Aravot Daily interviewed former National Assembly deputy Naira Zohrabyan.
– Mrs. Zohrabyan, the Vice President of Turkey announced that Nikol Pashinyan will leave for Turkey in March, but official Yerevan has not confirmed that information yet. What agenda do you think will be discussed in Turkey?
– I assure you that Pashinyan will leave for Turkey in March, even if he and his staff are not informed about it at the moment. The tragedy is that Armenia no longer decides its own foreign policy agenda and in the post factum, we are simply informed about decisions made. And the agenda to be discussed in Turkey is very simple: the establishment of diplomatic relations with Turkey and the reopening of the borders, of course, with a package of Turkish preconditions.
– But the Armenian and Turkish sides announced after the first meeting of the envoys in Moscow that there are no preconditions in the agenda of normalization of relations.
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– It is an impudent and cynical lie, and while our society has found a new emotional topic – the possible dismantling of Soghomon Tehleryan’s statue in Maralik, which will happen sooner or later, and they are ready to set a heroic duty around the statue, Turkey has added to its known preconditions. Erdogan no longer considers the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict on the Azerbaijani agenda, which was one of Turkey’s main preconditions, to be resolved, but the Turkish political elite continues to insist that the Armenian side abandon the Genocide agenda, and Nikol Pashinyan threw the issue in the pocket of the Diaspora and the ARF in his most recent press conference, considering it only their narrow agenda. And to the already known preconditions, the Turkish elite has clearly put two more preconditions on the agenda: the settlement of the Zangezur corridor, so that they have uninterrupted land connection, and second, pressure on American-Armenian structures to remove the idea of the Genocide from the American political agenda, since that affects Turkish-American relations. Let’s be honest, does anyone think that it is possible to do more now than what Serzh Sargsyan and Edward Nalbandyan negotiated with the Turks in 2009? Of course not. However, the Turkish side refused to ratify the negotiated document, putting forward unacceptable preconditions. Now, in addition to the existing preconditions, they consider the main one, the Artsakh issue, to be resolved. Two more have been added, and with this agenda, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Turkey and the opening of the borders will take place.
– When Serzh Sargsyan was signing the Zurich Protocols, a wave of serious public and political protests arose. In your opinion, why is there no such uprising now?
– It should be asked to the former insurgents, who raised an unspeakable wave of protests in Armenia and the Diaspora and the third president had to be in the Armenian communities, presenting the situation. It does not exist now, because, unfortunately, our society, for obvious reasons, no longer wants to respond to any agenda at all, and the forces that lit anti-Turkish bonfires and shot Erdogan’s scarecrow are now engaged in a much more important matter, such as debating in the National Assembly the historical issue of replacing Arpi Davoyan with Hrach Hakobyan in the Armenian-Belarusian inter-parliamentary commission. And this is it.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
