Is Armenia prepared for worst-case scenario? – Robert Kocaharyan on Pashinyan, Artsakh and Russia: Sputnik Armenia

Jailed former President Robert Kocharyan, who is facing trial in connection with the March 1, 2008 deadly post-electoral events, has responded to several questions by Sputnik Armenia.

The third president shared his concerns over the current govenrment's policies, addressing, among other things, the unresolved Ngaorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict and the future of the Armenian-Russian relations.

Below are excerpts from his comments sent from the isolation ward (where the ex-president is currently spending his pre-trial detention).

On Armenia's political landscape

What does Armenia's political landscape look like today? With the exception of a couple of minister-technochrats – not having the character of a real political subject – the government and the nucleus of the parliamentary majority is composed of individuals feeding themselves with US grants. The government receives media support exclusively from pro-Western media outlets, with Radio Liberty being their vanguard. All the pro-government parties, politicians, and non-governmental organizations pursue barefaced pro-Western policies, relying, as a rule, on Western funding. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also actively backs a party notorious for its terrorist reputation, which aggressively leads the battle to remove the Russian military base from Armenia. The entire politically active fulcrum behind the prime minister thus turns out to be openly pro-Western. And all this is under conditions of continuing the former authorities policy line by showing periodically courtesy to Russia.  

On the other hand, the political parties and figures, whose orientation implies a multi-sectoral cooperation with Russia, do not offer any support to the incumbent authorities, having absolutely no trust in the latter. All believe that the government’s pro-Western stance transforms into a mercantile pragmatism once finding itself confronted with Russian energy carriers and the Russian market. The picture is paradoxical indeed.

As to how long this “geopolitical ambiguity” by the ruling elite will drag on depends upon the situational circumstances. The entire resources of external trust in government is wasted on the negligent evasions of explaining the conflict between beliefs and practical actions.

As a result, Armenia lives on without conceptual programs, governed by the regime of empty slogans and foreign policy guidelines full of uncertainties.

On the current phase of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

What is the situation with the Karabakh settlement in the context of global and regional processes? The weakening of our negotiating positions due to our gross errors is obvious indeed. The prime minister’s statement, “Artsakh is Armenia - period”, shifted the negotiations from the track underlying the principle of the self-determination of nations to a platform not quite desirable for us, i.e. – that of territorial integrity.

The elevator contacts between Pashinyan and Aliyev nullified, in point of fact, the arrangements reached in Vienna and St Petersburg, which were very important for us. The controversial statement by Armenia’s leadership and the absence of a clearly worded position on settlement called into question Armenia’s constructiveness. That kind of perception has, by the way, already gone beyond the scope of the mediators’ evaluation, reducing itself to the public domain. Mnatsakanyan’s interview with BBC left an unpleasant residue. All that lowers the threshold of renewed military actions by Azerbaijan under the pretext of the apparent pointlessness of negotiations and the [ambitions] to re-establish its territorial integrity.

The ceasefire maintenance potential has weakened also due to the fact that amid the increasing global contradictions, the international community has noticeably reduced the resource of peace enforcement. It is additionally important to have the understanding that its scales and detrimental consequences will be the heaviest ever should a war ever erupt.

The conflicting parties have accumulated an extremely big storage of arms and arms supplies. The perception of all this would, perhaps, sober up the authorities, increasing their responsibility. Is Armenia - which is currently divided between blacks and whites - prepared for worst-case scenarios as these? A country's security is not dependent only upon the combat efficiency of its armed forces and the quantity and quality of arms supplies. Public sentiments and consensus over nationwide issues appear to be of no less importance.

Never before has our society been split through controversies to such a high degree. The complicated relationship between the governing elites of Armenia and Artsakh, the demonization of war heroes, humiliation of generals with a military past and the disrespect for the memory of killed servicemen appear to be the dangerous enemies of the society's patriotic potential. And the fact that the country's defense budget is being practically frozen - against the backdrop of the 20% increase in the adversary’s military expenditures – is hardly and rather suspiciously characterized beyond the frameworks of theories of conspiracy to fall within a normative lexicon