Alexander Minasyan: Army education should be given serious attention

PanARMENIAN.Net -
Armenia must have a strong Army, as due to its geopolitical situation the country will always be under Pan- Turkism threat, the former head of Military Institute at RA Defence Ministry Alexander Minasyan said.



As he told a news conference in Yerevan, serious attention should be given to army education and forming of pro- government mentality of future Armenian soldiers.



Pan-Turkism is a political movement started more than 100 years ago aiming to unite the various Turkic peoples into a modern political state.



In the research literature, the term "Pan-Turkism" is used to describe the idea of political, cultural and ethnic unity of all Turkic-speaking people. Turanism is a closely related movement but a more general term than Turkism, since Turkism applies only to the Turkic peoples. However, researchers and politicians engaged in the field of Turkic ideology have used these terms interchangeably in a multitude of sources and literature. The term "Turkism" started to be used with a prefix "Pan" (from Greek pan = all), for a "Panturkism".



While the various Turkic peoples often share historical, cultural and linguistic roots, the rising of a pan-Turkic political movement is a phenomenon only of the 19th and 20th century [7] and can be seen in parallel with European developments like Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism or with Middle-Eastern Pan-Iranism. Proponents use the latter most often as a point of comparison as the concept of "Turkic" is not a true racial or ethnic description but more of a linguistic and cultural distinction. This is to differentiate it from the term "Turkish" which is more of an ethnic/racial term for the citizens and denizens primarily residing in Turkey. Pan-Turkic ideas and "re-unification" movements have been popular since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asian and other Turkic countries.



Pan-Turkism is and has always been a movement viewed with suspicion by many, often perceived as nothing else but a new form of Turkish imperial ambition. Some view the movement as racist and chauvinistic, particularly when considering the associated racial and historical teachings. Specifically, the young Turks who carried pan-Turkist ideologies as their guiding principle are accused of the Armenian Genocide, Greek genocide and Assyrian Genocide.