Pashinyan: international community urges Armenia to lower the bar on Karabakh status
YEREVAN, April 13. /ARKA/. The international community urges us to lower the bar on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, otherwise it will not be able to help the Armenian side, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said to lawmakers today.
‘The international community is telling Armenia that being the only country in the world that does not recognize the territorial integrity of Turkey's ally Azerbaijan is a great threat not only to Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), but also to Armenia,’ Pashinyan said.
"Today, the international community is again telling us to lower our bar a little bit on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, and there will be greater international consolidation around Armenia and Artsakh. Otherwise, the international community says, 'please don't pin your hopes on us, not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't help you,'" he said.
Pashinyan said there are no countries in the world today that are happy with their borders and consider them fair, but "somewhere we have to stop."
"I should not be accused of surrendering lands, but of not surrendering them. And now I want to confess that I may be guilty of that. Because in 2018-2019 I did not tell the society that all our friends expect us to surrender 7 districts to Azerbaijan in one configuration or another and lower our bar on the Artsakh's status," he said.
The prime minister considers himself guilty of not telling the people that the international community unequivocally recognizes the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and expects Armenia to recognize it as well.
"I am to blame that I didn't say clearly that the scenarios that were unacceptable to us were not acceptable to Azerbaijan as well, and that representatives of the international community sometimes told us that in all this, if the Armenian side accepted one, we would still have to convince Azerbaijan to accept it as well. I should have presented all this in detail to our people. And the fact that I didn't do that is my fault," he said.
He said: "if I had surrendered territories in Artsakh, maybe I would have saved thousands of lives, but having not surrendered them, in fact, I became the author of decisions which resulted in thousands of victims.’
Pashinyan noted that at one time he could not convince himself to talk to the people about it for a number of reasons. -0-
