Armenian circus has lost a great clown Sargsyan’s retro show

“There is one thing that's better than mountains, and it's mountains that we haven't climbed.” Paraphrasing these famous lyrics by Vladimir Vysotsky, one might say: the only thing more amusing than Serzh Sargsyan’s statements are the ones he hasn’t made yet. This is a conclusion drawn from firsthand observation of Armenia’s political stage. And to be fair, the third president of Armenia never fails to entertain his audience.

Yesterday, on June 10, Sargsyan decided to speak with local media. In itself, such interaction is not only useful but also essential for any politician — even one as irrelevant as Sargsyan. Yet this is precisely the personal tragedy of the former president: every time he faces the press, it leaves a strong impression that the Armenian circus has lost a truly talented clown in Serzh Sargsyan.

Sargsyan confidently declared: “The so-called Lavrov Plan is a term invented by journalists and the former opposition. There was no such plan.” He then immediately proceeded to discuss the details… of the Lavrov Plan — and did so rather freely.

“First of all, the issue was to be resolved as follows: the status of Nagorno-Karabakh would be determined by the free expression of will of the Nagorno-Karabakh population, with legally binding effect, and the agenda was not limited in any way. Secondly, we were to return five out of the seven districts to Azerbaijan, in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions. Peacekeeping forces were to be deployed, and depending on when the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh was determined, the fate of the remaining two districts would also be decided,” he said, adding that “the proposed solution was very good for Armenia.”

And here a logical question arises: “So why didn’t official Yerevan agree to this proposal and opt for the peaceful return of the five temporarily occupied Azerbaijani districts?” The answer is obvious: the reality was far more complex and quite different from what Serzh Sargsyan now claims. He conveniently omits the most important point — the categorical rejection by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev of what Sargsyan describes.

Even the Telegram channel Baghramyan 26, known as a mouthpiece for current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, recently published “shocking details” revealed by former Karabakh separatist and “Nagorno-Karabakh MP” Vahram Atanesyan during a series of interviews with journalist Tatul Hakobyan. He recounted what took place on November 7, 2014 at the so-called session of the inter-parliamentary cooperation committee between Armenia and the “NKR” — an entity Yerevan has long supported politically, financially, and militarily.

“At the 45-minute meeting, Serzh Sargsyan spoke alone for 30 minutes. His entire speech focused on the meeting in Sochi, which, if I’m not mistaken, took place on September 26 (editor’s note: it was actually August 10, 2014), between Putin, Sargsyan, and Aliyev. You’ll remember the escalation in July — that was when Azerbaijan first used a kamikaze drone, destroying our OSA-AK air defence system along with the entire crew, something our side never reported at all,” he began his account.

Here, it’s important to highlight a key point: this is a clear admission that Armenia’s former leadership, under Serzh Sargsyan, deliberately concealed the truth from its own citizens.

“Sargsyan spoke very openly and in great detail, telling us that the essence of the discussions was this: Armenia was to unconditionally return five districts to Azerbaijan. Then, at some indefinite point in the future, a referendum on the status of ‘Nagorno-Karabakh’ was to be held — a plan Ilham Aliyev flatly rejected,” said Atanesyan.

And there it is — the crucial detail that Serzh Sargsyan continues to leave out to this day.

How can one not laugh at Armenia’s third president, who, in his attempts to discredit Pashinyan, ended up providing yet another reason to admire the principled stance of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev — a leader who showed remarkable resolve and firmness in rejecting a plan that favoured Armenia and was being imposed on Azerbaijan by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries?

And yet, that wasn’t Sargsyan’s only blunder yesterday. When responding to journalists’ remark that Prime Minister Pashinyan had criticised Levon Ter-Petrosyan — despite many viewing him as Ter-Petrosyan’s spiritual successor — Sargsyan stated: “I don’t consider the current governor to be the spiritual son of Levon Ter-Petrosyan. And how this came to be is quite clear: the man governing Armenia is doing everything possible to discredit any prominent figure.”

What staggering moral and ethical pettiness, what political pygmyism! To refer to Nikol Pashinyan — the man who swept Serzh Sargsyan and the entire Karabakh clan into the dustbin of Armenian politics — not as the prime minister, but merely as “the man governing Armenia,” is, at the very least, small-minded. And what does that make Sargsyan himself, if he refers to the man who unseated him as though Pashinyan were running a beer kiosk?

Incidentally, Armenian society is now grappling with a rather curious question: does the Catholicos of All Armenians, Garegin II, really have a son, as Pashinyan claims? If so, it would mean the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church has broken his vow of celibacy. Given Sargsyan’s frequent meetings with the Catholicos, one might expect him to shed some light on this murky affair. But no — he’d rather muse about Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s “spiritual son,” when the more appropriate voices on the matter would be Ter-Petrosyan himself or Pashinyan. Certainly not Sargsyan, who once opposed Ter-Petrosyan and who has his own so-called “spiritual son” in the form of his fugitive son-in-law Mika Minasyan, wanted on multiple criminal charges and too afraid to show his face in Armenia.

This, then, is the final chapter in Serzh Sargsyan’s political saga — entertaining the Armenian public with tone-deaf remarks and laying bare the astounding extent of his irrelevance. Then again, the bigger question may be for the citizens of Armenia themselves: how did they tolerate this clown at the helm for so long?