Pashinyan on the circumstances of the Karabakh war
The Prime Minister of Armenia participated in a meeting of the parliamentary commission investigating the circumstances of the Karabakh war in 2020 and made a detailed report. In his speech, which lasted more than three hours, Nikol Pashinyan touched not only on the course of the war and the circumstances of the signing of the November statement on the cessation of hostilities, but also on the history of the negotiation process in the Karabakh conflict.
The meeting of the commission will continue on June 27, and its members will have the opportunity to get answers to their questions from the prime minister himself. Pashinyan promised to answer all questions live, except for those that would contain state secrets. The deputies will receive all the information during closed hearings.
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Pashinyan has never said before that in order to end the 44-day war in Karabakh, Russia offered to deploy peacekeepers in the Armenian city of Meghri and around it. They were supposed to provide a connection between the western regions of Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan.
“I did not agree to this. I did not agree to the creation of a layer not controlled by the Republic of Armenia, that is, the creation of a corridor through the territory of Armenia. My position has not changed: roads should be open, but they should remain under the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Armenia,” Pashinyan said.
The prime minister recalled the document on the exchange of territories between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which, in the context of the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, could have been signed during the 1999 Istanbul summit. He announced that Armenian Parliament Speaker Karen Demirchyan and Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan “prevented” the implementation of this project at the cost of their lives.
Pashinyan is referring to the terrorist attack on October 27, 1999, when an armed group entered the parliament building and shot deputies and members of the government. He talks about one of the unofficial versions of the causes of the attack. Many believed that it was organized by the secret services of countries that have their own interests in the region — Russia and the United States.
The theory was based on the fact that in November 1999 an OSCE summit was to be held in Istanbul, where the heads of Armenia and Azerbaijan could sign some document. It was about the mediators’ proposal for a territorial exchange: Azerbaijan ceded to Armenia the Lachin corridor connecting it with Nagorno-Karabakh, and in return received part of the territory of the Meghri region, that is, the same corridor to Nakhichevan. This option was considered unacceptable by many Armenian politicians, including Vazgen Sargsyan and Karen Demirchyan. After the terrorist act in the Armenian parliament, the documents were not signed.
“This document actually records the death of the fundamental ideas of the Armenian side about the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem,” he said.
Pashinyan said that although the document has not gotten legal force, proposals of such content continue to appear at the negotiating table.
The prime minister believes that the document on the exchange of Meghri for Nagorno-Karabakh had nothing to do with the right to self-determination and violated the principle of the territorial integrity of both Armenia and Azerbaijan:
“This is nothing but an act of recognizing Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. Otherwise it is impossible to formulate. If you give away part of your territory in order to get Karabakh from Azerbaijan, then this means that you recognize Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, and you put your own territory up for auction.”
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In 2018, Pashinyan announced that he would start negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict anew, from scratch. He now explained that as of May 2018, he had two options to avoid it:
- “Azerbaijan should have actually recognized the interim status of Nagorno-Karabakh according to the logic of the Kazan document. It couldn’t be. Why did Azerbaijan have to accept what it rejected 7 years ago, and for the sake of which it started the April four-day war [2016]?”
- “I had to not only recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, but also agree to the status quo established around Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, and also to dismantle the existing status quo within Nagorno-Karabakh itself. It is impossible to imagine, even if we evaluate the situation from today’s point of view.
The prime minister assumes that for Armenia, the statement of the OSCE chairman made back in December 1996 may be news: “The legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh should be determined on the basis of the right to self-determination, which will give it a high status of autonomy within Azerbaijan.”
Pashinyan recalls that hostilities ceased on November 9, and the fall of Shushi played a pivotal role. He said that he has in mind the strategic role of the city, and not the symbolic one:
“After the loss of Shushi, Stepanakert, in fact, would be under attack, pressure on Martuni would inevitably increase, and most importantly, 25,000 of our soldiers would be under the threat of encirclement.”
According to the prime minister, the November announcement was the fifth attempt to stop the war.
He presented to the parliamentary commission details of the attempts and details from conversations with Vladimir Putin. Initially, the Azerbaijani side presented the following preconditions for a ceasefire:
- “Surrender of Fuzuli without a fight,
- the retreat of the Armenian forces along the Araks to the Khodaferi reservoir so that the reservoir would be under the control of Azerbaijan,
- return of Azerbaijanis Guliyev and Askerov, who are serving sentences for murders and kidnappings in Karabakh, with the possibility of returning captured Armenians.”
These conditions were unacceptable for the Armenian side. In addition, according to Pashinyan, Baku did not link the fulfillment of these requirements with the cessation of hostilities, but only promised “a humanitarian truce to organize the funeral of the dead.”
Several attempts at a truce were unsuccessful. Baku not only did not support the ceasefire, but also intensified “its offensive actions, inflicting missile strikes on Stepanakert, Martakert, attacking Hadrut.”
Pashinyan says that along with attempts to prevent attacks, Armenia also made diplomatic efforts:
“The issue of deploying Russian military observers on both sides of the line of contact was considered, who would monitor the situation and record violations of the ceasefire. However, Azerbaijan constantly shied away from such a decision and conducted more intense hostilities.”
