Graphic © Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Serzh Sargsyan, the Gray Cardinal of Armenian politics as he was often referred to back in the day, has spoken. It is unlikely that many Armenians will be hanging on his every word given that it’s only four years since street protests forced him to resign. The hand-picked successor to the far more ruthless and cynical Robert Kocharian, Sargsyan had come to power in 2008 in a bitterly contested presidential vote that left 10 people dead following post-election violence.
But even though that was largely Kocharian’s doing, and while Sargsyan was hardly as bad as his predecessor, he was nonetheless loathed, paving the way for the 2018 Velvet Revolution that perhaps wasn’t as much about democracy, but more an intense dislike of a self-perpetuating regime poorly governing a country from which many thought only of leaving. Yet, while his re-emergence might come as a surprise, it is also understandable.
Today, Sargsyan’s nemesis is the same as in both 2008 and 2018 – Nikol Pashinyan.
Perhaps more significantly, following Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Karabakh war, both Sargsyan and Kocharian likely view the current environment as one that they can exploit to return to power. However, it isn’t just that. In recent statements, Pashinyan has effectively accused both men of ‘selling-out’ the mainly ethnic Armenian-populated and disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh. Pashinyan might not be a nationalist, but he is a populist.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Yerevan Bureau has more.
Former President Serzh Sarkisian has rejected Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s continuing criticism of peace proposals made by the United States, Russia and France during his rule, insisting that they did not call for Azerbaijani control over Nagorno-Karabakh.
The proposals were based on the so-called Madrid Principles of the Karabakh conflict’s resolution first drafted by the three world powers leading the OSCE Minsk Group in 2007.
The draft framework accord envisaged that Azerbaijan would regain control over virtually all seven districts around Karabakh occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces in the early 1990s. In return, Karabakh’s predominantly Armenian population would be able to determine the disputed territory’s internationally recognized status in a future referendum.
Pashinian has repeatedly criticized the peace plan since Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. In recent remarks on the subject, he singled out new versions of the plan which the Minsk Group co-chairs put forward in 2016-2018, during the final years of Sarkisian’s presidency.
“In 2016 … Karabakh lost all theoretical and practical chances of not being part of Azerbaijan,” Pashinian claimed in December amid continuing opposition statements blaming him for the outcome of the six-week war that left at least 3,800 Armenian soldiers dead.
Sarkisian sought to disprove such claims in an interview broadcast online late on Monday. He insisted that updated proposals submitted to the conflicting parties by the mediators in 2016 did not cross Armenian “red lines.”
Serzh Sargsyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2008
Sargsyan said that new proposals received from the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs in 2016 would allow Kelbajar and Lachin, two of seven Azerbaijani regions surrounding the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) then under Armenian control, to remain a physical land link between with Karabakh until a referendum was held at an unknown time in the future. The other five regions, however, would be returned before then.
Indeed, this was much speculated about at the time, resulting in an armed ultra-nationalist violent extremist group, Sasner Tsrer, taking over a police station in Yerevan in July the same year to prevent it, as well as to also call for the release of Zhirayr Sefilyan, a Lebanese-Armenian former commander in the first Karabakh war who had long threatened violence if any land, as expected by the international community, was returned to Baku’s control.
The hostage situation that left three policemen dead is believed to have made Sargsyan back off from the “5+2 proposal,” but there is also no indication he would have accepted it anyway. If the red line was whether the referendum to be held would be on external self-determination, i.e. independence, rather than internal self-determination, i.e. some form of local autonomy or governance, then that was a red line for Azerbaijan too.
In fact, it is believed that the basic principles made no reference to what any question would be in any future referendum, so if Baku was unwilling to make concessions, so too was Yerevan.
Indeed, as Robert Aydabirian, Jirair Libaridian, and Taline Papazian wrote in last year’s white paper, The Karabakh War of 2020 and Armenia’s Future Foreign and Security Policies, “the authors do not see the path to independence a likely one, just as it was unlikely before the war.”
