Vance and his wife Usha visited the memorial at the end of an official trip to the Armenian capital on February 10. After they laid flowers by its eternal fire dedicated to the victims of the 1915 genocide, Gzoyan escorted them to other parts of the complex, including cross-stones placed in memory of Armenians killed in pogroms in Azerbaijan that followed the outbreak of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
According to an AGMI press release, Gzoyan noted “the connection between those events and the Armenian Genocide.” She went on to present Vance with “books about the Armenian Genocide and the Artsakh issue.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, who stopped using the Armenian name of Karabakh a few years ago, indicated his dissatisfaction with the organization of Vance’s visit to the memorial when he spoke in the Armenian parliament later in February.
“There happened things that should not have happened, but that’s a topic for another conversation,” he said without elaborating.
Gzoyan tendered her resignation aftewards. According to some media outlets, the Armenian government ordered her to step down because of what she told and showed Vance.
Gzoyan has still not publicly commented on her decision which has upset the 74 other employees of the AGMI. They protested against her exit in a joint letter to Pashinian.
“It was the first time in the history of our museum that all employees, without exception, appealed to a higher authority,” Mihran Minasian, an adviser to the AGMI director, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday.
“We expected that our director will on the contrary be rewarded for her good work,” said Suren Manukian, who runs one of the AGMI divisions.
Manukian said he and his colleagues were unofficially informed by the Armenian Ministry of Education, Culture and Youth Affairs, which supervises the AGMI, that Gzoyan was told to quit because of failing to ensure proper oversight of a controversial reconstruction of the genocide memorial that began last summer. He dismissed that explanation as “unserious,” arguing that the reconstruction work is directly overseen by the ministry.
Education Minister Zhanna Andreasian has personally inspected it during her regular visits to the site. Gzoyan no longer accompanied her during those inspections after Vance’s visit.
Andreasian’s ministry on Tuesday declined to give a reason for Gzoyan’s resignation, saying that it will only reply to written questions from RFE/RL’s Armenian Service later on. It also noted that the AGMI’s director is appointed by its board of trustees.
The board’s chairman, French-Armenian genocide scholar Raymond Kevorkian, and several members resigned last week. Pashinian promptly replaced them on March 6.
