During a briefing on June 25, Nikol Pashinyan made a statement that largely escaped public attention, even though it concerned a matter of great importance.
“Yes, I also said, ‘Artsakh is Armenia, period.’ During the election campaign, and dozens of times before that, I said: yes, I am the person who said it. And it is precisely as a result of saying this that we have reached this point. Had I not said it, we would have remained trapped in that hostage-like situation, because we would never have understood what was happening to us and why it was happening,” Nikol Pashinyan said today.
This is, in essence, a direct admission that he made that statement in order to escalate the situation. Because if Nikol Pashinyan considers today’s situation to be the result, rather than the consequence, of that statement, then he presents it not as a mistake but as a deliberate act of escalation. After all, it was the war and the defeat in that war that brought us “to this point.”
Otherwise, he would have said that the aggravated situation and developments resulting from that statement led him to his current conviction that one should proceed not along the path of conflict but along the path of reconciliation and agreement, and led to the conclusion that one should not follow the path of confrontation, and so on. But he does not say that he was mistaken or that he made that statement based on incorrect perceptions. He says that he did it for the sake of today’s outcome. And today’s “outcome” is the loss of Artsakh and, already, Azerbaijan’s ongoing claims against Armenia.
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In practice, however, despite the fact that Pashinyan has effectively made a sensational admission in his own words, my assessment remains different. I believe that he now prefers to speak about “deliberate” actions rather than admit to making mistakes.
Because if he admits to mistakes, an obvious question arises: who is to say that he is not making mistakes now? And who is to say that years from now he will not claim, for one reason or another, that he deliberately sacrificed the enclaves, the roads of Syunik, the return of Azerbaijanis, Armenian agriculture, and so on in order, for example, to preserve the sovereignty of the Ararat Plain? It is precisely to prevent such doubts from taking root in the public consciousness that he prefers to admit that everything he did was deliberate rather than say that he made mistakes and was incompetent both in conducting negotiations and in waging war.
Hakob BADALYAN
