Armenian journalist: PM Pashinyan chooses war instead of settlement

Armenian journalist Tatul Hakobyan has written that if a third country had been negotiating for Armenia for 30 years, Armenia probably would not have reached such a dishonourable, humiliating end.

“We chose death out of 10 possible options. We could obtain the status of an autonomous republic for Garabagh in 1988. We said that this is not enough,” Caliber.Az reports citing Hakobyan’s message on Facebook.

“We could have preserved Garabagh and Lachin in 1997 stretching 6,200 square kilometres as a continuation of the Republic of Armenia and we would have had the Republic of Armenia through which pipelines and railways would pass, but the organisers of the military coup Serzh Sargsyan, Robert Kocharyan [ex-presidents] and Vartan Oskanian [former foreign minister] needed power, money and fame, rather than safe Garabagh and Armenia. The regime of Kocharyan and Sargsyan flourished from 1998 to 2018. There was no Garabagh issue for them, they said that the issue had been resolved,” the journalist wrote.

“After 2018, Pashinyan, having huge legitimacy, instead of returning to a painful and dignified settlement, took a gamble and brought us a 44-day disaster [second Garabagh war]. We could have been more careful with the paper dated November 9, 2020, but we called it a surrender and Pashinyan a capitulator to oust him. We could still keep the Armenians in the cradle, even without status in August 2023, but the Kocharyan-Serzh-Arkady [Ghukasyan]-Bako [Sahakyan] group carried out a coup in Garabagh. Today, the representative of this group, Shahramanyan, signed a decree on the dissolution of “NKR”. Death or freedom. We didn't see any other options. We decided to die,” Hakobyan wrote.