Diplomat: It is pointless to talk about the security guarantees of  the Artsakh people in the absence of the status of Artsakh

ArmInfo. Against the backdrop of Baku's desire to force to renounce any status of Artsakh, dilute it with the rest of Azerbaijan, holding Artsakh people as hostages,  Armenian interests in this matter have not even been formulated yet.  Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, former Foreign Minister  of Artsakh Arman Melikyan expressed a similar opinion to ArmInfo.

"And the fact that before the 44-day war these interests were  expressed in the maintenance of the status quo, the preservation of  which was guaranteed by external, and not by our own forces, is the  biggest problem of the Armenian statehood. Having a formal toolkit  for conducting foreign policy, our state has all these years did not  even try to form an alternative agenda, although such ideas were  proposed. As a result, today the restoration of sovereignty requires  a lot of consistent work," he said.

In the opinion of the diplomat, in today's realities, this work, the  search for ways to outline the most important problems and ways to  solve them, should be carried out outside the state and political  institutions by a professional team. While, unfortunately, the expert  and analytical circles in Armenia are busy serving either the  interests of the authorities or the interests of external forces, but  certainly not the interests of Armenia. Moreover, in both cases this  is done by analytical justification of already committed, rather than  predicted actions.

Meanwhile, according to Melikyan, it is pointless to talk about the  security guarantees of the people of Artsakh if Artsakh does not have  a status. While in the current situation, Baku not only does not  intend to do this at all, but also claims that even the NKAO does not  exist, referring to the decision to disband it, taken back in the  early 1990s. While according to Melikyan, Artsakh should have a  status in any case. Just like ithad it, starting with the formation  of the USSR. In this light, it is impossible to consider Artsakh as a  part of sovereign Azerbaijan under any circumstances.  "Another  important problem is Baku's attempts to draw parallels between the  rights of Artsakh people and, for example, Azerbaijanis who  previously lived in Syunik. One should never confuse the issue of  human rights with the right of a particular territory to have state  status. Meanwhile, unlike the Azerbaijanis living in Armenia earlier,  the Artsakh Armenians had this right yesterday and still have it  today. And Armenia abandoned its natural mission of protecting the  rights of more than half a million Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan,  and thus provided Baku with the opportunity today to express its  readiness to protect the rights of all Armenians in Azerbaijan  without granting the status to Artsakh," the diplomat summed up.