The third President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan and the current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan regularly threaten to publish the proposals submitted by the OSCE Minsk for the settlement of the Karabakh conflict to show who handed over Artsakh and who did not. Let me remind you that the previous proposals – package, phased, “common state,” “Madrid principles”- have already, in fact, been declassified and published by the Ani Research Center. Therefore, it is not a big secret today, and the remaining proposals can be published instead of threatening each other. However, there are some indirect signs that give some idea of Pashinyan’s position before the war.
Let me remind you of the Prime Minister’s interview with the BBC’s HardTalk program, which was posted on YouTube on August 14, 2020, about a month and a half before the war. (Probably aired a few days earlier). The part of the interview where Pashinyan explains why he says “Artsakh is Armenia and that’s it” is more interesting. “First of all, Nagorno Karabakh,” the Prime Minister explains, “Has been inhabited by local Armenians for several millennia, and by the way, the name ‘Artsakh’ has a history of several thousand years.” The host of the program, Steven Sakur, interrupts Pashinyan, saying, “We can not delve into the millennia of your history, we can reflect on today’s realities.” He mentions the UN Security Council resolution, which, according to him, unequivocally demands the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the occupied territory of Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan. In response, the Prime Minister of Armenia says, “The UN Security Council document does not mention the Republic of Armenia or the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia. It mentions the self-defense forces of the Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh” (you can watch that dialogue from about the 6th minute).
Two conclusions can be drawn from the interview. A) In the summer of 2020, the Prime Minister of Armenia considered Artsakh an Armenian land (where Armenians have lived for thousands of years), B) He did not think that the well-known UN resolutions, which, by the way, for 26 years referred to the Azerbaijani side as an argument for ending the “occupation,” were an obstacle for Artsakh to leave Azerbaijan. His views apparently changed after the war. Compare the idea expressed in the interview with Pashinyan’s December 26, 2021 Facebook post, where, in particular, it is written: “It is obvious that the UN Security Council would have made all the decisions by the logic of the resolutions it had previously adopted on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where Nagorno-Karabakh was recognized as part of Azerbaijan.” Pashinyan’s position expressed in the summer of 2020 also indirectly testifies to the fact that at that time he did not consider that everything was lost, and that the “former,” starting with Ter-Petrossian, had already handed over Artsakh.
But statements, speeches, interviews are not diplomatic documents. Until all the draft settlements that existed before the tripartite declaration of November 9, 2020, are known, it will not be possible to give an objective assessment of any process.
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Aram Abrahamyan
