Armenia's Prime Minister, organizer of the current hostilities against Azerbaijan Nikol Pashinyan returned for another interview to BBC yesterday. In order to avoid mistakes in English (like he did during the interview with Stephen Sackur, saying that there are 18% of Armenians living in Karabakh), this time he spoke in Armenian, but the severity of the situation on the battlefield did not allow him to speak in Armenian with dignity.
Speaking to the BBC's Jonah Fisher, Nikol Pashinyan began with the same phrase that de facto put an end to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict over a year ago. "Karabakh is Armenia, it is the land of Armenians," he said, lying that "always 80 plus per cent of the population there have been Armenians." The point here is not even that the Armenians appeared en masse in Karabakh only after the signing of the Turkmanchay Treaty in 1828 (by the way 160 years before the start of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is definitely not "always"), but that the new ideologue of the occupation of Azerbaijani territories denies not only the right of Azerbaijanis to live in their native land, but also their very existence.
The international law has no concept of "land of some nation", there is only "the territory of some state," and representatives of all peoples have the right to live on this territory. Demanding that Karabakh be the land of only Armenians, Nikol Pashinyan voices fascist slogans about racial purity, and he is right when he adds that this is "the essence" of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: indeed, it is a conflict between the radical nationalism of the occupiers who carried out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, and normal humanity, which does not require only one nationality to live in Karabakh.
To cover up the racist essence of the initial statement, he immediately lied that "Azerbaijan wants Armenians not to live there," although Azerbaijan considers all residents of Karabakh to be its citizens who have found themselves under the occupation of the nationalist forces of Armenia. In fact, Azerbaijan wants Karabakh to cease to be a zone of endless war and all its inhabitants - Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Russians, other peoples - to live in peace and quiet. Nikol Pashinyan, of course, cannot allow this, because for him "Karabakh is the land of Armenians."
After listening to Pashinyan's first tirade, Jonah Fisher concluded that having such a position Armenia is clearly not ready for a compromise. "No, we are ready for a compromise," the Prime Minister of Armenia immediately interrupted, but did not eleborate. This is one of the distinguishing features of Nikol Pashinyan's policy regarding the conflict: never offer any specifics, because any specifics will distance him from the main goal - the eternal occupation of the territories of Azerbaijan.
Then Fischer asked if Armenia was ready, as the "Kazan formula" suggested, to de-occupy the Azerbaijani regions around Nagorno-Karabakh, whether such a compromise step was acceptable for it. Pashinyan refused such a prospect, but accused Azerbaijan of the impossibility of de-occupation, which "refuses to recognize the Nagorno-Karabakh people’s right to self-determination." Fischer reminded him that under the current international law, Armenia has been illegally occupying Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent areas for more than 25 years."
Nikol Pashinyan himself, of course, did not read these resolutions, speaking based on the old arguments of his predecessors from the Karabakh clan. For example, the resolutions No. 884 of November 12, 1993, adopted in connection with the occupation of Azerbaijan's Zanglian region by Armenia, in paragraph 4 says: "[The UN Security Council] demands the unilateral withdrawal of occupying forces from the Zangilan district and Horadiz, and the withdrawal of occupying forces from other recently occupied areas of the Azerbaijani Republic."
Armenia always tries to play on the fact that the word "Armenia" is not mentioned in this formulation, but it does not matter. Zanglian region, Horadiz and "other recently occupied regions" are recognized in the document as the lands of Azerbaijan, and it does not matter whose soldiers occupy them - the soldiers of any foreign state must leave the Azerbaijani territories. If there are Armenian soldiers there, they must be unilaterally withdrawn from the occupied lands. Nikol Pashinyan, on the other hand, continues to think that he can somehow change reality with just words.
This is what a British journalist pointed out, saying: "But the lands should belong to Azerbaijan. It is in the resolutions, that they belong to Azerbaijan. Let's be clear about that." In response, the Armenian prime minister began to accuse Azerbaijan of wanting to arrange the "genocide of the Karabakh Armenians" invented by Pashinyan. "Today the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh face the existential threat. The whole problem is if the armed forces of Azerbaijan succeed, it will mean the genocide of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh," he lied.
And again, no, Azerbaijan does not plan ethnic cleansing in the liberated territories, the multicultural and multinational policy of Baku simply does not imply such a program as discrimination of citizens on ethnic grounds. Armenians live in Azerbaijan today quite normally (by the way, their very presence in the republic is stubbornly denied by Yerevan) and suffer from the aggression of the Armenian military as well as other peoples of the country - let us recall that Armenian citizen Karina Grigoryan was wounded as a result of a missile strike on Ganja.
At the end of the interview, Jonah Fischer asked why Nikol Pashinyan called Russian President Vladimir Putin so many times during the hostilities. The Armenian prime minister was unable to answer anything concrete, only saying "those treaties set out that, indeed, if the territory of the Republic of Armenia in case of imminent threat defined under certain parameters, Russia shell uphold certain certain security commitments."
" You see, I cannot answer your question in political terms. The Russian Federation has assured that its undertakings which are defined in treaties, it will uphold them," Nikol Pashinyan said, adding that this was exactly what Vladimir Putin told him.
