Member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the social-political correspondent for Yerkir Media Gegham Manukyan burned a Turkish paper flag on Freedom Square in Yerevan. He said that this action has a backstory. Manukyan had heard several people criticizing the Turkish flag burning that takes place every year on April 23rd as part of the ARF’s annual torchlight procession. “We burn the Turkish flag as a symbol of protest against the Turkish policy of denial. It seemed, however, that there were campaigns on social media after the flag burning this year. Several people, including a state official, said that burning a flag is a criminal offense that the police needs to deal with. The post was deleted, however,” Gegham Manukyan noted.

He considers such opinions to be false warnings, however, and he emphasized that the burning of the Turkish flag is not meant to be against the Turkish people, as many think, but instead against the policies of denial carried out by the Turkish government. “Fake peaceful-brotherly statements are unnecessary. I would suggest that people who make such statements go read Erdogan’s speech, where he said that they didn’t do enough against Armenians. Unlike those people who promote peace, young 18 year olds who burned flags in 2016 went to Talish as volunteers.”

As far as why some people criticized burning the Turkish flag, Gegham Manukyan said that people have different motivations, whether it be to try and make their lives better with peaceful initiatives, to criticize the ARF, or to seem “modern.”

Luiza Sukiasyan