“Armenia is witnessing a systematic state-led campaign to undermine, divide, and persecute Armenia’s national church,” CSI’s Joel Veldkamp warned on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “The arrests of Armenian clergy and their supporters must be seen in the context of the prime minister’s demand that the Catholicos of All Armenians resign from his post — a flagrant assault on religious freedom.”
Speaking at a briefing entitled “Repression of Christianity in Armenia” held in the Rayburn House Office Building, Dr. Joel Veldkamp, CSI’s Director of Public Advocacy, detailed alarming developments in Armenia based on his recent visit for the country’s inaugural National Prayer Breakfast.
The panel also featured presentations from Peter Flew, a historian and expert on Orthodox Christianity, Lauren Homer, the director of Law and Liberty International, and Constantin Clerc of SOS Chrétiens d’Orient.
Crackdown on Church, Dissent
Veldkamp reported that the administration of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has imprisoned Church clergy and lay members using what Armenian legal monitors and human rights organizations describe as “falsified evidence and selective prosecution.”
On the day Veldkamp arrived in Yerevan, masked agents from Armenia’s National Security Services detained three journalists, and a fourth the following day. Ruling party officials threatened to seize the Union of Journalists’ building just as CSI was being interviewed in that very building.
CSI requested to visit imprisoned clergymen, but the Armenian Ministry of Justice did not grant them access.
Warnings from Armenian human rights groups
Armenian human rights defenders told CSI that when they had raised concerns about the escalating crackdown, the U.S. Embassy was non-responsive.
Veldkamp referred to a joint statement issued by Armenian civil rights groups on October 19, condemning “selective, punitive, disproportionate and unlawful application of criminal justice mechanisms” by the government in its campaign against the church. He also referred to a November 5 report from the Armenian Center for Political Rights, which details how the charges against Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan were based on falsified evidence.
Veldkamp said that the Armenian human rights organizations he met during his visit to Yerevan delivered a “consistent” message: “Judicial independence and the rule of law are gravely threatened in Armenia, and it is becoming harder to speak freely about it. As best as they can, these human rights defenders are preparing themselves for a new era of authoritarianism in Armenia.”
Implications for Christian Identity
Veldkamp emphasized the existential threat this persecution poses to Armenian cultural identity: “The Armenian Apostolic Church is 1,700 years old. For most of those 1,700 years, there was no Armenian state. The church held the Armenian nation together. Through centuries of statelessness, dispossession, and even genocide, the church has preserved Armenia’s unique identity as the world’s first Christian nation.”
He warned that Prime Minister Pashinyan “envisions a future where the church has no social or political influence independent of the state,” leaving individual believers with no mediating institution between themselves and government authority.
American Silence amid Crisis
Despite the gravity of these violations, the U.S. State Department and government have remained silent about the attacks on the Church, even as U.S.-Armenia relations reach unprecedented levels of engagement around peace negotiations with Azerbaijan.
Veldkamp warned that the Armenian government’s campaign against the church threatens this engagement. “An Armenia whose vibrant civil society has been pulverized, where people are afraid to speak, where policy is controlled by an increasingly erratic, unaccountable, and unpopular prime minister, will be, at best, a fragile ally of the United States.”
Dr. Veldkamp praised a notable exception to the silence: Dr. Asif Mahmood, co-chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, who in his personal capacity called for the release of the clergy during the National Prayer Breakfast.
“An Armenia with a severely weakened national identity is not an Armenia that is going to be helpful to the U.S. for very long,” Dr. Veldkamp concluded. “If President Trump wants to avoid this outcome, it’s time for the U.S. government to break its silence.”
