Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – The Armenian opposition has severely criticized the government, saying Yerevan had "backtracked" from its position on the Nagorno (Upper) Karabakh conflict at last week’s OSCE summit in Astana.

Levon Zurabyan, the coordinator for the Armenian National Congress, said the concessions that Armenia has made in past years were reflected in the joint statement adopted in the Kazakh capital by the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia and the mediating OSCE Minsk Group countries’ senior officials.

"Those concessions are due to the economic failure of the ruling elite in Armenia and a shift of the military and political balance in Azerbaijan’s favor," Zurabyan said, charging that the situation might change for the better only if President Serzh Sargsyan resigns and "a legitimate government is established".

The Nagorno Karabakh conflict was high on the agenda of the OSCE summit, which took place for the first time in more than a decade. The statement, issued by Presidents Ilham Aliyev and Serzh Sargsyan jointly with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said "the time has come for more decisive efforts" to resolve the Karabakh conflict.

Zurabyan said Nagorno Karabakh "is currently not cited as a party to the conflict", which builds on the political course paved by former president Robert Kocharian’s government.

"Armenia also stepped back from the simultaneous enforcement of the principles of the territorial integrity of states and self-determination of nations. Armenia formally agreed that the Nagorno Karabakh conflict is to be settled in line with Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity."

Azerbaijan waged a war with Armenia in the early 1990s, which claimed some 30,000 lives and displaced about a million Azerbaijanis. Armenian armed forces have been occupying over 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory since then, and OSCE-brokered peace talks have been largely fruitless so far.