Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday sought to justify his failure to avert the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, saying that it might not have broken out had he made disproportionate concessions to Azerbaijan.
He testified before an ad hoc commission of the Armenian parliament for the second time in just over a week in what opposition groups see as continuing attempts to dodge responsibility for the disastrous war.
Pashinyan defended his handling of the six-week hostilities in his first lengthy testimony given on June 20. He focused on events preceding them while answering on Tuesday questions from pro-government members of the commission tasked with examining the causes of Armenia’s defeat.
“I’m not saying that it was theoretically impossible to avoid the war,” he told the panel boycotted by opposition lawmakers. “But the necessary condition for that theoretical possibility was a renunciation of, let’s put it this way, the Armenian vision for settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”
Asked what he thinks he had failed to do before the war, Pashinyan said: “I feel guilty about absolutely everything, but I say, ‘OK, it’s just a declaration.’ When I start drawing up my own indictment … I enter a deadlock at some point.”
Armenian opposition leaders say that Pashinyan made the war with Azerbaijan inevitable by mishandling peace talks mediated by the United States, Russia and France. They specifically accuse him of recklessly rejecting a peace deal put forward by the three co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group.
The plan was the last version of their so-called Madrid Principles of the conflict’s resolution originally drafted in 2007. It called for an eventual referendum of self-determination in Karabakh that would take place after the gradual liberation of virtually all seven districts occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces in the early 1990s.
In 2021, former President Serzh Sarkisian publicized the secretly recorded audio of a 2019 meeting during which Pashinyan said he opposes the plan because it would not immediately formalize Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan. Pashinyan said he is ready to “play the fool or look a bit insane” in order to avoid such a settlement.
Pashinyan has repeatedly alleged that the Madrid Principles recognized Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan. His political opponents and other critics shrug off those claims, arguing that the proposed settlement upheld the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination.