Moreover, they even go further, indirectly putting some blame on Sargsyan’s presidency.
In 2016, during the presidency of Serzh Sargsyan, a four-day war exposes vulnerabilities in the defense positions of the Armenian side. Sargsyan then displays a more flexible attitude. Yet he insists on the question of independence, or referendum for independence, which results in the same outcome: no resolution to the conflict.
And it was this deadlock that ultimately lead to the 2020 Karabakh war. It was even clear in the late 2000s that war clouds were visible on the horizon, and by 2011 others such as the International Crisis Group (ICG) were loudly ringing the alarm bells. Though the Azerbaijani side can be criticised for much, it was clear to any attentive and objective observer that time was on Baku’s side and not Yerevan’s – just as Levon Ter-Petrosyan warned in 1997.
Under Kocharian’s presidency, and even though the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs say both sides were close to a deal in Key West, it never seemed like anything more a charade of imitated peace negotiations. Sargsyan, to his credit, did not appear to be as hardline as his predecessor, after all being engaged in the ill-fated 2009 Armenia-Turkey Protocols process as well controversially stating that Armenia never had any claims to Agdam.
Nikol Pashinyan, Yerevan, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian 2008
To be fair, the 2016 Erebuni Police Station siege might well have prevented him from following through with the so-called Lavrov Plan, itself not much more than a variation on the Madrid (Basic) Principles, but this was really the beginning of the end.
“There are Madrid Principles. There are documents prepared by the Russian Federation in 2010-2011, the so-called Kazan document. There are projects that were distributed in April last year in Moscow at the meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan with the participation of the co-chairs, and they are now being actively discussed,” Lavrov said, implying that the an eventual settlement of the conflict will be done in phases, or a stage-by-stage approach.
Lavrov went a step further in his remarks on Tuesday by saying that “assuming at the first stage the solution of the most pressing problems, which are the liberation of a number of areas around Nagorno-Karabakh and the unlocking of transport, economic and other communications.”
As mentioned earlier, Pashinyan is not a nationalist but he is a populist and miscalculated that there would not be any negative reaction to some of his words and actions. The infamous meeting between the Armenian Prime Minister and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the Munich Security Conference in February 2020 particularly springs to mind.
Following the Velvet Revolution led by Nikol Pashinyan, the parties to the conflict agree on confidence-building measures. The expected negotiations on substantive issues do not take place. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes the Armenian side has still time before it must enter into such negotiations. He is convinced that he can assemble a strong international alliance in support of Armenia and Karabakh’s independence, relying on the success of his Velvet Revolution and the strong steps taken toward the return of democratic governance in Armenia. Eventually the positive atmosphere between Azerbaijan and Armenia degenerates into mutual recriminations. The Armenian side declares that negotiations are useless, and rejects formulas offered for the partial resolution of the conflict based on the step-by-step approach.
Pashinyan does not have the full confidence of Russia. When full scale war arrives, anticipated diplomatic, and possibly military, support from the West does not materialise, and the Armenian side finds itself alone and loses the war.
In a sense, then, Sargsyan and Pashinyan are hardly being honest on the prospects for peace back then, and who is particularly to blame, leading some to accuse both, as well as Robert Kocharyan before them. All three failed to recognise the reality and and a precarious situation that should have seen more of a sense of urgency in striking a peace deal. But perhaps the most blame lies with Robert Kocharian, Vazgen Sargsyan, and Serzh Sargsyan in 1998.
It is also quite possible that peace was never possible after they forced the first President of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, to resign precisely over a compromise peace deal.
To end, while there is much to criticise Pashinyan for, that overlooks one other new reality. There is now another chance to work towards a difficult but necessary peace before it is too late. As Libaridian and others have warned, failure to do so will likely lead to more losses for Armenia in the future. Though sadly and inexcusably coming at the cost of several thousand deaths, that opportunity should not be squandered for the sake of future generations.
