Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan presents his government’s program to parliament on Thursday
YEREVAN—Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pahsinyan said he is ready to sit down with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but said those negotiations would not be effective as long as one of the full parties to the conflict – the Republic of Artsakh – is not participating in the process.
Pashinyan made these remarks Thursday while presenting his government plan to the National Assembly, which approved it by a vote of 62 to 35.
The prime minister said that having Artsakh at the negotiating table was not something novel, but rather a fact that has been forgotten.
The fact that Artsakh is a full-fledged party to the talks was confirmed at the OSCE Budapest summit in 1994, the Prime Minister said, and reminded that negotiations were being conducted in that format up until 1998, after which representatives of Armenia took over negotiating on behalf of Nagorno Karabakh.
“Before coming to Armenia Robert Kocharian was the elected President of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, while Serzh Sarkisian was an organizer of Artsakh’s self-defense movement. Therefore, they could probably have a mandate to negotiate on behalf of Nagorno Karabakh, irrespective of how we see it. I cannot do the same. I cannot retain the right to hold negotiations on behalf of the people of Artsakh., because I have no legal, political or moral bases for it,â€
