Մատչելիության հղումներ

Armenia Marks 100th Anniversary Of Its First Republic


Armenia - Armenian soldiers march at the Sardarapat war memorial in a military parade dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the first Armenian republic, 28 May 2018.
Armenia - Armenian soldiers march at the Sardarapat war memorial in a military parade dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the first Armenian republic, 28 May 2018.

Armenia marked on Monday the 100th anniversary of the proclamation of the country’s first independent republic that followed centuries of foreign rule.

The short-lived republic was officially set up on March 28, 1918 as Armenian army and militia units prevented Ottoman forces from occupying Yerevan and the rest of modern-day Armenia.

The decisive battle was fought from May 22-29, 1918 around Sardarapat, a village about 50 kilometers west of Yerevan. Turkish forces were defeated there and pushed back from the capital of what was the first sovereign Armenian state in more than four centuries.

A war memorial built near Sardarapat in the late 1960s was therefore the scene of the main official ceremonies to mark the independence centenary. Hundreds of soldiers, some of them clad in First World War-era uniforms, as well as gray-haired veterans of the 1991-19914 war with Azerbaijan marched there in a military parade watched by President Armen Sarkissian and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.

The parade also featured tributes to hundreds of thousands of Armenians who fought, mostly as Soviet Red Army soldiers, against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Troops from the Russian military base in Armenia also participated in it.

“For the first time in their history, the Armenian people were citizens, rather than subjects, masters, rather than servants, and that was a fateful turnaround,” Pashinian said in a speech that preceded the parade.

Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian speaks at the Sardarapat war memorial, 28 May 2018.
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian speaks at the Sardarapat war memorial, 28 May 2018.

Pashinian noted that the military victory at Sardarapat was achieved only three years after the beginning of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey which put the Armenian nation “on the verge of extinction.”

“From the standpoint of pragmatism and rational calculation, the Armenian people stood no chance to win,” he said. “But we won because we realized that our essence is not to be herded to deserts and massacred … The Armenian people won because for the first time in 400 years they pinned their hopes on themselves, rather than others.”

The first Republic of Armenian was governed by leading members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) throughout its two-and-a-half-year existence. Its last government was forced to hand over power to representatives of Bolshevik Russia in December 1920 nearly three months after another Turkish invasion of Armenia.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern-day Turkey, was supported by Soviet Russia at the time. By contrast, the first Armenian republic was allied to Britain and other Triple Entente powers.

“Only thanks to the existence of the First Republic was Armenia incorporated into the Soviet Union as a full-fledged union republic,” said Pashinian. “And only thanks to this status did Armenia manage to secede from the Soviet Union without upheavals and to gain the status of an internationally recognized independent country.”

Facebook Forum

XS
SM
MD
LG