
ArmInfo.First president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, responded to the call of the Armenian intelligentsia to the RA authorities and the international community to resume the negotiation process on the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement.
Thus, in the statement of the first President of the Republic of Armenia, published on his Facebook page, in particular, it is noted: "Today, on March 2, the press published an appeal of eighty Armenian representatives of the intelligentsia (academicians, corresponding members of the National Academy of Sciences, doctors of sciences, candidates, etc.) to the international community, the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, as well as the executive and legislative authorities of Armenia, with a call to take "immediate" measures to resume the negotiation process on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the de-occupation of the occupied territories of Artsakh, to return to their homes citizens who have lost their homeland. I apologize for my indiscretion, but I urge respected representatives of the intelligentsia to read the following excerpt from the memoirs of Avetik Isahakyan.
In this vein, Ter-Petrosyan published the following excerpt from the memoirs of Avetik Isahakyan: "After many years of absence from the Caucasus, when I returned to my homeland, I found my old friend Leo in Yerevan, prematurely aged and in poor health, but in his soul he was the same oak in the mountains of Karabakh. We talked at the desk until late at night. He talked about his childhood, Shushi, old and new Karabakh, life of meliks, catholicoses, khans, wars, writers... The horror and tragedy of the Armenian people in the Great War filled his soul. He was crushed by the weight of this unbearable grief. "Only in the grave I will forget this grief. But who is to blame?" he said to me - We are to blame, we are representatives of the intelligentsia, activists, me and you, and all of them. Our people are innocent. And we were so stupid, ignorant, that we believed in selfish, dramatic-bourgeois Europe, for which the life of sheep is more precious than the life of Armenians, small oppressed peoples. We, who, like children, believed in the conscience of enlightened mankind, the corrupt international press, canine diplomats. We, who created and nurtured the parties, in which the arrogance, boastfulness, genocidal ignorance of the Armenian intelligentsia were embodied. Isahakyan, From My Memoirs (1933)".
In this vein, the first President of Armenia expressed his deep conviction that if the intelligentsia, who signed this message, had listened to the wisdom of Leo, had the courage to publicly appeal to the Armenian authorities with a request to resolve the Karabakh issue on the basis of compromises, the Armenian people would not be in such a deplorable situation today.