Tuesday, June 20 2023 12:54

ArmInfo.The OSCE Summit in Lisbon and the article entitled "War or peace? Time to sober up" by  Armenia's first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan proved among the key moments of the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process, Armenia's Premier Nikol Pashinyan stated at a meeting of the Parliamentary Commission  for investigation of the circumstances of the 44-day war.  

According to him, in his article, the first president of Armenia did  not give a clear answer to the question of how he saw the status of  Nagorno-Karabakh. Levon Ter-Petrosyan talked about compromises,  according to which the status quo cannot be maintained for a long  time, and for this reason one should not engage in self-deception,  while the Armenian people have no allies in the issue of the  independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. "The main idea of the first  president was that in the next millennia Karabakh would remain  inhabited by Armenians, but did not give a clear statement about the  status Nagorno-Karabakh," Mr Pashinyan said. 

According to him, in his article, the first President of Armenia and  this article, continued the Prime Minister of the Republic of  Armenia, caused a sharply negative reaction from the country's  political elite. One year before this article the first president of  the RA participated in the presidential elections under the slogan  "Victory, stability, progress", but a year after these elections,  which are questionable in terms of their legitimacy, he began to talk  about peace, not about victory. Meanwhile, 7 years before this  article, the Supreme Council of Armenia decided to reunite with the  Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region. In particular, Pashinyan recalled  the resolution adopted on December 1, 1989 by the Supreme Council of  the Armenian SSR and the National Council of Nagorno-Karabakh on  reunification, on the declaration of independence of Armenia on  September 21, 1991, and on the declaration of independence of  Nagorno- Karabakh on September 2, 1991. Pashinyan cited  Ter-Petrosyan's article, in which the first president notes that from  a personal point of view, the best solution for him would be not to  participate in the 1996 presidential election and remain in the  memory of generations as a winner in the war, but he considered such  a position "cowardly desertion ". As a result, three days and three  months after the publication of the article, Ter-Petrosyan resigned.

As the prime minister noted, Ter-Petrosyan's article has become  another knot that brings confusion to the Karabakh process. There  were no secrets in the negotiation process itself, everything was  published, but the relevant documents were not available to the  general public. According to Pashinyan, the leaders of Armenia and  Artsakh did not publicly state that the 4 resolutions of the UN  Security Council, adopted in 1993 and fixing the "occupation of 7  regions of Azerbaijan by Armenian forces", demanded to immediately  and without preconditions withdraw troops from there. They considered  it unacceptable to use force to gain territories, and  Nagorno-Karabakh was called a "region of the Azerbaijan Republic."  These documents, Pashinyan added, were not just a piece of paper, and  it would not be easy to consign them to oblivion. In this regard, he  noted that although the OSCE summit in Lisbon in 1996 had no legal  force, the position of the international community showed that the  community recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and  provides for the status of high autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh within  its borders.