20 Years of Statehood

In this interview granted exclusively to Nouvelles d'Arménie Magazine, His Holiness Karekin II assesses the spiritual and patriotic renaissance that the Apostolic Church has been experiencing for the last 20 years. While telling us about his vision for the future, he reasserts that the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin has authority over the whole religious institution and confirms the necessity of reinforcing its cohesion on a global scale.

Twenty years have elapsed since Armenia attained independence. Twenty years that often threw back into darkness or cast into oblivion a certain number of personalities and significant events of an extraordinary adventure, characterized by "a frenzied sequence of events" during almost four years, from 1988 to 1991. Here is a recapitulation of what happened, for our collective memory, in the simplest and fairest possible way.

The difficulties the Armenians are encountering presently are not due to independence, but how they dealt with it. Everybody shares the blame, as Armenians have political shortcomings, which is normal, considering the lack of State tradition and the damages domination continues to exert on the collective unconsciousness...

The economy of Armenia, lacking in natural wealth, subjected to a blockade, also suffers from the blur between political power and the power of money, which in turn leads to corruption and emigration.

At the beginning of September 1991, even before Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh proclaimed its independence, which it seized by force of arms in the years that followed, imposing a ceasefire on Azerbaijan in 1994. Twenty years later, while negotiations are continuing between Armenia and Azerbaijan under the aegis of the international community in order to reach sustainable peace, the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh has still not been recognized.