Human rights activist: Armenians themselves brought Azerbaijanis to war

Armenian human rights activist Vardan Harutyunyan has said that even today Armenian people can talk about the obvious mistakes that Armenia made and which led to such a situation.

“The saddest circumstance was that the word was not heard, it was voiced, but it was not heard. I personally spoke and wrote that everything must be done to prevent war. During the war, I regularly said that it must be stopped within a day,” Harutyunyan told 1in TV channel, Caliber.Az reports.

“There were great opportunities to solve the problem in the 1990s, the OSCE Minsk Group was created, a compromise solution to the Garabagh issue was proposed, and it is known that this led to a coup in Armenia because some Armenian officials, namely, Serzh Sargsyan, Vazgen Sargsyan, Robert Kocharyan and the Garabagh authorities were fully against resolving the issue through a compromise,” the human rights activist noted.

Harutyunyan added that the officials thought that making compromises was a defeat. If you have nothing to give up through negotiations, you do not want to understand the logic of the other side and propose to resolve the issue with your fists rather than in court, through negotiations, then you will have to go into battle, and we went into battle. We have been saying for 25 years that we won and will continue winning.

“The talk about peace in Armenia for 25 years has been perceived as a betrayal, “the sale of Garabagh”. This has been the state propaganda for 25 years in a row. Most of our people are still victims of this propaganda. Some people still think that we should be in a state of perpetual war, every day our children must stand on the border at which the enemy is targeting, and at which we are targeting the enemy's children,” he said.

The human rights activist said that these thoughts brought us to 2020. 

“We had generals and commanders who thought this way, namely, Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, Nikol Pashinyan. As for Pashinyan, I hoped that he would be able to enter into real negotiations with the enemy. Call Azerbaijan 'enemy' if you want, some people want to call Azerbaijan 'enemy'. It was necessary to negotiate with the enemy; there is no benefit from negotiations with a friend. For example, we have friendly relations with Uruguay, you can negotiate as long as you want. Is there any benefit? However, Azerbaijan is near Armenia, bordering Armenia, and it was necessary to negotiate with Azerbaijan. We have reached this point. This point is Armenia without Garabagh.

It is wrong to look for the guilty anywhere, to blame the Azerbaijanis, the Russians, and the Europeans because we are responsible. We can be offended by Russia, which could help more, we can be offended by Iran and Azerbaijan, but first of all, we should be offended by ourselves. Why did we reach this milestone with our own steps? Why did we create such a situation that today is already so difficult,” Harutyunyan said.

Harutyunyan noted that even at the end of the 2020 war, I wrote and spoke a lot that we had lost Garabagh’s right to self-determination. I reiterated many times in this studio and in others that we lost two years, lost the first two years after the war of 2021-2022 because again we did not agree to subjective negotiations on the status of Garabagh, even as part of Azerbaijan because the end of the 44-day second Garabagh war in November 2020 showed that it is impossible to see Garabagh independent. This was obvious, but we continued talking about the right of self-determination as it was in 1994, however, the situation was different.

“In general, we needed to draw conclusions in 2016, but Serzh Sargsyan stated in the parliament in 2017 that the negotiations had ended because Azerbaijan only expected concessions from Armenia. Of course, Azerbaijan used force and saw that it could win, we brought the Azerbaijanis to war. Therefore, the war of 2022 and this last one could have been stopped, if we were far-sighted and prudent. We were guided by emotions,” he added.