“Why did we lose and why do we continue to lose? To find the answer to this question, one must know a very important thing: the citizens of Armenia and the Armenian elite, by and large, with a few exceptions, came to a unique conclusion, and showed unique behavior after 1994. After 1994, the political elite and especially the government abandoned the victory and made politics immoral,” said Andranik Tevanyan, a member of the Armenia parliamentary faction, on November 7 at the “We Unite” youth forum organized by the Voice of the Youth civic club. Tevanyan presented his point of view on how they turned politics into immorality, which led to Armenia’s defeat.
“The elite formed from the committee named Karabakh on the wave of the Karabakh movement, which later came to power and after the war announced and adopted a policy according to which the Karabakh issue is a burden for the development of Armenia, is immoral. Today’s immoral political power was born from that immoral political elite because this power is a consequence. It is the continuation of the power that declared that the Karabakh problem is a burden and hinders Armenia from developing.”
According to Tevanyan, there are two versions: the defeat was due to ignorance or betrayal. “Whether this was the result of ignorance or betrayal, I believe that the government is happy about this defeat, even if they do not realize it. It is a subconscious impulse because the environment they came from was politically immoral, because to declare after the victorious war that the Karabakh issue hinders the development of Armenia, when you were one of the leaders of the Karabakh movement, means to pervert Armenia’s political life, make it meaningless and, in fact, to contribute to the loss of statehood.”
According to the deputy of the Armenia faction, there were two models of ideological disputes after 1994. “Some in power claimed that without resolving the Karabakh conflict, that is, leaving Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, and recently stated in a direct text that their plan was to leave Karabakh within Azerbaijan without resolving the Karabakh issue and without the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations, under which they mean the de facto refusal of the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide, without these concessions to Ankara and Baku, Armenia would not have had a chance to develop. The other part of the government, represented by Vazgen Sargsyan, Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, the Karabakh political elite, Dashnaktsutyun, the National Democratic Union, and those who were in opposition at the time, believed that the Karabakh issue could not be an obstacle to Armenia’s development.
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Yes, the Karabakh issue is a heavy burden, but it cannot be said that in order to fight against dandruff, one must be beheaded. In 1998, the thesis that the Karabakh issue could not hinder Armenia’s development won. Before the change of power in 1998, the political power presented that the RA GDP could not grow, taxes could not increase in Armenia, the economy could not develop, the Diaspora would not make a single penny, and emigration from Armenia would continue. This was announced by the head of state at the 1997 session of the Security Council.”
Then Tevanyan presented the situation after 1998, noting that the period after the regime change in 1998 was the most peaceful period in Armenia. “We did not think that there could be a war, the GDP increased six times, the budget increased eight times, poverty sharply decreased, there was immigration in ten years, the Karabakh issue changed significantly in the international perception. During those ten years, from the idea of leaving Karabakh to Azerbaijan, we came to a situation that was certainly not the culmination of our dreams – the Madrid Principles, but we came to a situation where the international community accepted that Karabakh could be sovereign outside Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan accepted that approach.”
According to Tevanyan, after 2008, when Serzh Sargsyan was the President of Armenia after Robert Kocharyan, the mistakes that existed before should have been corrected, and in the international arena, in Tevanyan’s opinion, we should have continued to insist on Artsakh’s right to self-determination.
“But the peak of this was 2007, and after that we had a retreat.” According to Andranik Tevanyan, this government took revenge in 2018, and at that time there was an outburst in the society. “A just uprising, expectations that these people stole- that is, society did not make a mistake in starting political change. Society made a mistake in bringing the wrong people to power. Now that mistake must be corrected. It is everyone’s task to change this situation, to oust these politically immoral people, and to form a new national government.”
Nelly BABAYAN