Russian media, citing a “diplomatic source”, reported that Washington is forcing representatives of Nagorno-Karabakh to agree to a meeting with the Azerbaijani side.
According to Pashinyan, 20 out of 60 telephone conversations with Putin during this period took place on November 8 and 9, when the text of the tripartite statement was discussed. He agreed to start these negotiations on the condition that the document does not contain provisions regarding Shushi and the corridor through the territory of Armenia. For his part, he offered to return the Aghdam region instead of the Hadrut region.
Pashinyan said that he signed the statement on the morning of November 9, but Azerbaijan refused to sign this version of the document and put forward new demands.
“The culmination of the process was the evening of November 9, when it became clear that Azerbaijan was making new additions to the agreed document. This meant that the text I had signed in the morning was no longer valid.”
According to him, Azerbaijan did not accept the proposal of Aghdam instead of Hadrut, there was no mention of Shushi and the creation of a corridor through the territory of Armenia in the text. It was only about the cessation of hostilities, the return of 7 regions around NK, the creation of the Lachin corridor and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers here and in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“But at the moment when the President of the Russian Federation said that Azerbaijan was proposing to add a clause on the return of enclaves in the Tavush region to the text, I stated that I ruled out the possibility of signing such a document,” Pashinyan said.
After some time, the parties managed to agree on removing the clause on enclaves from the document. It was signed, according to the Armenian prime minister, after “difficult, lengthy” discussions, in parallel with reports “about the intensification of hostilities and the accumulation of a large number of drones in the sky over Stepanakert.”
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What needs to be done to reach a truce and stop the war? For the first time, Pashinyan addressed this issue with the President of Russia on October 13. Putin said that “one can try to talk about ending the war in exchange for the return of 5 regions” around NK, which were under the control of Armenia after the first Karabakh war. A few days later, on October 19, in a telephone conversation, the Russian president confirmed that the war could be stopped according to the Russian plan developed many years ago.
“And the condition is as follows: 7 regions are returned in the 5 + 2 format, the issue of NK-Armenia communication through the Lachin corridor is being resolved, Russian peacekeepers are deployed in Karabakh, the status issue remains unresolved, it is postponed for an indefinite future,” Pashinyan said.
The Prime Minister of Armenia agreed, but the Azerbaijani side stated that it expected to receive all 7 regions at once.
According to an official statement from the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the Armenian-Azerbaijani talks scheduled for June 12 in Washington were postponed “at the request of the Azerbaijani side.”
The Prime Minister says that on October 19 he learned from the President of Russia about another condition from Baku. It was about guarantees for the return of Azerbaijani refugees to Shushi, who “accounted for 90 percent of the population of Shushi without any restriction on further increase.”
Baku also proposed the construction of a new road for the unhindered movement of Azerbaijanis:
“According to the proposal, all Azerbaijanis should have direct and unhindered access to Shushi, and not just those living in Shushi. For example, 50,000 Azerbaijanis could come to those living in Shushi, there could not be any restrictions. And they could stay.”
Pashinyan did not accept the offer. He says he was worried that the Lachin corridor would not operate, Azerbaijan could close it at any moment, because Shushi would not enter the Lachin corridor, and it would pass a few meters from Shushi. He believes that “recent events”, that is, the blocking of the Lachin corridor, proved him right.
As for the “fall of Shushi”, Pashinyan expects that the circumstances of the loss of the city should be clarified in the framework of the initiated criminal cases. He emphasizes that all his instructions concerned the strengthening of Shushi and the organization of the defense of the city. And he received assurances that he would stand. Contradictory information came from the President of Nagorno-Karabakh and from the General Staff of the Armed Forces.
“Before signing the tripartite statement, I was also informed that a part of Shushi was under the control of the NK Defense Army,” he said.
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Pashinyan also touched upon the former leaders of Armenia. He mentioned the article of the first President Levon Ter-Petrosyan “War or Peace? Time to think”, which talked about the need for compromises:
“To briefly formulate what Ter-Petrosyan said, it will turn out: it is impossible to maintain the status quo for a long time, let’s not engage in self-deception and cherish vain hopes, we have no allies on the issue of the independence of Karabakh.”
He stressed that Ter-Petrosyan does not give a clear and literal answer to the question of what status Nagorno-Karabakh will eventually have, whether it will be independent, whether it will be part of Armenia or Azerbaijan. According to him, this article has become “another factor aggravating the confusion in the Karabakh issue.”
According to the prime minister, the second president, Robert Kocharyan, deprived Nagorno-Karabakh of “any independence”, excluding Karabakh from the negotiations:
“Moreover, he deprived Nagorno-Karabakh of the only internationally recognized status, which made it possible to sit at the same table with representatives of Russia, the United States, France, Azerbaijan and Armenia. This, in fact, was the end of the international subjectivity of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
He also criticized third President Serzh Sargsyan, recalling his team’s “dubious slogan” that “bad negotiations are better than the best war”:
“The worst negotiations gave Azerbaijan time to prepare for the best war for it. With this slogan, they tied Armenia hand and foot, so that Armenia and Karabakh at some point X would be in a hopeless situation.”
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