By Harut Sassounian
Top Armenian government officials have crossed all red lines. After giving away Artsakh, they are now endangering the existence of the Armenian Republic. This alarming development is the fault of the entire leadership of the ruling Civil Contract Party, starting from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and ending with his Ministers, the Speaker and majority of the National Assembly.
Pashinyan’s agreement to turn over the Republic of Artsakh to Azerbaijan was illegal because he has no jurisdiction over Artsakh. Knowing that, the Prime Minister did not ask for the approval of either the National Assembly or the Constitutional Court before signing the declaration of capitulation. Prior to the 2020 War, Pashinyan himself admitted that he was the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia and had nothing to do with Artsakh, while loudly proclaiming, “Artsakh is Armenia. Period.” This is one of his scores of contradictory statements.
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Most governmental leaders around the world resign immediately after suffering such a devastating loss in war. They acknowledge their failure and yield their seat to someone else who can salvage whatever is left. Pashinyan, a psychologically crushed man, cannot properly rule the country and restore the damage that he himself has brought about.
Pashinyan is stubbornly clinging to power, thus increasing the damage and losses. He has not used the word Artsakh once since the 2020 war. He never mentions Artsakh Armenians’ right of return. He has not lifted a finger to secure the release of Artsakh’s leaders who are being tried in Baku. He claims that Artsakh Armenians are not citizens of Armenia, even though they possess passports of the Republic of Armenia.
Meanwhile, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Alen Simonyan, who is just as incompetent as the Prime Minister, once again, gave insane answers to a simple question from an Artsakh journalist, last week. The question was: “When will I return to Artsakh?” Simonyan replied: “When it is safe, when we sign a peace treaty. You got out of there, because it was not safe, even though it was possible to stay and fight till the end with the weapons that Armenia had left. You should have fought, Armenia fought.” This is the usual tactic of Pashinyan’s clan. Put the blame for their own failures on everyone else.
To make matters worse, when the journalist asked Simonyan why he avoids using the name Artsakh, he gave a complete nonsensical denialist answer: “I am a politician, and I oppose any foreign citizen calling one of my cities by a Turkish or Azerbaijani name. I must uphold a politician’s ethics.” He is shamefully comparing saying Artsakh to a Turk or Azeri calling an Armenian city by a Turkish name!
Only a defeatist high-ranking official would talk like that. He knows very well that Artsakh Armenians fought as much as they could, killing 205 Azeri soldiers and wounding 1004 others within 24-hours on Sept. 19, 2023, but were unable to continue resisting a well-armed enemy which was many times more powerful than them. They had no choice, but to leave. If they had stayed any longer, they would have been all slaughtered by the Azeri troops. Maybe that’s the outcome that Simonyan would have preferred.
There is plenty of evidence of Azeri soldiers’ brutal behavior during previous battles when they videotaped the cutting off of the head of an elderly civilian man. In another gruesome criminal act, which the Azeri soldiers “proudly” videotaped, they tortured, mutilated, raped and killed Anush Apetyan, a female Armenian soldier, during an attack in September 2022, after cutting off her legs, putting her cut off finger in her mouth, and poking out her eye and replacing it with a stone! These are shocking war crimes!
Simonyan’s anti-Artsakh comments generated immediate outrage throughout Armenia and the Diaspora. Several major Armenian and Artsakh organizations issued statements lambasting him.
Instead of lecturing Artsakh Armenians about staying and fighting, Simonyan should look at the self-defeating behavior of his own government which did not lift a finger to come to the rescue of fellow Armenians in Artsakh — the constitutional obligation of the Armenian government. On the contrary, on Sept. 21, 2023 just as Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan was addressing the emergency UN Security Council meeting in New York about Azerbaijan’s huge attack on Artsakh, Prime Minister Pashinyan embarrassed his own Foreign Minister in front of the whole world by announcing in a live address in Yerevan: “At this moment, our assessment is that there is no direct threat to the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.” Thus, Pashinyan gave a great excuse to Azerbaijan to cover up its massive crime and undermined the claim of international lawyers that Artsakh Armenians were subjected to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
I am certain that the next nationalistic government of Armenia will declare that all of Pashinyan’s verbal or signed agreements, commitments and statements violate Armenia’s laws. Therefore, they are null and void. Pres. Erdogan of Turkey and Pres. Aliyev of Azerbaijan should not waste their time demanding concessions from Pashinyan, because anything he concedes to them will be reversed by the next Armenian government.