It has become a custom in Armenia to manipulate LGBT issues before the elections as well as during times of political crisis. Lack of information about sex makes it easy to manipulate and hate speech is more dangerous than ever before in the atmosphere of fear which stems from ignorance.

Many will still remember when some groups of people began to spread fake posters trying to portray cooperation between Pashinyan and the LGBT community to stop the rally of the 100th day anniversary of Nikol Pashinyan’s leadership as Prime Minister.

They even said that supposedly LGBT people will participate in the rally waving their flags.

Of course, this was done taking into consideration the intolerance of the society, assuming that people would not participate in the rally in such a case or vice versa, there would be some among the participants who are different with whom a conflict will begin and the rally would fail.

That is to say, all this has been the subject of discrediting the new government and raising up the former.

Neither the first nor the second took place, the institute of hate speech didn’t work in this case, but it had a negative impact on people from the LGBT community.

The same, but with more resources, is being done right now before the elections.

Colorful posters have appeared in town, where it says homosexuals are with Pashinyan, and a website is placed on the poster. There are several materials on the site that are taken from other sources, and the most interesting part is their partners section.

During the first days, there were a few local organizations and names of individuals here, however it was not difficult to contact them and find out that they had nothing to do with and did not even recognize such an initiative. Pink Armenia and four individuals were included as partners, of which only one was actually an employee of the organization.

Whatever the case, understanding that this information is easy to verify, they quickly deleted the local organizations and individual names, leaving the logos of only four international organizations. However, upon talking to the international organizations, we also found to that they don’t know anything and have nothing to do with that initiative.

Yesterday, the initiative distributed press releases, photos and videos that they would be holding a rally in Yerevan on November 16-17.

It turns out that four foreigners took part in the demonstration, who walked in different parts of the city for a few seconds at a time, took photos with a rainbow flag and posters.

Their message was mainly spread by those media outlets, who have consistently been prominent with the propaganda of hatred.

Moreover, many of them did not find the pictures provided by the initiative to be that attractive, and have changed them in order to make the situation even more harsh.

In the initial version of the message, it noted that the demonstration had been organized by activists from Poland, Bulgaria and the Ukraine, and the media which already propagates hatred used a picture of Armenian activists, as that might raise a larger wave of hatred than photos of four unfamiliar foreigners.

It turns out that this is another game between political parties, and they have again chosen LGBT issues as a scapegoat. As a result of this game, individuals suffer and become victims of hatred as they are targeted both in social media and in real life.  

In this regard, Pink Armenia has also issued a statement.

Mamikon Hovsepyan
Executive Director of Pink Armenia

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.