“Now, assessing today's situation, I can say the following: in my opinion, by going through that defeat today, we have gained the opportunity to have an independent sovereign state,” he told a group of Armenian Americans at a meeting in Washington.
Pashinian said the thousands of Armenians who died in the September-November 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh sacrificed their lives for that.
“We must now concentrate on using the opportunity created by that sacrifice. And it won't be easy,” he said.
Pashinian’s domestic political opponents and other critics maintain that Armenia became not only a sovereign but also victorious country long before he swept to power in 2018 and mishandled the six-week war. They say that Pashinian’s policies have left the country fighting for its very survival and largely defenseless in the face of what they see as another military aggression planned by Azerbaijan.
Predictably, opposition leaders in Yerevan scoffed at his latest comments. Kristine Vartanian, a lawmaker representing the main opposition Hayastan alliance, suggested on Tuesday that Pashinian’s idea of Armenian sovereignty is “subordination to Azerbaijan and Turkey.”
“If defeat is an opportunity for states, why do [other] states strive not for defeat but for victory and build their statehoods upon it?” Vartanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
An official video of Monday’s meeting held at the Armenian Embassy in Washington showed its several dozen Armenian-American participants applauding Pashinian at the start and the end of it. The Armenian government’s press office did not release a full transcript of the meeting that apparently involved questions from the audience and the prime minister’s answers to them. It was thus not clear whether any of the participants questioned his policies or statements.
A smaller group of young members of the Armenian community in the United States picketed the embassy during the meeting, holding posters that accused Pashinian of having “betrayed” Karabakh, “derailed” democracy and even denied the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey.
Pashinian caused uproar in Armenia and its worldwide Diaspora with his comments on the genocide made in Switzerland on January 24. Meeting with local Diaspora members, he said Armenians should “understand what happened” in 1915 and what prompted the subsequent campaigning for international recognition of the slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenians as genocide.
The premier seemed to imply that foreign powers, notably the Soviet Union, were behind that campaign. He insisted on January 31 that he did not deny or question the genocide.
The main official purpose of Pashinian’s trip to Washington is to attend the annual International Religious Freedom summit that began there on Tuesday. He was not scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump or senior members of the new U.S. administration.