By Benoit Lannoo*
YEREVAN, Armenia | ANTWERP, Belgium | 21 August 2025 (IDN) — There is little chance that the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will congratulate the Armenian Apostolic Catholicos on his birthday today. This is a U-turn from five or six years ago, when a praising press release was issued every year by the Prime Minister’s office on the occasion of the anniversary of the Catholicos.
“I highly value your role in strengthening cooperation between the Government of the Republic of Armenia and the Holy Armenian Apostolic Church, backed by the activities of the working group, which was established by our joint decision”, the 21 August 2019 congratulatory telegram stated. “The Holy Armenian Apostolic Church has always played an important role in our people’s life in terms of strengthening spiritual values and preserving national identity.” The PM said, to be “convinced that the Catholicos will continue His efficacious efforts in this direction” and wished “His Holiness robust health and every success in His patriotic mission.”
But no telegram for today’s birthday. There has been a serious fly in the ointment of the Church State relationships for a few weeks. Moreover, two of the prominent archbishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the country are in detention on remand for the moment.
Apologies
Nonetheless, the Armenian Prime Minister recently publicly apologised for his unprecedented attacks via social media on the Church and the political opposition in his country. The PM’s posts indeed were not exactly diplomatic. For example, Pashinyan accused an unnamed prelate of “banging with his uncle’s wife” and he and his entourage had been spreading rumours that the Catholicos did not take his vow of celibacy too closely and even fathered a child.
“Everyone has known these stories for a long time,” an Armenian student recently told me in Gyumri, Armenia’s second largest city. “But why does a PM, after being seven years the undisputed leader of the Republic, suddenly, as a believer, go into these stories?”
Pashinyan also labelled his political opponents as “idiots” because they had accused him of a “lack of political will” in parliament.
But a few days ago, a court forced the PM to issue an apology for all this.
Artsakh
Pashinyan did not even address the apologies he was forced to make by the judge. It is obvious that the prime minister does not mean any of those apologies.
On the contrary, in his latest statements, he aggravates the matter: the loss of Artsakh. This Armenian enclave was purged of its two-millennia-old Armenian population by Azerbaijan in September 2023, in defiance of all international agreements concerning it.
Meanwhile, the destruction of Armenian cultural-religious heritage by the Azeris in Artsakh is continuing. The regime in Baku has produced a new ruse to fool the international community: now it is “spontaneous” forest fires in Artsakh that are destroying the Armenian heritage, and Azerbaijan “unfortunately” does not have enough workforce to extinguish them.
Pashinyan is doing everything he can to make it clear that this is not an Armenian problem. He seems to have forgotten how, the day after his appointment as Prime Minister in 2018, he went to Artsakh to show the people his ‘everlasting’ support and solidarity.
Refugees
The PM’s U-turn is one of the 180-degree turns. “Peace is impossible without closing the Karabakh issue”, Pashinyan posted a few days ago on his official Facebook account.
Regarding the refugees from Artsakh, he is crystal clear: “I consider the discussion by both sides concerning the return of those who have become refugees since the start of the conflict in Armenia and Azerbaijan to be a dangerous factor, that damages the peace established between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
Pashinyan might certainly be right to point out that during the first war for Nagorno-Karabakh, in the early 1990s, some places in present-day Armenia — and certainly several regions in the mountainous region that Baku has now reconquered — were also ethnically cleansed of all Azeris. But that does not alter the fact that he is ruthlessly abandoning more than one hundred thousand Artsakhis who have been forcibly chased from their homeland in the past five years.
Bagrat Galstanyan
And this explains the conflict with the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Catholicos, for example, has explicitly not given up on the diocese of Artsakh: Archbishop Vratanes Abrahamyan is still the primate of Artsakh, even though he and his faithful now live in exile, scattered throughout the territory of Armenia and in the diaspora: the Catholicos and Mgr. Abrahamyan even appointed a young deacon, Edvard Keshishyan, to take care of the social and pastoral needs of the Artsakhis.
How different this attitude of the Church is from that of Pashinyan’s government, which is litigating to try to administer the small building in Yerevan where the representation in exile of the former republic of Artsakh has its offices.
“The Artsakh issue is part of the Armenian question, just like the genocide of the early 20th century is and all the other injustices that were done to the Armenians for centuries are,” Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan told us two years ago when we met him in the northern diocese of Tavush. Nowadays, Galstanyan is in prison on charges of planning a coup.
Mikael Adżapahjan
Two days after the arrest of Archbishop Bagrat in Tavush, the bishop of Shirak, Mikael Adżapahjan, in Etchmiadzin (the ‘Vatican’ of the Armenian Apostolic Church) was also arrested. A week and a half ago, the archbishop appeared in court to discuss his remand. Since the hearing was public, much footage of his remarkable defence is circulating on the internet.
“The judges may not have noticed, but I am domiciled in the Smbatyants Street,” Adżapahjan told his judges. “Do you know who Mesrop Smbatyants was? He was the first bishop of Shirak. He was also arrested several times, and he was executed by the Soviets in 1937. No one knows exactly who condemned him; their graves are overgrown. But his name is still remembered. I will also be justified — if not today, in ten years or later – but you will remain guilty, and your children will be ashamed.”
Freedom
Prison did not break the church leader’s mental strength.
“I have never been freer than in these 50 days,” the Archbishop of Shirak said. “At the age of twelve, I voluntarily limited my freedom by choosing a spiritual path. Trying to frighten someone by imprisonment who has voluntarily limited his freedom is simply ridiculous, as if your bars can isolate me from God’s presence! However, you must know that the Azerbaijanis never imprisoned me. And neither did the Soviet authorities, whom I always criticised. Nor the authorities of the independent Armenian republic under previous leaders Robert Kocharyan or Serzh Sargsyan: I criticised them, but neither of them has ever had me arrested. But now, in what Washington recently called a ‘bright and democratic’ country, a clownish regime is treating me as a criminal.”
Prime Minister Pashinyan may be praised abroad for the so-called ‘peace’ he recently reached with Azerbaijan. Still, in his own country, he is being despised by an increasingly wider circle.
*Benoit Lannoo works in communication, ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogue, as well as policy strategies. He is based in Antwerp, Belgium, and travels regularly to Armenia. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: Catholicos Garegin II of the Armenian Apostolic Church and his Prelate, Archbishop Mikael Adżapahjan of Shirak (rights reserved)