“Don’t Play Favorites in Armenia!” ANCA’s Aram Hamparian Slams U.S. VP Over Election Meddling and a Deleted Genocide Tweet
During his visit to Armenia, the U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance expressed his support for Nikol Pashinyan ahead of the upcoming elections in Armenia.
Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) believes that Vice President Vance should not be endorsing a candidate: “He should be respecting Armenia’s democratic system, engaging in American politics here, but leaving Armenian politics to the Armenian people.”
During the interview with 168.am, Hamparian said that there were six very clear expectations, which they communicated to the vice president, and unfortunately, now that he’s departed, we see that none of those six were met: “Number one, he should have met with Artsakh refugees, that would have been the proper thing to do. Number two, visit with the families of the Armenians being held hostage in Azerbaijan. Meet with opposition political parties, not just the single party that runs the country. He should have visited the Armenian Apostolic Archbishops who are imprisoned in Yerevan, and taken a trip to Holy Etchmiadzin to visit with the Katholikos as a sign of his shared faith, Christian faith. And finally, he should have recognized the Armenian genocide. And it seemed for about 10 minutes there, he did that in a tweet, but then inexplicably deleted his tweet, which I think drew vastly more attention to this matter than it would have otherwise. It’s humiliating, almost embarrassing, to see our vice president speak honestly, forthrightly, courageously about a war crime, a genocide, an act of ethnic cleansing, and then have to roll it back, clearly under pressure. Whether that pressure was internal or external, it really doesn’t matter. The fact that our vice president had to roll back a principal stand that he took is kind of beneath the office…”
He noted that this really speaks to something very serious: “The United States is speaking to Armenia about security guarantees and about the willingness, the resolve of the United States to stand up, to check Azeri aggression. Well, here we are. That is tested, not at the level of security but simply at the level of semantics of word choice, of descriptions of an event that happened more than a century ago. And we see that the sort of the resolve of our government sort of collapses, even at the level of word choice under foreign pressure, which raises a lot of concerns about how serious those security guarantees are.”
Answering to the question about whether we will see the US involvement in Armenian upcoming elections after Vence’s statements, he said that everything points to the United States continuing to play favorites in Armenia: “And that’s not good for America. It’s not good for Armenia. It’s certainly not fair to the Armenian people. A lot of the funding, for example, that has gone from the US to Armenia, very often, people get very excited about this instance.
They see it perhaps as something that might strengthen schools or build roads and bridges and infrastructure, things of that sort. The fact of the matter is a lot of it has gone to the police, has gone to a riot control, has gone to interior ministry forces, uh basically population control, which is a scary proposition. We should not be meddling in uh Arminia’s elections or frankly arming the Armenian government to deal with a civil unrest that might result from them rigging these elections. So it’s really not fair. And in the same way that I, as an American, resent other countries interfering in our democracy, we should not be interfering in any other country’s democracy.”
By Razmik Martirosyan
