ArmInfo. On April 22, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan responded to accusations of his readiness to "surrender Artsakh" at a government meeting.
As Nikol Pashinyan stated, after November 9, 2020, before each of his foreign visits, rumors spread that he is going to sign a document on the settlement of the Karabakh conflict, under which Artsakh will be surrendered to Azerbaijan. "I declare with all responsibility that during this period there have been and are no projects on the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement, be sure to pay attention, a project or a draft that is on the table or is in circulation. I mean after November 9, 2020," Pashinyan said.
As for the "surrender of Artsakh", Pashinyan, "making a thousand apologies", said that he is forced to state that "Artsakh is not an object, not a thing to surrender or not to surrender." "Artsakh is, first of all, the people living there. If we had surrendered Artsakh, then after the 44-day war we would not have spent tens of billions of drams to ensure the return of Artsakh people their homes," the head of government noted.
According to him, if he intended to surrender Artsakh, then, on the contrary, he would simply not do anything after the war, and the surrender of Artsakh would essentially become a reality. "On the contrary, we are investing in Artsakh in unprecedented volumes, because to preserve Artsakh means that the people of Artsakh remain to live there. To preserve Armenia means to make sure that the Armenians live in the country and vice versa return those who left. And this is impossible without peace," Pashinyan said .
Pashinyan once again ruled out that there is a document more or less close to signing, which will be signed without a wide public discussion, including with all sectors of Artsakh society. "This is a guarantee, an iron guarantee that the fate of Artsakh cannot be decided behind the backs of the people. In this regard, pessimists cite as an example the tripartite statement of November 9, 2020, which was signed without wide public discussion. This is a strange comparison, because in a war within hours, sometimes minutes, decisions had to be made to save the lives of thousands of Artsakh residents, 25 thousand servicemen and the evicted Armenians from Artsakh," Pashinyan said. As the head of the Armenian government pointed out, the entire policy of the RA authorities is currently aimed at not being forced to make decisions in such conditions.
"At the moment, all the documents that are the subject of negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan are in the public domain. These are 5 points passed to us by Azerbaijan, and our reaction to them, which, in fact, have been published many times. We will continue to do so as long as the boundaries of diplomatic ethics and ethics of interstate relations are allowed," he said.
Nikol Pashinyan touched upon, in his words, speculations on the topic of his statement on the call of international partners to lower the bar on the status of Artsakh. Pashinyan expressed his bewilderment at the fact that his opponents say "why international partners have not come forward with such proposals before". As the prime minister noted, the proposals put forward by the OSCE Minsk Group in 2016 are nothing more than a document on lowering the bar, since the meaning of this document is to postpone the issue of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh for an indefinite period. And we were talking about decades. "The OSCE Lisbon summit in 1996, the idea of a single state in 1999, the Key West process in 2001, the Madrid principles of 2007 were also a call for lowering: Direct and indirect calls for lowering the bar were contained in various documents adopted by various international bodies since the 1990s. And the fact that the significance of these facts was carefully hidden from our society does not mean that they did not exist," Pashinyan said.
According to him, in the short, medium and long term, the strategy of the Armenian authorities is to ensure a situation that will allow the people of Artsakh to live in Artsakh. "Any solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict or any situation that has developed in Nagorno-Karabakh, which will not only not provide, but will not guarantee these conditions, is unacceptable for us, will never be acceptable," the prime minister said.