Zareh Sinanyan, the High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs and Armenian Genocide denier, will visit South America
Diaries Armenia
The High Commissioner for Diaspora, Zareh Sinanyan, will visit the Armenian communities in South America during the next few days of November. His arrival comes months after he repeatedly denied the Armenian Genocide.
During his stay in Argentina, from November 6 to 12, Sinanyan will visit the city of Cordoba and will receive representatives of some Armenian organizations in Buenos Aires at the Armenian Embassy. ARF-Tashnagtsoutioun, Armenian Society and Homenetmen announced that they will not participate in the reception “in order not to legitimize a person who is absolutely unworthy of occupying that position,” they said.
In April 2024, Sinanyan supported the unusual proposal of the ruling party MP Andranik Kocharyan to “have the names of all Armenians subjected to genocide and to verify where, how and under what conditions they were killed.” “I really like what Mr. Kocharyan said because this is actually the beginning of a much more scientific and objective conduct of the debate on genocide and a deeper recognition process,” was Sinanyan’s statement in line with the denialist arguments of the Turkish state.
In another surprising statement in April 2022, the High Commissioner for Diaspora questioned the various recognitions of the Armenian Genocide. “What do we gain from the international recognition of the genocide? When we look at the 44-day war in 2020, I did not see what additional value the international recognition of the genocide gave to Armenia,” he said.
“There is no place for denialism here, and even less so if it is an Armenian official or leader,” Hagop Tabakian, representative of the FRA-Tashnagtsoutioun of South America, told Diario ARMENIA. “No one who has grown up and lived understanding what the struggle for recognition and the genocide perpetrated by the Turkish state has cost the generations that preceded us, and ourselves, can, by protocol or by good manners, receive a denialist.”
Vahagn Melikyan, former ambassador to Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay and former Secretary General of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, also harshly criticized Zareh Sinanyan this year. “They brought in a person who believes he understands the Armenian diaspora deeply, knows everything about it… But what he knows well is the art of dividing it. Living there, mastering the fine threads that bind people and structures, he has mastered the art of cutting them, tearing them apart.”
In the same vein, the Coordinating Council of Armenian Organizations in France (CCAF),which brings together dozens of community organizations rejected Sinanyan’s visit in February 2022 and denounced that “the High Commissioner of the Diaspora went to France to divide and weaken the Armenian community by promoting small groups that act as an alternative to the CCAF.”
