IS THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MUSEUM-INSTITUTE’S FUTURE ENDANGERED?

The dismissal of Edita Gzoyan as the director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan is a disturbing development and cause for deep concern. Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, only after a week or two of equivocal versions circulating in the news, said he asked for her resignation because she allegedly gave U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance a book about “the Artsakh issue.” 

Even leaving aside other considerations, the book the Prime Minister inaccurately refers to as related to “the Artsakh issue” was a compilation of reports in the American press about anti-Armenian atrocities perpetrated by the Tatars in the early 20th century published in 2020. The volume, “Azeri Aggression Against Armenians in Transcaucasia: Reports from the U.S. Press (1905-1921),” by Ara Ketibian, does include a preface by the author, who offers readers an update about the latest developments in Artsakh following the 44-Day War of 2020. 

The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute’s raison d’être, according to the mission statement published on the institutional website, is “preserving the memory and legacy of the Armenian Genocide.” During Dr. Gzoyan’s short yet prolific tenure, the Museum-Institute excelled across the board. It attained scholarly milestones that may not be well-known to the lay public but which carry great heft in academia and contribute immensely to advancing recognition of the Armenian Genocide in the face of obstinate denial by Turkey—the very perpetrator—and Azerbaijan. As she had done on the dozens of previous official occasions, during Vice President Vance’s visit Dr. Gzoyan led him and his wife to the eternal flame and later to a row of three khachkars erected in memory of the victims of the anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan in 1988-1990. She followed the established routine. Not a political official, Dr. Gzoyan is a distinguished scholar with a doctoral degree in History, with some sixty scholarly works to her name and she had hosted more than a hundred such visits, perhaps with not as much media exposure as the U.S. Vice President would attract.  

This leaves us with disturbing questions about what is in store for future directors of the only Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in the world (as opposed to more than seventy dedicated to the Holocaust). The intimidating nature of this dismissal and the verbiage used to justify it will surely compromise the academic freedom the AGMI director must enjoy in the pursuit of the very goals the institution exists for, inducing the director to self-censorship, as was the norm in Soviet times. We call on the Armenian Government to reverse this ill-thought decision that represents a huge blow to the decades of devoted work by scholars and Armenian communities all over the world towards the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, reinstate Dr. Gzoyan in her position, and explicitly ratify the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute’s mission and the academic freedom of its staff from the director down.