Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan has once again done the regime’s dirtiest work: he blocked the release and debate of the long-promised parliamentary inquiry into the 2020 Artsakh war—after the ruling party spent three years advertising the process as proof of its “openness.” Nothing better captures Civil Contract’s ludicrous, self-congratulatory hypocrisy than campaigning as servants of the people while yanking the people’s report the moment it reaches the floor.
In February 2022, the Civil Contract majority engineered an ad hoc commission with a friendly arithmetic: seven of eleven seats for itself, four dangled to the opposition. Both Hayastan and Pativ Unem refused to legitimize a foregone conclusion—a body built to launder Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s wartime record, not interrogate it. Civil Contract pressed on. Chair Andranik Kocharyan ran the process; the commission wrapped this spring and promised publication in September, to coincide with the five-year mark of the war.
Report submitted. Debate expected. And then—Simonyan’s trapdoor.
On Wednesday, the Speaker declared there were “no legal grounds” to add the report to the agenda, suddenly discovering an 18-month cap on ad hoc commissions. How convenient that a clock no one mentioned while the commission was useful becomes decisive the second its findings are due to face public scrutiny. Kocharyan himself disputes the interpretation and says he met the deadlines. Simonyan shrugs and hints the report will appear in some “different format.” Translation: buried, buffered, or bled of consequence.
Let’s be clear about what’s being dodged. Civil Contract promised answers about why Armenia lost a six-week war in which at least 3,800 Armenian soldiers died, what the government and military did and failed to do, and what “preparedness” meant before the shooting started. Instead of answers, we get procedure as a shield and “format” as a fig leaf. The party that boasts of radical transparency is now telling citizens to accept a locked door and be grateful for a peephole.
The timing makes the stunt even more insulting. In late August, Pashinyan admitted he rejected a 2019 settlement plan brokered by the U.S., Russia, and France—then claimed accepting it would have cost Armenia its statehood. Civil Contract insists blame belongs to former presidents Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan, as if a decade-old prehistory absolves the leadership that actually held power in 2020. Now the one document designed—however imperfectly—to test those claims is kept off the floor by a technicality weaponized at the eleventh hour.
This is not governance; it’s evasion dressed up as compliance. It’s the opposite of accountability: a majority manufactures a process, starves it of legitimacy, and, when even that controlled process produces something real, smothers it with rules it ignored until the outcome became inconvenient.
Call it what it is: a gag order on public memory. Civil Contract cannot posture as the party of sunlight while switching off the lights whenever the truth approaches the lectern. If the report vindicates them, they should welcome the debate. If it doesn’t, the public has the right—indeed the obligation—to read it, argue it, and demand consequences.
It is Artsakh, not some euphemism to be retired at the regime’s convenience. And it is the Armenian people, not Civil Contract’s legal word games, who get the last word on what happened in 2020. Release the report—on the record, on the floor, and in full.
