If You Wanted War to Start, You Should Have Said: 'Karabakh Is Armenia and That's It' - Robert Kocharyan

If we wanted a peaceful resolution to the Karabakh issue, we always had to give the opponent hope that they would resolve some of their questions through negotiations, said Robert Kocharyan, a candidate for Prime Minister from the 'Armenia' alliance, during a meeting with voters in Charentsavan.

"If you wanted war to start, you should have said: 'Karabakh is Armenia and that's it', and we would have had nothing to discuss, which is what our government did. The negotiating process was halted and everything was directed towards war. Here is another major mistake that has recently been made: we have shifted the issue from the realm of the right to self-determination to the realm of territorial integrity. This means that you are giving Azerbaijan legitimate rights to solve the issue by force. One of the reasons why no country condemned it is due to this. No country condemned the country that started the war," Kocharyan said.

According to the candidate for Prime Minister, this is a failure of our diplomacy, which has no justification. He also noted that the mistake is not with the diplomats; in Kocharyan's assessment, our diplomatic staff is quite good. "Simply, someone has been placed in the upper echelons who is executing orders from one person. The rest of the staff did not receive any assignments or directives to act on," he emphasized. He also stressed that we must bring the issue back to the realm of the right to self-determination.