Simonian said they should have “stayed and fought” when he was asked by an exiled Karabakh reporter on Tuesday what the Armenian government is doing to assert their right to return to their homeland. The remarks sparked a storm of condemnation from Armenian opposition leaders and public figures as well as Karabakh refugees.
The latter included relatives of some of at least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Karabakh killed during the 24-hour hostilities followed by the exodus of the region’s remaining 100,000 or so residents. Dozens of other Karabakh Armenians remain unaccounted for.
“With this statement, Alen Simonian tried to denigrate the heroic struggle of the people of Artsakh during the more than nine-month [Azerbaijani] siege and the large-scale military operations that followed it,” read a statement released by the office of Samvel Shahramanian, Karabakh’s Yerevan-based president.
“Samvel Shahramanian considers it necessary to emphasize once again that the people of Artsakh did everything in their power to continue living in their historical homeland,” it said. “However, the fight is not only waged on the battlefield but also on the political and diplomatic fronts where Alen Simonyan has also been at the forefront.”
“The Artsakh authorities spared no effort to ensure that the servicemen who defended the homeland do not feel alone and are able to safely exit their occupied or encircled positions after the cessation of hostilities,” added the statement.
Simonian, who is a key political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, refused to apologize while seemingly waking back on his inflammatory statement. He claimed that he slammed not ordinary Karabakh Armenians but their leaders who he said always wanted to “empty Karabakh” of its ethnic Armenian population.
“I didn’t mean to say that women and children should have stayed there,” the controversial speaker told reporters.
Gegham Stepanian, Karabakh’s exiled human rights ombudsman, dismissed the explanation as “laughable.” He said Simonian’s claims are part of a broader pattern of Pashinian’s political allies and other supporters trying to absolve him of blame for the fall of Karabakh.
“For the Armenian public and especially the Artsakh public, Nikol Pashinian’s government is primarily to blame for the loss of Artsakh,” Stepanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “They deliberately started this victim blaming right after the exodus. So everything is being done to blame us for that.”
Shahramanian already rejected Pashinian’s allegations last June that that Karabakh forces did not fight back the Azerbaijani offensive because the authorities in Stepanakert as well as the Armenian opposition wanted the region’s population to flee to Armenia to topple him.
“Within hours we realized that we are alone, that resisting the Azerbaijani armed forces outnumbering us by a factor of 12 to 1 was not possible and we had to save lives,” the Karabakh leader said at the time.