Video: "We Do This Without Understanding," Says Alen Simonyan

“No one claims that Turkey and Azerbaijan are not hostile towards us. That is a fact. We also need to note and fix how we have been, for understandable reasons, hostile towards our neighboring countries at least for the last 100 years. In the same way, we have been hostile and consider ourselves enemies of our neighbors. They perceive us in that way too,” stated the Speaker of the National Assembly Alen Simonyan during his speech in parliament, asking, “So, how are we going to solve this issue?”

“You say that we are bringing Turkish and Azerbaijani matters. No, that does not correspond to reality. We want to secure our country from future developments that it is not ready for and cannot be ready for—again for objective reasons. That is merely the case. There is a reality that has been created after the war. I have often said that the opposition's tactics and what is happening at the border coincide; I see a connection there, but now I want to move away from that assumption,” he said.

Simonyan also mentioned that it is possible that both the opposition and the government are overlooking the situation: “When you say we have our mistakes, we also have our mistakes. And could it be that among those mistakes is the fact that we are taking advantage, not noticing, and are pouring water into their mill? We do this without understanding. Once an Azerbaijani narrative is thrown into circulation, both we and you take that narrative and build the entire process around it; you say you took it, we say no, you took it, and we try to justify ourselves.”

Simonyan urged to stop all this so as not to pour water into the mill of neighboring countries that are hostile towards us.