People Living Along the Contact Line Should Be Able to Acquire Weapons: Metakse Hakobyan

Metakse Hakobyan, a member of the National Assembly of Artsakh, stated in an interview with ArmDaily.am that the abduction and murder of a resident of Chartar by Azerbaijani soldiers should not be a reason for distributing weapons to the people. Hakobyan noted that the Artsakh parliament is currently amending the law regarding the carrying of weapons.

“We are now making changes to the law on weapons, which will facilitate the process for residents to acquire firearms. In addition, our faction has proposed, and it seems that the proposal has been preliminarily accepted, to subsidize residents of communities located along the contact line so that they can procure weapons. Perhaps this could provide a solution to the problem,” Hakobyan said.

Regarding the brutal murder of a 65-year-old man from Martuni, Hakobyan emphasized that Azerbaijanis will use any occasion to commit such acts, aiming to instill panic, fear, and terror so that people leave Artsakh as soon as possible.

“Partially, they are succeeding, because there are people who cannot withstand this tension. The sad part is that authorities need to ensure that such events do not cause panic because we must also realize that in the situation we are currently in, anything can be expected from a treacherous enemy; it is not new for us to recognize the Turk, especially the Armenians living in Artsakh know very well how the Turk has behaved over the decades they have been forced to coexist. If we generalize this, our authorities need to apply measures—we recently discussed these measures, and they have different options, but I will not elaborate on them due to security concerns. Perhaps this might alleviate the created situation, but it is late; we must acknowledge that this should have been done immediately after the trilateral declaration, not just now starting to think about how to implement this process from 2022,” added the Artsakh deputy.

Metakse Hakobyan pointed out that today we face challenges not only regarding the enemy's potential to enter our territory and abduct our compatriots, but there are also serious issues concerning the lands adjacent to the contact line, which are under our control, yet farmers already fear to carry out any work there. Effectively, we are deprived of this opportunity and are now losing the possibility of cultivating the lands that are under our control.

“Everything is to be expected from the enemy, that they will enter and, even from a distance, kill a peaceful farmer or abduct livestock, as was the case in the murder of a shepherd. Today I had the opportunity to ask a question to an official from the Defense Army regarding the events related to the Red Market and our expectations overall; I do not want to comment on this too much, because, in reality, they are also issues concerning the security of Artsakh,” said Hakobyan.

He emphasized that the main concern is that the current Prime Minister of Armenia is in charge of everything, the one who led us to defeat, yet our army is fulfilling its assigned functions.