
ArmInfo Armenia's first president, Levon Ter- Petrosyan, stated back in 2012 that the Madrid Principles stipulated that Nagorno-Karabakh was part of Azerbaijan. Let me remind you that after the adoption of the Madrid Principles, all negotiating documents were based on these principles, as stated by NA Vice Speaker Ruben Rubinyan in a conversation with journalists on September 26.
He was commenting on Levon Ter-Petrosyan's request to publish the 2019 negotiating document, after which the debate would cease.
When asked why the Foreign Ministry hasn't officially published the proposal that was on the negotiating table in 2019, as Ishkhan Saghatelyan recently insisted, Rubinyan replied that the Prime Minister once stated that he had instructed the Foreign Ministry to first present the documents to him and assess their advisability of their publication. "In fact, there are no secrets in the 2019 documents. These documents represented a summary of the situation in the negotiations at the end of Serzh Sargsyan's presidency. All documents based on the Madrid Principles boiled down to the following: 5, 5+2, or 7 districts will be transferred to Azerbaijan and nothing more. In other words, there is no mention of the status of Nagorno- Karabakh, and, in fact, the Madrid Principles imply that after that, it is obvious what will happen to this status: it will be part of Azerbaijan. This is Levon Ter-Petrosyan's interpretation, and it is the correct interpretation," the Deputy Speaker emphasized.
He also added that none of the documents regarding the referendum contained any wording that definitely suggested that the referendum would be conducted in a particular manner or what its outcome would be. "I'm not talking about any specific document, but there were formulations that could be interpreted as a referendum for the entire territory of Azerbaijan, including Nagorno-Karabakh," Rubinyan said.
Regarding Ishkhan Saghatelyan's remark that this document offered Armenia much more favorable terms for resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, which the current government conspiratorially rejected, Rubinyan responded: "We have not turned down any proposal for resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict during our tenure, so any claims otherwise are false," the RA Deputy Speaker concluded.