During an episode of “Interview with Petros Ghazaryan,” the host asked the first President of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrossian about how he said that we do not have allies on the Artsakh issue. In other words, no one in the world shares our visions, but it is obvious that we cannot reach the visions we consider pro-Armenian on the Artsakh issue resolution using our own resources. Do we have to hand it over at an expensive price if we are to be realistic?
In response, Ter-Petrossian said that we should first say that we do not have a vision, and what we had was absurd. “What was absurd is that you can have huge successes and lots of territory- look, Artsakh went from being 4.5 thousand km to 12.5 thousand km- and maintain that forever without doing anything. That was absurd. We understand that it was not possible to maintain that forever. We see how Armenia’s resources and Azerbaijan’s resources changed as a result of correlations in forces, we saw that carefully… Azerbaijan worked patiently and calmly.
They prepared for 30 years and solved their problems. Our side did not understand that, not the political forces, intellectuals, or the entire Diaspora. It was an elementary thing. The best time to resolve the Artsakh issue was in 1994 when Azerbaijan was in a bad situation and it was prepared to accept that solution. It did not resolve the issue of status, but NKAO’s borders and the Lachin region would be maintained, peacekeeping troops would be established, and it would have given us the opportunity to create a strong Artsakh and a strong Armenia.
We also would have the opportunity to discuss this as equals. We saw similar conflicts; the Arab-Israeli war has lasted 70 years, the war in Northern Cyprus has lasted 50 years. It’s fine, it would have stayed that way, the important thing is that there wasn’t a war, there was peace, and that issue turned into an international issue that needed to be resolved one day.”
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The president reiterated that there are no allies on the Artsakh issue, and there never have been any. As far as what will happen with the Artsakh issue, Ter-Petrossian said that it is difficult now. We had something to exchange at the time, but we don’t have that now. We do not have anything now, which is why Azerbaijan will agree to some maintenance of the status quo. We lost our opportunity for concession.
“Who said that we are giving Artsakh to Azerbaijan? That we were giving the lands away? No such thing ever happened. We spoke about mutual concessions. We would have had an entirely different situation today, and the Artsakh issue would have truly turned into an international one. We would have discussed it at the level of the UN, and it would have gone higher than the Minsk Group.”
Nelly Babayan
