Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan said that his Government will not yield the country’s statehood, sovereignty and independence to anyone under any circumstance. Speaking at his Civil Contract Party’s congress, he said that the ruling party must defend the independence, sovereignty and statehood of the country.
He noted the achievements which his administration recorded over the course of the Civil Contract party being the ruling party, and also noted that there is one global issue which is capable of shadowing all their successes. “That disaster, that tragedy is known to everyone, it is the 44-Day War of 2020, our numerous victims, martyrs, our losses and our tragedy,” Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said that the Civil Contract Party has remained committed to its program, however there are cases when being committed to the program led to success, while there are some that led to failures, and the case of the NK conflict is one of them. “Why did that happen? Because we never thought of the Karabakh issue of being an issue which we should use to remain in power or solve domestic political affairs. And just like we tried to go on the path of re-establishing the foundations of our statehood in terms of internal politics – in accordance to the party program – we similarly approached the NK issue. And our biggest objective was to approach the NK issue solution within the framework of the content of our statehood’s foundation,” he said.
Pashinyan argued that the fact that the biggest criticism he’s received in the post-war period is that he had declared “Artsakh is Armenia, period”, shows that the foundations of the Armenian independence have consistently eroded and collapsed since the first day of regaining independence.
“Because after the first day of adoption of the declaration, in fact, a consistent abandoning from this program took place at a time when in 1991 NK was declaring independence, when a total abandoning of this program took place in the negotiations process and when in 2007, by accepting the Madrid Principles as basis of negotiations, the then-ruling power in Armenia basically destroyed the legal grounds of Nagorno Karabakh’s declaration of independence,” Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan added that upon coming to power and facing this situation his party tried to do whatever depended on it to repair the foundations of Armenia’s statehood.
“And we, essentially, recorded that Armenia, on the level of state government, had consistently abandoned and destroyed the state’s foundations from 1998 to 2018. Then we found out that even we are no longer able to restore it with all our efforts. And it turned out that no one wants to restore, otherwise this criticism wouldn’t be voiced with that emphasis,” Pashinyan said.
Speaking about the Civil Contract Party’s founding program, he quoted it as saying: “the implementation of any program of settlement of the Karabakh issue is possible only through the restoration of NK’s status of a full party to negotiations, without the consent of which no option of settlement can be considered as de-jure accepted”.
“After I was elected prime minister, my initial efforts were aimed at the restoration of NK’s status as a negotiator. And we remained committed to our statements here too. But as a result it turned out that all these stories are already out of Armenia’s control, because as a result of thirty years of negotiations Armenia lost all control in terms of the NK issue. It turned out that Armenia doesn’t decide anything in that regard no more, and the only thing it can decide is to obediently fulfill the decisions made elsewhere,” Pashinyan said.
Pashinyan said that his administration’s mistake was not obeying those decisions.
“We acted like that not only in context of the NK issue, but we did so by realizing that otherwise we’d lose sovereignty and statehood. We understood that actually perhaps the Karabakh issue isn’t the whole story.
And the rest of the story pertains to Armenia, its independence, sovereignty. And I want to record that just like our party’s founding documents stated, today also our supreme goals are Armenia’s independence and sovereignty.
And today we must loudly and clearly declare that we will not yield our statehood, sovereignty and independence to anyone under any circumstance.
And we are a party that must defend independence, sovereignty and statehood,” Pashinyan said in his speech.
