Pashinian spent on Tuesday nearly four hours testifying before an ad hoc commission of the Armenian parliament tasked with investigating, among other things, his handling of the six-week war. He again blamed Armenia’s top military brass and former leaders for its outcome and claimed that the latter had also mishandled Nagorno-Karabakh peace talks.
A spokesman for former President Robert Kocharian, who is also the top leader of the main opposition Hayastan alliance, said Pashinian keeps trying to “put the blame on others by every possible and impossible means.” In detailed written comments, Bagrat Mikoyan described Kocharian’s 1998-2008 rule as “the most peaceful period in the history of the Republic of Armenia.”
“During President Kocharian’s tenure, Azerbaijan did not even think that it could attack Armenia and Artsakh, knowing that it would be punished,” said Mikoyan.
The office of another former president, Serzh Sarkisian, said Pashinian is keen to justify his “destructive” track record through a “deliberate misrepresentation of obvious facts.”
Hayk Mamijanian, a senior member of Sarkisian’s Republican Party, shrugged off Pashinian’s fresh claims that the so-called Madrid Principles, a framework peace accord jointly drafted by the United States, Russia and France prior to the 2020 war, recognized Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan. He said the proposed settlement on the contrary upheld the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination.
“If the Madrid Principles are so bad, then why were they in all of your government and pre-election programs, including after the war?” Mamijanian asked during a news conference.
Pashinian admitted on Tuesday that he could have stopped the war in Nagorno-Karabakh three weeks before the Armenian-Armenian ceasefire brokered by Russia on November 9, 2020. He said he rejected an earlier truce accord proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin primarily because it called for the return of Azerbaijani refugees to Shushi (Shusha), the strategic Karabakh town eventually captured by Azerbaijani forces. He claimed that would have meant “handing over Shushi to Azerbaijan.”
“Azerbaijanis would have returned to Shushi as an ethnic minority of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic,” countered Artur Khachatrian, a parliament deputy from Hayastan. “Karabakh flags would have flown over the city of Shushi and the Azerbaijanis living there would have accepted Karabakh’s sovereignty.”
“Now Turkish and Azerbaijani flags are flying over Shushi, and Shushi poses an existential threat to both Stepanakert and whole Artsakh,” Khachatrian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.