The interior of Haghpat Monastery Church displaying ancient frescoes and religious iconography. Haghpat is one of the four monasteries of the Armenian Apostolic Church. (Photo: Getty/iStock)
Grey bearded, lively eyed and cassocked, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan of the Armenian Apostolic Church cuts a larger-than-life figure.
Two years ago, he was leading tens of thousands on a 90-mile peaceful march on Yerevan the capital of Armenia.
He was in prison when I saw him just days before Vice-President JD Vance’s visit to Armenia and Azerbaijan.
For the past half year, Archbishop Bagrat has been incarcerated on the orders of Armenia’s increasingly authoritarian, pro-Turkish prime minister Nikol Pashinyan.
Following arrest on trumped up charges of “terrorism”, Bagrat was locked up in the same detention centre where the Soviet secret police executed his episcopal namesake and role model – Archbishop Bagrat Vardazarian – in Stalin’s “Great Purge” of 1937.
Pashinyan now conducts his own political purge of prominent bishops. While so far bloodless, his anti-Church campaign borrows heavily from the old Bolshevik playbook for religious persecution.
Archbishop Bagrat is just one of over a dozen prominent clerics now behind bars, under house arrest, or indicted on a sleuth of unsubstantiated charges ranging from terrorism to planting drugs.
The heavy-handed prime minister demands the ouster of the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Catholicos Karekin II.
The Catholicos too is accused by Pashinyan, without any evidence, of being a threat to national security. His other vulgar smears are not fit for print by any serious organisation.
Donning a counterfeit cassock, the prime minister placed himself at the head of an uncanonical committee to direct a “reform” of the church.
The Church Pashinyan wants to control has parishes here in the UK and around the world.
The wealthiest patron of the Church, the businessman Samvel Karapetyan, is among Pashinyan’s political prisoners. The Armenian state has nationalized communist-style his business empire as further punishment.
So, what’s going on in the world’s oldest Christian nation, a free post-Soviet republic, a member of the European Council, an EU aspirant and a “Strategic Partner” of the UK? Why the democratic backsliding and the persecution?
Attacks on Christian and other religious institutions are rarely isolated events. They are usually indicators of bigger civilisational struggles. In the case of Armenia, it’s very similar to the rest of Europe.
In a letter from prison to Vance, Archbishop Bagrat agrees with the Vice-President about Europe pursuing “civilizational suicide”, and says Armenia is doing likewise.
The tiny Republic of Armenia was established to serve as a secure homeland for the victims of the great Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey (1915-1918) and subsequent massacres and other mass atrocity crimes.
The most recent of these horrors took place less than three years ago. Azerbaijan, militarily and politically supported by Islamist Turkey, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and jihadists from Syria, then completed the ethno-religious cleansing of 150,000 Armenian Christians from the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh.
This catastrophe for the Armenian nation and its church provided the impetus for Archbishop Bagrat’s march on Yerevan. His goal was to save Armenia’s endangered Christian civilization.
The constellation of powers that produced the eradication of the Armenian Christian presence in Nagorno Karabakh now have their sights on the Republic of Armenia itself.
Azerbaijan’s oil rich dictator Ilham Aliyev openly lays claim to. He calls its “Western Azerbaijan” and boasts that that this conquest and planned colonization will be undertaken by civilian vehicles or, failing that, by tanks.
Azerbaijan and its “one Islamic nation, four state” condominium partners have identified the steep price of peace for Armenia: surrender of its sovereignty, political and economic atomization and integration into that Islamic condominium.
Among their demands is an Armenian Apostolic Church incapable of fulfilling its historic role as the bastion of the Christian Armenian nation – a spiritual fortress that has withstood centuries of persecution by Ottoman Turkey and then decades of persecution by communist Russia.
The authoritarian Islamist “brotherhood” of Erdogan, Aliyev, al-Scharra and Sherif, claims the Armenian Apostolic Church is an “obstacle” to peace. They threaten war against Armenia if the impediment is not removed.
Pashinyan’s response to this aggression is appeasement. Faced with the combined military might of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Syria and Pakistan. The Armenian prime minister yields to demand after demand. Armenia’s Christian civilization is existentially threatened.
This grim reality is known at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FDOC). But Yvette Cooper and ministerial colleagues in the UK and abroad remain tight-lipped, despite selectively posing as defenders of democracy, human rights and religious freedom in other contexts.
From his prison cell, Archbishop Bagrat explains why Western governments turn a blind eye to the persecution of Armenia’s national church: “They deceive themselves into believing they are protecting their economic and geopolitical interest.”
It was not supposed to be this way. In 2019, prime minister Boris Johnson pledged to “provide protection for vulnerable Christian communities”, and to place this duty “at the heart of the priorities of UK Foreign Policy”. It never happened.
As the UK faces its own mounting civilizational challenges, the sooner His Majesty’s Government ceases to appease powers intent on the deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian civilization we share with Armenia, the more secure the British Isles will be.
This civilization and the religious freedom that uphold it are the strength and security of the UK no less than Armenia. British prime ministers from Churchill to Thatcher understood this truth.
Let Yvette Cooper and the FDOC start by securing the release of Archbishop Bagrat, his imprisoned clerical colleagues and Samvel Karapetyan.
John Eibner is President of Christian Solidarity International (CSI).
