Pashinyan Mixes Up Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Then Dismisses Protocol Chief

In diplomacy, there are a few golden rules: shake hands firmly, don't trip on the red carpet, and above all, know which country your guest is president of.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stumbled on rule number three this weekend. Two days later, on Monday, Oct. 19, his chief of protocol was out of a job.

Gagik Vanoyan, who had run the government's protocol service for nearly four years, was dismissed with no public explanation. Officially, nobody has said the two events are connected. Unofficially, the timing is doing a lot of talking.

On Saturday, Pashinyan stood beside Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov at a joint press appearance in Yerevan. Japarov was in town for bilateral talks and the United Nations COP17 biodiversity conference.

Reading from a prepared statement, Pashinyan warmly welcomed Japarov as the president of Kazakhstan.

Japarov is the president of Kyrgyzstan.

Making matters more awkward, Kazakhstan's actual president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, was also in Yerevan for the same conference, alongside a lineup of other world leaders. That made it less a simple mix-up and more a case of mistaken identity with both suspects in the building.

The firing, which came while Armenia is hosting hundreds of international delegates, drew criticism from Vahagn Melikian, a former senior diplomat who led the protocol service from 2000 to 2006.

"Even if any mistakes are made, they usually wait until an official event is over and then try to understand what the problem was," Melikian told RFE/RL's Armenian Service. Translation: you don't fire the stage manager in the middle of the show.

Melikian, a longtime Pashinyan critic, argued that experienced diplomats have been repeatedly pushed out of government during the prime minister's eight years in office. "So who is to blame: the diplomats themselves or the person who dismissed them and who has no clue about protocol?" he asked.

But Vanoyan didn't escape Melikian's critique either. The veteran diplomat said someone without a professional diplomatic background should never have been put in charge of protocol to begin with.

So who wrote "Kazakhstan"?

That remains the million-dram question. The government hasn't said whether Vanoyan was blamed for the error or whether other factors led to his exit.

What is clear: somewhere in Yerevan, a lot of staffers are now triple-checking their maps of Central Asia.

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