Armenian nationalist Hayk Nazaryan, the organizer of a neo-Nazi rally in Yerevan, who disseminates antisemitic cartoons and texts on the Internet, continues to live peacefully and freely in Yerevan. According to our sources and confirmed by Nazaryan’s own blogs, neither he nor his associates in the Hosank radical nationalist movement have been detained, and there is no open investigation being conducted against them.
Nazaryan fervently calls to fight “J*ws”, who, in his opinion, were behind the terrorist attack in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall; he is happy that he resembles Hitler; he is proud of a “hero” who fought in Lebanon together with Palestinian terrorists against Israel. He is not hiding: he posts on social media about his comings and goings. For example, on February 29, he posted a photo of himself at the Aspar Arms gun store in Yerevan, which sells modern 7.62 mm rifles, among other things.
Earlier, on March 9, Nazaryan posted a video from an underground passage in the center of Yerevan. All this could refute the reports that the Nazi and his comrades allegedly left the territory of Armenia, and the law enforcement agencies are allegedly investigating their activities. According to him, he was never even detained.
In an interview with Hraparak on January 13, 2024, Nazaryan himself said that after the neo-Nazi rally under a banner with a styled version of Hitler’s swastika, where participants raised their hands in a Nazi salute, the police only warned him that he should have obtained a permit. “And the next day I found out that you cannot come out with such paraphernalia, and we are now working on changing the colors of the flag…” Later, on January 19, he wrote on his Facebook page: “Despite these small external changes, our radical pro-Armenian ideas, will and approaches will naturally remain the same.” He himself said earlier that “he was warned that such things create problems for Armenia and one should not behave like that.”
“Z**nists are wreaking havoc around the world, causing conflicts and wars in different parts of the globe so that they can profit from this chaos with their world banks and black market weapons for their national programs. The sons of Satan are leading the Aryan tribe to perdition and the planet to destruction to turn our beautiful world into hell on earth because that is where they came from. Hell is in their very nature, so it must be reflected in our reality,” he says on Facebook (translated from Armenian).
Armenia prefers to claim that Azerbaijan is waging a “hybrid war” against their country, and that antisemitic acts (including attempts to set fire to a synagogue in Yerevan) may have been organized by outside forces to discredit Armenians.
But even if we assume that Hayk Nazaryan is a hireling of Baku and conducts his campaigns in the interests of the state with which Yerevan is locked in an armed conflict (negotiations on border demarcation are currently ongoing), this all the more does not explain why his neo-Nazi and antisemitic activities, such as rallies, statements and cartoons, are not being blocked either by the police, the prosecutor’s office or the Armenian authorities. Especially if we remember that the only state that can be definitely delighted with this development is the neighboring Iran, which happens to be quite friendly with Yerevan.
Emil Shleimovich
Translated from Detaly