Pashinyan narrowing space for compromise
By Trend
Since the day the former Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan was overthrown, Baku has never had any illusion that subsequent Armenian leaders would stop playing tricks and show common sense in an attempt to come to terms with Azerbaijan.
However, what the newly-elected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is calling for might cause a full-scale war.
He has come to power on the wave of the popular movement that was aimed reportedly against corruption and inefficient economic management. Well, Nikol, do a favor, go and reform the drowning national economy, feed the people living in poverty, and give them jobs.
However, instead, he visits the occupied Azerbaijani territories and starts tempting their residents – citizens of Azerbaijan and Armenians by origin – with a possible future “unification” of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia.
Armenians themselves speak about the contradictory statements of Pashinyan and his ignorance of the subject.
“A few days ago, at a press conference, the prime minister expressed a number of approaches that can be dangerous,” former defense minister of Armenia, Vigen Sargsyan, believes.
He further said the prime minister’s statements “lack awareness of the details of the negotiation process [on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict’s settlement]."
Maybe in future Pashinyan will manage to grow into a major and experienced political figure in Armenia, but today his actions look mostly emotional and short-sighted.
Pashinyan's statements sound like the other side of the conflict - which has enough power to disabuse him of his fanciful ideas - doesn’t exist.
Therefore, it would be unjust not to warn the rookie Armenian leader against taking dangerous steps with a quote from “Rambo: First Blood”, which he probably watched when he was a child: “Don't push it. Don't push it or I'll give you a war you won't believe.”
Azerbaijan's position is that - until the very last moment, while the opponent is still negotiable - it will avoid using military solution for returning the occupied territories.
Recent statements made by the new prime minister of Armenia are narrowing the space for a compromise.
At the time, the former President of Armenia Levon Ter-Petrosyan warned that “what we reject today, we will ask for in the future, but we will not get it, as has happened many times in our history.”
Ter-Petrosyan noted that there is no other way but to come to a compromise, otherwise a war will be an option: “Maximalism and denial of a compromise are the shortest way to aggravate the situation in Armenia.”
There are many Armenians who realize Armenia has been on the wrong track in its aggressive behavior.
Video messages from Philip Ekozyants, the Armenian blogger living in Ukraine, became a real trouble for the apologists of the “Greater Armenia” geopolitical project – a trap created more than 100 years ago against Turkey and Russia, into which the Armenians were lured.
His addresses to Armenians, posted on YouTube, dispel the murk that the “friends” of the Armenian people once plunged the entire nation into.
He asks his compatriots what ordinary Armenians (not those living in California, Paris or Moscow) could do – to live in peace with neighbors or continue to chase after the chimera called “Greater Armenia” and demand lands that they never owned?
The answer is up to the people of Armenia, but it seems that they do not understand what is going on, although they consider themselves the “most ancient” people on the Earth.
If the new Armenian authorities continue holding their radical stance, we soon will see a new revolution in that country.
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