learning inside Armenia has been relatively easy: the Armenian diaspora, one of the most prosperous and influential in the world, has been eager to help. The true difficulty lay in convincing Yerevan to tear down the obstructions that exist purely to create an unfair advantage for Armenia’s tiny ruling elite, who preside over a maze of regulations designed to protect them from competition from diaspora Armenians.

Sarkissian’s conception of “nation” extends beyond the frontiers of Armenia to encompass the global Armenian community. What is today Armenia was, after all, once marginal to Armenian life, which flourished in lands now held by Turkey. The Armenian identity — its literature, culture, cuisine, lore — was developed outside Armenia. Historically, Armenians built and administered other people’s countries for them. Constantinople’s most revered architect, for instance, was an Armenian — as was the founder of the Turkish political theater. Today, however, such expertise cannot be put to Armenia’s aid. For one of the requirements for service in government is uninterrupted residence in Armenia for several years.

Sarkissian is aghast that all his outreach to draw talent to Armenia is in the end frustrated by “absurd and meaningless regulations.” A luminary of the diaspora such as Noubar Afeyan, the founder of Moderna, must spend a minimum of five years living exclusively in Armenia before he can quality for service in the Armenian government. Yerevan would like his vaccines and philanthropy, but not his skill or service. “Armenia is a small country, but a global nation,” Sarkissian tells me. “And this pettiness is depriving future generations of Armenians. It’s madness.” Opening up the government to the diaspora is among the constitutional reforms Sarkissian is championing.

By convention, changes to the constitution take effect only when a new president is sworn in. Sarkissian has just over three years left in his seven-year term of office. Armenia, by his own admission, cannot afford to wait that long. So is Sarkissian willing to resign in order to expedite the implementation of the reforms? “Being the president of Armenia has been the greatest honor of my life,” he says. “But I did not accept this job to feel honored. I accepted it to serve Armenia. And I will not stay in it a second longer if it means impeding Armenia’s progress.”

Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.