Levon Ter-Petrosyan States Under What Circumstances the People Would Not Be in a Dire Situation

The first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, has commented on the letter directed today by 80 intellectuals to the international community and the authorities of Armenia. Below is Ter-Petrosyan's response:

"Today, on March 2, a letter from eighty intellectuals (academics, corresponding members of the National Academy of Sciences, doctors of sciences, candidates, etc.) has been published in the press, addressed to the international community, the co-chairs of the Minsk Group, as well as the executive and legislative authorities of Armenia, calling for 'immediate' actions to resume the resolution process of the Karabakh conflict and to de-occupy the territories of the Republic of Artsakh, allowing displaced citizens to return to their homes.

Apologizing for my immodesty, I would urge the esteemed intellectuals to read the following excerpt from the memoirs of Avetik Isahakyan: ‘Many years after being absent from the Caucasus, when I returned to my homeland, I saw my old friend Leo in Yerevan. I found him aged prematurely and with health issues, but spiritually he was the same oak as the mountains of Karabakh. Until late at night, sitting in front of the writing desk, we conversed. His terrifying memory, which was not in any way withered, seemed to engulf me. He recounted stories from childhood, from Shushi, about Karabakh, both old and new, about meliks, catholicoses, khans, wars, writers, authors, books and more books, and a thousand incidents, faces, passages, personalities, anecdotes. The horrors and calamities suffered by the Armenian people in the Great War filled his soul with bitterness. He was shattered by the weight of that unbearable sorrow. 'I will only forget the pain of the Armenian people in the grave. But who is to blame,' he told me, 'we are to blame, we intellectuals, the leaders, you, me, and all of them.'

Our people are not to blame. Rather, we, who were so foolish and ignorant to believe in the profit-driven, capitalist-bourgeois Europe, for whom the lives of colonial sheep are valued more than Armenians, than small oppressed nations. We, who, like children, believed in the conscience of enlightened humanity, in humanity, in the sellable international press, in hyenas and puppy diplomats… We, the talkative ones, the great speakers, we who created and nurtured the parties that embodied the arrogance, boastfulness, and genocidal ignorance of Armenian intellectuals." (Avetik Isahakyan, 'From My Memoirs' 1933). My deep conviction is that if the intellectuals who signed the letter had had the courage to publicly demand that the Armenian authorities resolve the Karabakh issue on the basis of compromises, our people would not be in such a dire situation today."