They are trying to do it in a very disgusting way. Aleksanyan

Our sisters and brothers from Artsakh are being exploited by opposition partners for their own purposes. This was stated by the MP from the Civil Contract party, Vahagn Aleksanyan, during a conversation with journalists at the National Assembly.

“They have tried to do this from the very beginning, from the time our sisters and brothers in Nagorno-Karabakh were subjected to forced displacement. However, after several disappointments and unable to mobilize those people, unable to incite protests in Armenia, it seems that they have stepped back from that idea. Now they are trying to do it again, and they are trying to do it in a very disgusting way,” he said.

Aleksanyan also accused the media of giving voice to radical-minded residents of Artsakh and putting misleading headlines. In response to a comment that government-affiliated media, for example, are framing headlines like “An Artsakh resident regrets even losing a gulyan, everyone should be equal to the ground,” he stated that this is not normal and that he strongly condemns it.

“But you know what the problem is? Your media and others are talking to citizens of Nagorno-Karabakh who hold radical views and getting such headlines as ‘I will bury the kids,’ ‘I will bury the wife,’ ‘I will kill the family, hang them upside down from a tree,’ such headlines, and then when you hear a counter narrative from other people, you begin to criticize those people,” he noted.

Aleksanyan stated that he joins the criticism but emphasized that when the criticism is one-sided, that polarization is what the opposition wants. “That is what the opposition wants to achieve. Both sides should call on the citizens of Artsakh participating in the actions not to become tools in the hands of the opposition, not to spread the hatred and narratives of the opposition, curses, and slanders, and to explain to our citizens that the opposition is trying to exploit them for their own interests,” concluded the MP.