Former NKR Foreign Minister Arman Melikyan considers the pre-electoral process a vulgar struggle for a chair.
– The more we get closer to one year of the four-day war in April, the more Azerbaijan intensifies its actions on the border. Recently, they have begun to use large-caliber weapons and subversive acts have become frequent. Are these PR actions to keep the Armenian side in terror and horror, or Azerbaijan is preparing new adventurism?
– The tactics of keeping the situation heated in the frontline are the harmonious and integral part of Azerbaijan’s overall political line. Now, add frequency to the escalations, temporarily an additional factor has emerged: the upcoming RA parliamentary elections. The point is that for official Baku it is important for the political forces which in principle are in favor of handing over the one-second of the current territories of Artsakh to the opponent constitute the significant majority in our parliament, and granting a privilege of foreign peacekeepers’ access to the region instead of expecting reconciliation and lasting peace. The number of such political forces today are rightfully the ruling RPA party and the opposition ANC: they are campaigning the idea of land-giving.
– Armenia is conducting fixation and modernizing activities on the borders with modern technologies. Is this the sufficient conclusion that the Armenian side should have drawn from the short-term war one year ago? Are there are any other visible steps?
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– The RA authorities are trying to find solutions in the frontline while they must first of all be sought in the political sphere. Azerbaijan’s military activeness is the effective composite of its policy, and as long as we are able to neutralize the enemy’s ambitions in the political level, we will continue to have unjustified losses on the battlefield. This problem can be solved but our officials judging by their conduct do not pursue such a goal and even a desire.
– Can we state that the political process on the peaceful settlement of the Karabakh conflict will not come out of the impasse in the visible future, although the co-chairs are trying to organize meetings at least at the ministerial level?
– The question has reached an impasse for us. Azerbaijan is consistently increasing its political, diplomatic and military pressure, and it is a progress for Azerbaijan to ensure a positive shift in all the three directions.
– Pertaining to the incident with blogger Alexander Lapshin which received a stormy reaction in Armenia. The political forces and politicians voiced even extreme proposals: to break the diplomatic relations with Belarus, to withdraw from the EaEU, and so on. Was the uproar raised in Armenia equivalent to what happened, or it was a good opportunity to be expressed? Did official Yerevan not have levers or actions which it could use but did not?
– This uproar was simply an evidence of our powerlessness. We have put ourselves in this situation that neither official Yerevan is able to fully protect the interests of Artsakh nor Stepanakert deprived of its formerly political independence is able to demonstrate itself as a truly sovereign state. Event twenty-five years after the declaration of independence, it does not have a full law on citizenship. In other words, it does not have full citizens nor approved stable borders. Accordingly, now Artsakh is just a territory inhabited by some people and having an indefinite state description which is recognized by the international community as part of Azerbaijan. Apart from us, for all the rest Lapshin has illegally violated the Azerbaijani state border, and to bring a criminal prosecution against him is the right of sovereign Azerbaijan.
– Was Russia’s and Israel’s reaction whose citizen is the blogger adequate to the incident, meaning the level of Russian-Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan-Israel relations? Can these relationships still be reconsidered although already voiced official positions?
– The story associated with Lapshin does not have the real potential to influence on Russian-Azerbaijani or Israeli-Azerbaijani intergovernmental relations.
– Can the incident happen to Lapshin lead to a chain reaction and create problems for the Armenian states in the world as many predict?
– With the help of Lapshin’s successful extradition, Azerbaijan created a legal-political precedent which can begin a real manhunt against the relatives of Artsakh being a citizen of different states in the world. It can be said that the incident is a successful start of the process of state intimidation by official Baku to former visitors and future possible tourists of Artsakh.
– Have you received an offer to cooperate in the context of elections? In general, how would you assess the internal political-electoral processes?
– I have not received offers and I have not made any initiative on my side in this direction. The pre-election campaigns so far leave an impression of a vulgar struggle for the chair. Theoretically, I consider my cooperation possible with the political force which will present a fundamental alternative to the land-giving ideology in the Parliament. I can take the professional formulation of alternative approaches and the preparation of the methodology to use it on myself. To ensure the solution of this problem, some and comparatively secondary class circumstances can be ignored.
