On August 23, Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, in his address to the nation on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of his country's Declaration of Independence, specifically tried to answer a question that the opposition forces had been asking him for a long time.
Pashinyan said: "I want to clarify the question that has been raised before me for exactly 7 years. I am accused of why I did not voluntarily make concessions in September 2020 to prevent the 44-day war. I respond. If I had made concessions at that time, we could have lost the statehood and independence of Armenia disproportionately to a much greater extent. Armenia has never been as sovereign, as independent, and as developed as it is now. We gained a real Armenia with an area of 29.7 thousand square kilometers."
So what is the essence of the concession that the opposition demands from Pashinyan to make to Azerbaijan? The main opposition forces of the country envisage the acceptance of the final settlement model proposed by the Minsk Group until 2020 without war. They blame Pashinyan, saying that if we had accepted the Minsk Group's plan to avoid war, we would have handed over 5 districts to Azerbaijan while keeping Lachin and Kelbajar, the Lachin corridor would have remained in our hands, Armenians would not have fled, the status of the mountainous part of Karabakh would have remained ours until resolved, and there would have been no talk of the Zangezur corridor....
Indeed, the Minsk Group’s solution plan before the war was exactly like that.
But there was a decisive point that the Armenian opposition did not see and maybe did not want to see — in 2020, the one who controlled the situation was not Armenia, but Azerbaijan; Azerbaijan did not accept the half-measures of the Minsk Group’s plan; it was either all resolved at once or there had to be a war. Under these circumstances, Pashinyan’s concession to Azerbaijan to avoid war would have changed nothing, because Azerbaijan did not want to accept the half-measure solution model proposed by the Minsk Group. This will undoubtedly remain President Ilham Aliyev’s greatest service before history.
Interestingly, Pashinyan did not recall this decisive point in his answer to the question that has troubled him for 7 years. He could have said that avoiding the war was not solely in my hands; Ilham Aliyev also had to agree, but he never allowed the half-measure solution model near...
Perhaps Pashinyan has unofficially said these words about Ilham Aliyev in his close circle...
Aydın Quliyev,
political analyst
