French President Macron expressed support for Armenian Premier Pashinyan. www.primeminister.am
CSI statement
CSI calls for release of imprisoned archbishops and respect for separation of church and state
On June 29 French President Emmanuel Macron assured Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of his “solidarity” as he intensifies a wave of arrests and other coercive measures against the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Macron made this statement in an Armenian-language post on his X account. In the same post, he expressed his support for “democracy,” “peace” and “open borders.”
The French president’s statement amounts to public support for Pashinyan’s use of instruments of state power against the national church, which has a historic and constitutional function as the spiritual guardian of the Armenian nation in public life.
Among those arrested in a broad anti-opposition dragnet operation are Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan and Archbishop Mikayel Ajapahyan. They are charged with plotting to violently overthrow the government.
The Armenian prime minister has insisted on the removal of the Catholicos and has pledged to set up a government-backed committee to choose his replacement.
“If he does not leave voluntarily, the faithful flock of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church will remove him, in a Christian manner,” the prime minister warned in a social media post. A deputy chairman of Pashinyan’s political party, Vahagan Aleksanyan, was more direct, accusing the Church’s leadership of “supporting the terrorists” and demanding that the Catholicos be “thrown out” of office.
Among the others arrested was David Galstanyan, an elected representative of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh. The 120,000 Armenian Christians of that region were forcibly displaced by Azerbaijan in September 2023 following a nine-month blockade.
Political differences between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the prime minister revolve largely around the fate of the ethnically and religiously cleansed Karabakhi community.
The current wave of anti-church propaganda and arrests was triggered by the Catholicos’s participation in a conference held by the World Council of Churches in Switzerland at the end of May, where he pled for the preservation of the Armenian Christian heritage of Nagorno Karabakh and the right of the displaced to return to their homes in safety.
Azerbaijan and Turkey insist that Armenia must drop such public advocacy actions regarding Nagorno Karabakh as a condition of peace with Armenia.
Yesterday, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign minister, met with senior government officials in Yerevan to discuss Armenia’s track to membership of the EU. She made no public reference to the arrest of the archbishops and members of the political opposition.
Christian Solidarity International (CSI) urges the Armenian authorities to release the incarcerated archbishops and all other political prisoners, and to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the Armenian Apostolic Church. CSI furthermore calls on France and all EU member states to stand in solidarity with victims of repression as opposed to perpetrators of repression.
