After consulting with the Armenian Diaspora in New York, Armenia's "revolutionary" Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addressed the session of the UN General Assembly with the renewed Yerevan concept of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: he has moved forward on the road of tougher rhetoric and directly accused Baku of intending to carry out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories Azerbaijan after their release.
According to Pashinyan, he came up with it after Baku and the OSCE Minsk Group refused to change the format of the Minsk process. The new Armenian PM insists on including a self-proclaimed 'NKR' as a third party to the talks.
"This is possible only if Azerbaijani government wants the territory and not the people. Thus, it becomes obvious that the intention of Azerbaijani leadership is to cleanse Karabakh from Armenians. Hence Karabakh must not be a part of Azerbaijan, unless one wants to trigger a new genocide of Armenian people," he said at the UN.
This provocation did not cause much reaction from the negotiators and Azerbaijan: the OSCE Minsk Group fixed that Yerevan had exacerbated the rhetoric, while Baku quietly refused to change the format of the talks, confirming the desire to settle the conflict peacefully on the already existing site. The international documents confirm that the occupation of the Azerbaijani territories by the Armenian troops is an interstate conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the opinion of the casual person from the street cannot change it.
Apparently, the new Prime Minister of Armenia considered that was not loud enough, therefore he started to make harsher statements on Karabakh - like the news in the Armenian media about Pashinyan sending his son to serve in the occupation zone. This speech at the UN General Assembly was the peak of his provocative rhetoric.
Pashinyan remains silent about the expulsion of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR, which began in the winter of 1988; Pashinyan does not say a word about ethnic cleansing in Karabakh and other regions of Azerbaijan during the Karabakh war and occupation; Pashinyan does not even remember the Khojaly tragedy. It would seem that these are the crimes of his official opponents, Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan - but in reality Nikol Pashinyan, who voluntarily surrendered to the authorities in 2009, went to prison for organizing mass riots for 7 years and was released after a year and a half, is their heir.
Nikol Pashinyan's statements on representation of Nagorno-Karabakh in the future as part of Armenia's territory and the need for participation of the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as a third party of the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement don't correspond to spirit of negotiation process that has been conducted for over 25 years under auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, political scientist Andrei Yepifantsev told Vestnik Kavkaza earlier.
"We can see that Armenia's position in negotiations on Nagorno-Karabakh is changing. If previously it tried to drag out negotiations under plausible pretexts as much as it could, now it shows that it's not ready for any compromises. Perhaps Yerevan's position will change when Pashinyan will be diplomatically put in his place," Yepifantsev noted.
The fact that Nikol Pashinyan has no other language other than the language of streets and newspaper front pages was his personal problem until May 8, 2018, when, with the permission of Sargsyan's party, he led the Armenian government, but now this is a problem both for the republic, for its neighbors in the region, for its partners and allies in the international arena. Today, he is doing everything to resume clashes in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone, while striving to overtop his own loud words about Armenia's Karabakh with even more loudly words about the nonexistent aggression of Azerbaijan. And this is a repeat of the tactics of Kocharyan and Sargsyan "kill someone but scream that you are being killed."
