by The Armenian Mirror-Spectator
RE: The Azatutyun story in your August 30, 2025 issue on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that he rejected an OSCE Minsk Group proposal for the resolution of the Karabakh conflict before the 2020 war.
On the face of it, that might have been a serious mistake; the prime minister does have his share of serious mistakes, some of which he has acknowledged publicly.
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However, if rejecting an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) proposal by Pashinyan was a mistake, why wasn’t it a mistake by the previous administrations who made the same decision many times over 20 years?
Those rejections began with the decision by Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, the next two presidents of Armenia, and Vazgen Sargsyan, eventually a powerful prime minister of the Republic, of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair proposal in September 1997. Their rejection resulted in the removal of President Levon Ter-Petrossian, who had accepted a resolution which we considered the most that could be obtained.
The OSCE co-chairs produced a number of proposals during the 20-year reign of Kocharyan and S. Sargsyan, 1998 to 2008. Although these two leaders of the republic formally accepted some of these proposals, they placed such conditions they knew could not possibly be accepted by Baku, and thus their response to these proposals amounted to a rejection. For the record, I must add, reluctantly under the circumstances, that the leadership of Artsakh rejected outright just about any proposal that the Minsk Group ever offered.
The proposal rejected by Pashinyan has not been published. At the end of the Azatutyun article, one opposition leader describes it as having been offered once before, in 2007, a proposal that was based on the so-called “Madrid principles.” The prime minister should release the text of that proposal; but the opposition leader seems to be knowledgeable about its contents; he should publish it. I find it not so likely that OSCE would offer the same text more than a decade later.
The other point with regard to that proposal is that, if its contents were so favorable to the Armenian side and Pashinyan should have accepted according to the opposition, then why did it not work in 2007, when it was offered to Kocharyan? I will not go into details here, but it is clear that was not a workable proposal. For one thing, the “referendum” on the future status of Karabakh included in the Madrid principles was understood very differently and unreconcilably by the parties to the conflict; and the status issue has always been a major stumbling block in negotiations.
The responsibility for the inevitability of a new war must be extended to the leaders since 1998. The reaction of the opposition leaders to Pashinyan’s statement sounds disingenuous, to say the least.
The prime minister’s statement can be a “game changer,” as one opposition leader opined in that article, only if we forget the policies of the two decades before Pashinyan assumed the leadership of Armenia.
Finally, it would have been more professional if the reporter had given a chance to the prime minister to respond to the accusations made against him on this occasion.
I understand the politics behind the opposition’s reaction to the prime minister’s admission; but this is bigger than politics. Blind, personalized opposition to, approaching hatred toward, anything Pashinyan says or does cannot lend credibility to the opposition’s charges, even when some are credible; and it does not help Armenia to face the challenges it is facing.
Jirair Libaridian