“In order to find out what catastrophe we are facing, we are once again trying to hand over Artsakh to the enemy through verbal agreements. Let’s see what happened,” said Edgar Ghazaryan, former chief of staff of the Constitutional Court and a member of the Consolidation movement. “I want people to understand the facts clearly. The President of Azerbaijan says that this war has solved the Karabakh problem. In fact, it is not so. He is the one who says so. The November 9 statement is a statement on the ceasefire, not on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In 1994, a ceasefire was established between Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Artsakh. But that did not solve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. After the ceasefire, they proceeded to the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Now what is the difference between 1994 and 2020? The loser then was Azerbaijan, now we are in a more vulnerable position.
But the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has not been resolved. Now, in the post-war period, Azerbaijan is trying to solve these problems peacefully, without war, where it is needed, with war, because it has no limit to war, as Nikol Pashinyan is in power in Armenia. That is, to solve the Karabakh problem. And that means that Nagorno-Karabakh does not exist. We do not talk about that status anymore! Aliyev confirmed that the last time in Brussels it was agreed with Nikol Pashinyan not to speak about the status of Nagorno-Karabakh anymore, in Brussels they agreed to set up a demarcation commission. What was the purpose? I said that at the time. The aim was to clarify that part of the border, which refers to the village of Tegh in Goris, and to put the Azeri checkpoint there and block the road. But the Russians objected because Russian peacekeepers were stationed there.
And they did not allow a joint session of the commissions to take place in Moscow, despite the fact that the day after the Brussels agreement, when Nikol Pashinyan and Aliyev formed those commissions, Mher Grigoryan and Shahin Mustafayev met in Yeraskh, they decided to meet in Moscow next week. But Moscow did not host the commissions. They said, only Mher, you will come to Shahin, sit next to my Overchuk, you will deal only with the issue of transport unblocking. In other words, the mechanism of handing over Artsakh to Azerbaijan in that way was not actually solved. Now Azerbaijan thinks differently. It is building a road that passes not through the Lachin corridor, not through the village of Tegh, through the town of Berdzor, through the former town of Lachin to Stepanakert, but a new road that leads to Kornidzor, other Azerbaijani controlled areas outside the 5-kilometer Lachin corridor. That road is being built by Azerbaijan and it says, let’s move to this road to close the road from Tegh village to Artsakh, the city of Lachin, which after the liberation in the 90s was a road of hope, a way of life, a way of salvation, a way of victory.
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It wants to close that road and to take us temporarily on the so-called alternative road. And Azerbaijan will close that road at any moment. Not to mention that the gas pipeline supplying Artsakh, the power lines supplying Artsakh, and the internet cables pass through the current road to Lachin. In other words, if they have control over that road, they have control over all the infrastructures connecting Artsakh with Armenia,” he noted.
Ashot HAKOBYAN
