Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan reiterated on Friday that his administration had secured peace for Armenia for the first time since the country’s independence.
He dismissed accusations voiced by some opposition figures claiming that Armenia had peace before 2018, when he came to power, and that his administration’s actions led the country to war in 2020.
Pashinyan, speaking on the first day of the official campaign period for his Civil Contract party, said that Armenia had never had peace before.
“We had war, because every year we had casualties and wounded soldiers. Where have you seen peace in a place where soldiers are being killed and injured? We did not have peace; we had a continuous war and a constant postponement of the war’s escalation, and the deadline of that postponement was signaled by the April 2016 war. But it is also very important that the April war was preceded by a completely new package of proposals for the settlement of the Karabakh issue, which is now known to all of us and has been published,” he said.
According to him, the framework for resolving the Karabakh issue had already been defined at the 1996 Lisbon Summit, and the Karabakh issue had effectively been resolved back then. This entire delay and postponement, he said, was aimed at one thing: resolving the “Armenia issue” — meaning the elimination of Armenian statehood.
“And this is exactly what we understood, and we understood very quickly that Armenia was in a trap, and our task was to pull Armenia out of that trap. At the cost of our casualties and sacrifices, we have pulled Armenia out of that trap, and this is the most important thing. Those who say the sacrifices were in vain do not understand this — that Armenia’s statehood was saved from the trap,” Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said the scenario his administration faced in 2018 was one in which the Republic of Armenia, as a sovereign state, was meant to cease to exist and, at best, become a “banana republic” that would need permission from various places even to “breathe in and out.”
“Now the time has come for us to defend the Armenia we have today,” Pashinyan said.
Published by Armenpress, original at
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