Factions of the National Assembly of Artsakh have described as “unacceptable and condemnable” the “divisive statements” made by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan regarding forcibly displaced people from Artsakh. This is stated in an official declaration by the parliament of the Republic of Artsakh.
On the morning of March 22, in the metro, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan offered a woman from Artsakh traveling with her young son a badge shaped like Armenia’s map. She refused, saying: “We have another map.” During the exchange, Pashinyan said: “None of you should speak dismissively about this map; next time don’t try to say I gave away Karabakh.”
“The use of such vocabulary at the level of a head of state is incompatible with the declared principles of national solidarity. Deliberately discrediting the people of Artsakh is not only humiliating but also a gross distortion of reality. This concerns thousands of people who have been deprived of their homeland under existential threat and through forced displacement. Political manipulation at the expense of their dignity is unacceptable. When a public official entrusted with state responsibility begins to present the rights of their own people as ‘unrealistic’ or a ‘delusion,’ they are no longer engaged in politics but are instead justifying their own inaction and failures.
The right of the people of Artsakh to return is not a matter for bargaining. It is a fundamental right that cannot be nullified by any official statement or political expediency.
Moreover, it is unacceptable to use rhetoric that attempts to accuse us—people of Artsakh—regarding the ‘unprecedented’ levels of support provided from the state budget of the Republic of Armenia. Nationwide solidarity cannot be portrayed as a ‘debt’ or used as a tool of pressure.
We demand an immediate halt to the dissemination and amplification of such statements and call for refraining from rhetoric that divides society. Any opinion or statement voiced at a high state level inevitably has consequences, and responsibility for those consequences is borne by history for a long time,” the statement reads.
Later, Pashinyan invited Armine Mosiyan to the government to apologize live. Mosiyan is the daughter of Meruzhan Mosiyan, a field commander killed in the Artsakh liberation war in 1993.
