Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate – January 7, 2021 – International News
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan did not attend the Christmas service after sharp criticism from the church of his actions during the conflict with Azerbaijan and threats from the opposition.
Also, almost all other members of the Prime Minister’s political team, starting with the Speaker of the Parliament Ararat Mirzoyan, were not present at this service in the Cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator in Yerevan. The only high-ranking state official was Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan.
Pashinyan honored the religious holiday by quoting a passage from the Bible on his Facebook.
According to Prime Minister’s spokeswoman Mane Gevorgyan, he did not come because he was in isolation due to a coronavirus pandemic.
In June 2020, Pashinyan already stated that he and his family had positive tests for coronavirus, and a week later he announced that he had already recovered.
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. The spokeswoman did not specify whether Pashinyan had taken a new test recently.
The Armenian prime minister is often criticized for signing a peace agreement with Azerbaijan on Nagorno-Karabakh in November 2020, which ended the 44-day war for Nagorno-Karabakh. As a result, Armenia lost control of much of the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, also known as the Artsakh Republic, which in the 1990s occupied not only Nagorno-Karabakh itself but also large surrounding areas in Azerbaijan. Now they are all back under the control of Baku, and Azerbaijan now controls a certain part of Nagorno-Karabakh itself.
One of the most vocal critics of the prime minister and his government in general is the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin II. During the Christmas service in Yerevan, he mentioned the war in Nagorno-Karabakh and its “catastrophic consequences” for Armenians.
He also spoke of the “destructive mistakes” made by official Yerevan before the war that broke out in September 2020.
The Catholicos also prayed that the Armenians would “withstand this deadly ordeal for our state.”
The previous day, January 5, an opposition group announced that it would not allow Pashinyan into the cathedral for the Christmas service.
Almost all opposition forces accuse Pashinyan of defeating Armenia in the war. They are demanding his resignation and the transfer of power to a caretaker government, which is due to hold early parliamentary elections within a year. Pashinyan refuses to comply with the resignation demand.
Garegin II and other leading clergy of the church, as well as the large Armenian diaspora in the world, publicly support the demands of the opposition. Some church priests openly took part in anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan demanding Pashinyan’s resignation.
One of the priests from the city of Sisiana in southeastern Armenia refused to shake the prime minister’s hand during Pashinyan’s visit to one of the city’s temples in December. The church then refused to condemn the priest’s actions, despite criticism from Pashinyan’s supporters.
The Armenian Apostolic Church, one of a group of so-called ancient Eastern Christian churches that belong to neither the Orthodox nor the Catholics, uses the Gregorian calendar, but celebrates Christmas at the same time as the Epiphany on January 6. The Jerusalem Patriarchate of the Armenian Church remains on the Julian calendar, and its faithful will celebrate Christmas, in terms of the Gregorian calendar, on January 19.
The Armenian Apostolic Church is an authoritative and respected force among Armenians. According to opinion polls, about 97 percent of all Armenians call themselves (or their children) its believers.