The 2rd.am website that belongs to Robert Kocharyan, the Second President of Armenia, responded to the statement of the First President of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan. We present the complete response. “Today, former President Levon Ter-Petrosyan made a statement in which he gave different assessments to former Minister of Defense of Armenia Vigen Sargsyan’s recent ideas on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlemLevon ent.
At the end of the statement, he repeated his traditional fraud that as a result of Robert Kocharyan’s mistake, the Nagorno Karabakh was left out of the negotiation table. Let us remind that Viktor Soghomonyan, Head of the Office of the Second President of the Republic of Armenia, has repeatedly made statements on this topic and proved that Ter-Petrosyan and his political team themselves were guilty of leaving Artsakh out of the negotiation table. Historical facts prove that Nagorno Karabakh representatives had stopped participating in the negotiation process at least a year before Robert Kocharyan’s election as President of Armenia. The meetings and negotiations of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan were held regularly since 1990, in parallel with the Minsk process.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan negotiated both with Ayaz Mutalibov, Abulfaz Elchibey and Heydar Aliyev. Moreover, at the same time frequent meetings were organized between the representatives of the two Presidents, Liparityan and Guluzade (there were 11 such meetings in 1995-1996). In order to factually prove this one more time, we would like to quote a letter published in the January 25, 1997 issue of “Hayq” newspaper. “Armenia will no longer negotiate on Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan without Karabakh’s participation.
Zhirayr Liparityan, Chief Advisor to the President of the Republic of Armenia, stated this at the conference titled “Transcaucasia Prospects” held in London. Liparityan said that Armenia made that decision because as the OSCE summit in Lisbon showed, Azerbaijan seeks to use the bilateral meetings to push the Karabakh side gradually out of the negotiations. According to him, earlier Armenia welcomed and accepted Azerbaijan’s proposal to hold bilateral talks in order to facilitate the negotiation process”.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s cynicism is astonishing: he again blames the Second President for something that he has committed himself”.