Our Problem is That We Haven't Confronted This Truth and Haven't Told Our People About It: Nikol Pashinyan on the Right to Self-Determination of Artsakh

“Why am I saying and doing all this? Is it because I am a traitor? Is it because I am a foreign agent who dreams of giving away land to someone?” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated during a meeting with representatives of the Armenian community in Munich and surrounding areas.

“First, we must acknowledge one thing: what we have perceived as the right to self-determination and based our entire policy on since 1994, even before that, has had a different meaning because we all, for a long time, did not understand a very important fact.

In December 1996, the OSCE Lisbon Summit took place. What was this summit about? Essentially it provided an interpretation of the self-determination concept regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. The president of the OSCE Lisbon Summit stated in his address that this position is shared by the entire international community, except for one country, and that country was the Republic of Armenia. He literally recorded that the realization of the right to self-determination of Nagorno-Karabakh means obtaining a high degree of autonomy within Azerbaijan.

Here lies our fundamental problem. I am part of this issue, and I am both an object and a subject. I am an object insofar as I was part of the perception that the right to self-determination was understood this way before I became Prime Minister. We went to the international community and stated that Nagorno-Karabakh should be independent based on our right to self-determination. The international community responded that it was us who created the right to self-determination. This means that the legislator of self-determination told us, ‘Dear Armenians, yes, you have the right to self-determination, and this right should be realized by granting a high degree of autonomy to Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan.’ Our problem is that we haven't confronted this truth and haven't told our people about it.

Thinking that we can navigate through these international processes and achieve our goals, but that’s not how it works. We thought we were fighting against Azerbaijan, but we have actually engaged in this conflict against the entire international community, which is unreasonable. Why am I saying and doing all this? Is it because I am a traitor? Is it because I am a foreign agent who dreams of giving away land to someone? Of course, some may think that way, but I am doing this because I understand that if we continue on this path—of which I am a part—we will lose our homeland,” Pashinyan concluded.