Tens of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakabert memorial in Yerevan to commemorate the genocide victims. The daylong procession followed an official wreath-laying ceremony at the hilltop memorial led by Pashinian, parliament speaker Alen Simonian and President Vahagn Khachaturian.
Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church increasingly at odds with Pashinian’s government, was again excluded from the annual ceremony. Garegin and other top clergymen held a prayer service at Tsitsernakabert later in the morning.
The genocide began with mass arrests on April 24, 1915 of Armenian intellectuals and activists in Constantinople. An estimated 1.5 million Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or starved to death in the following months and years. About three dozen nations, including Russia, France, Germany and the United States, have recognized the genocide.
“Today we remember the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide, who fell victim to the massacres and mass deportations that raged from 1915,” Pashinian said in a statement issued on the occasion.
In contrast with his past statements, Pashinian did not mention the regime of the so-called Young Turks that ruled the crumbling empire during at the time. He also continued to put the emphasis on the Armenian phrase “Meds Yeghern (Great Crime), rather than the term “genocide,” in reference to the events of 1915.
Pashinian used the occasion to promote his policy towards Turkey and Azerbaijan, saying that Armenia should “survive the tragedy of Meds Yeghern” with “delimited and demarcated borders” and “normalized relations with neighbors.”
He condemned through his press secretary, Nazeli Baghdasarian, the burning of Turkish and Azerbaijani flags during an annual torchlight procession to Tsitsernakabert organized by the young wing of the opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) party late on Wednesday.
“That is a provocative and inflammatory practice,” Baghdasarian said in a statement to the state-run Armenpress news agency.
“This statement exposes Pashinian's political vector: to restrain his own people, fight against them, and justify any action of the enemy,” countered Kristine Vartanian, a Dashnaktsutyun lawmaker. “Pashinian sees a danger not from Azerbaijan or Turkey but from his own people.”
Over the past year, Pashinian has faced growing accusations of questioning and even denying the genocide for the sake of pleasing Turkey, which continues to deny a deliberate government effort to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. He declared in January that Armenians should “understand what happened” in 1915 and what prompted the subsequent campaign for international recognition of the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.
Armenian historians, opposition figures and retired diplomats expressed outrage at that statement, saying that Pashinian cast doubt on the fact of the genocide. Armenian Diaspora groups that have long been campaigning for genocide recognition also deplored it.
Pashinian told visiting Turkish journalists last month that his government will not strive get more countries and international bodies to recognize the genocide. He questioned the wisdom of relevant resolutions already adopted by many foreign parliaments, saying that they undermine stability in the region.