A member of the Hayrenik political party’s council, Ara Sahakyan, spoke about the meeting between the former presidents of Armenia and Artsakh surrounding the difficult situation in Armenia. He said, “Not only the political, but also the moral authority of each country is represented first by its current, but also its former high-ranking officials. That is the wealth that every nation has amassed over the decades.
The main attack by the current Armenian authorities was to destroy the solidarity among the generations. Their motto- reject the former and glory to the present- was a true revolution. When the past is completely rejected, it creates a rift between time periods and generations, and that society finds itself naked and defenseless.
To not accept your parents, to not take care of them, and to ignore them is a worldview and a sign of a lack of discipline. The opposite process can cause the same situation if the parents do not allow their children to grow and move forward.
I do not think that we will look for intrigues in this meeting between the presidents. It is worth sitting together at a table with presidents who have introduced different systems of government, competing with each other and having difficult pasts. This is a great advantage that we should welcome. Their agenda certainly included Artsakh, Artsakh’s security, and Artsakh’s fate, which are now very much connected with Armenia’s security. Today, Armenia’s fate depends very much on Artsakh. But Artsakh moves farther and farther away from us every day. Over the past 100-200 years, Artsakh has never been as far, strange, and unreachable as it is now,” Ara Sahakyan said.
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He also spoke about the war, its duration, and current talks from Armenian government officials about making Armenian-Turkish relations a priority. “I have an answer to that. A force came into power in 2018 that was determined to close the page of the Artsakh war by closing the long-term animosity between Armenia and Turkey and Armenia and Azerbaijan. When he said that he didn’t immediately fight for a ceasefire or resolution because we would have called him a traitor, this is what he meant: ‘If I am solving the issue peacefully, people will ask me about why we have an army. The army should have fought and we would have won. Since people would have asked me why I didn’t fight, I fought. I fought knowing that we would lose because the Azeri army was already more powerful than us with its armaments, Turkey was supporting it, and they had experienced militants fighting for them.’ He deliberately led our country to defeat and brought us to a degraded condition so that a good portion of society would accept that everything is fine. So that they would accept that the army fought and lost. But if he only defended that configuration and ended the war sooner, that wouldn’t have worked. He needed to add everything that he did after the war to this. He said that the army was condemned from the beginning. He never said that our army is weak, that we have issues with armaments, and that our high-ranking officials have certain problems before the war. He always presented the army as being perfectly armed, that all budgetary plans are moving forward, that we bought new weapons, etc. All that remained was to solve the issues of socks and strawberries. After the war, post-factum, he created that fake claim that the army is weak and it was stolen from for 25-30 years. Today, we have the following situation. When we call him a traitor, this is what we mean: when this government came to power, they were unable to prevent the war, negotiations failed, and they were defeated. Now is the next step: we lost the war and Artsakh became Azerbaijan’s internal issue. Now, they must carry out their leaders’ final order: to reconcile with Azerbaijan and Turkey,” Ara Sahakyan said.
Ashot Hakobyan
