LESSON IN MUNICH

Debates between the President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinian held at the Munich Security Conference provided a lot of useful information to those in Europe and around the world who still questions the moral, political, legal and historical truth on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Armenian prime minister was unable to counter the convincing, factaul and well-documented arguments of President Aliyev but made a series of provocative and absurd statements, which only proved Pashinian’s image as a politician who is able to cancel the prospect of peaceful settlement of the conflict due to uncontrollable emotions and attempts to replace the fundamental principles of the settlement with considerations that meet the interests of the Armenian occupation of Karabakh.

Status quo has no prospect

The focus of the debates was on the essence of the settlement and the prospect of achieving it. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev made it clear that conflict resolution should be based on the principles and norms of international law. He underlined the futility of Armenian attempts to maintain the status quo as a result of the occupation of a fifth of the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The settlement process should include the stages of de-occupation of territories, return of refugees, establishment of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and finally, the determination of the status of Nagorno-Karabakh within the framework of the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan recognised by the whole world.

Understanding that he is unable to counter the argumentation of President Aliyev, Nikol Pashinian tried to use the favourite trick of the Armenian side by distorting obvious facts and the essence of international legal documents. So, he reduced the content of the four UN Security Council resolutions to the demand for "withdrawal of local Armenian forces." However, Aliyev explained that "the Prime Minister of Armenia unsuccessfully interprets the true meaning of the resolutions of the UN Security Council", since all four resolutions demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces from all the occupied regions of Azerbaijan.

Pashinian’s attempt to turn the flow of debate to discussions on the right of self-determination of peoples was a complete failure. Ilham Aliyev also debunked this supposedly initial postulate of Armenian politics, which was designed to mask the occupation of Azerbaijani lands. Aliyev recalled that before the conflict, the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region of Azerbaijan SSR was about 180,000, of which about 130,000 were Armenians and 48,000 Azerbaijanis. However, Armenians expelled Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh and other adjacent regions of Azerbaijan. Therefore, all Armenian manipulations with the self-determination principle are meaningless.

At the same time, President Aliyev reaffirmed the principle position of Baku on the establishment of bi-communal peace in Nagorno-Karabakh and, in particular, the security of its Armenian population: "Azerbaijan is a multinational country, and Armenians as a national minority will have the same rights as the national majority.”

Despite such a clear, unambiguous and free interpretation of Azerbaijan’s position before the international community by President Aliyev, Pashinian’s efforts to present the Armenian approach to resolving the protracted conflict appeared loose. Counter-arguments of the Armenian prime minister were blurred, lacked solidity and fully demonstrated their weakness, which was also noticed by observers from third countries and even the Armenian experts.

Unprecedented cynicism

Azerbaijan’s fair position was also revealed during the historical part of the discussion. Aliyev began his address by taking the audience to a historical tour "before talking about the ways to resolve the conflict." In particular, he recalled that in 1805 the Karabakh khan Ibrahim Khan signed an agreement with the Russian general Tsitsianov, according to which the Karabakh khanate of Azerbaijan was subordinated to the Russian Empire. "You can find the text of the Kurekchai Treaty on the Internet. Nothing is said in the document about the Armenian population of Karabakh. Under the treaties Gulistan and Turkmenchai signed in 1813 and 1828, respectively, the remaining territories of Azerbaijan also became part of the Russian Empire,” Ilham Aliyev said.

Another irrefutable historical fact cited by President ALiyev was that one of the first decisions of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic founded in 1918, was to transfer the city of Yerevan to Armenia. "If you transfer something to someone, it means that this something belonged to you,” Aliyev said. He particularly underlined that Armenia launched an aggression against Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, which resulted in the expulsion of 300,000 Azerbaijanis, the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent Azerbaijani regions, ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis with 1 million Azerbaijanis turned into refugees and internally displaced persons, as well as numerous war crimes committed by the Armenian armed forces. The most monstrous of them was the Khojaly genocide, which claimed the lives of 613 innocent civilians.

Pashinian tried to object to all these irrefutable proofs of the historical correctness of Azerbaijan by slurred reasoning, which only indicated the depth of his ignorance of historical issues. Thus, he blamed Stalin for changing the initial decision of the Caucasian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), which allegedly concerned the fact that "Nagorno-Karabakh is an integral part of Armenia."

In fact, the meeting of the Bureau on July 4, 1921 decided "to include Nagorno-Karabakh in Armenia SSR", where ‘include’ implies that Nagorno-Karabakh had note been part of Armenia SSR earlier. Meanwhile, taking into account the following statement by Nariman Narimanov—"Given the importance of the Karabakh issue for Azerbaijan, I think it is necessary that the Central Committee of RCP(B) adopt a final decision.” Thus, the Caucasian Bureau decided to postpone the solution of this issue up until July 5, 1921, when Nagorno-Karabakh was retained within Azerbaijan SSR with the provision of regional autonomy.

Therefore, Ilham Aliyev addressed to Pashinian and all those interested in the history of the issue: "According to the decision of the Caucasian Bureau adopted in July 1921, it was decided to retain Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, and not to transfer it.” As for the constant critical references of the Armenian side and Pashinian personally to the role of Stalin in influencing the decision of the Bureau, Ilham Aliyev asked a reasonable question: "If he does not like Stalin so much, it is strange why he likes Shaumyan so much? After all, Shaumyan was one of the Bolsheviks. He was the man who killed innocent Azerbaijanis. And today the so called capital of Nagorno Karabakh is named after him."

The following statement of Ilham Aliyev was a real blow to the core of the "historical" concept of Armenian falsifiers: "If Nagorno-Karabakh is an ancient Armenian territory, why its capital is not ancient Armenian name either? Because the ancient name of the city is Khankendi, meaning Khan's village. Stepanakert is a compound toponym made of words—‘Stepan’ from the first name of Stepan Shaumyan and ‘kert’ meaning town or city in Armenian? Stepanakert is named after the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumyan. This proves once again that there is no Armenian historical heritage in these territories.”

But perhaps the most vile attempt of the Armenian prime minister to rethink the history of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict was his assessment of the tragic events in Khojaly in February 1992. Pashinian referred to an interview given by the former president of Azerbaijan Ayaz Mutallibov to the Russian newspaper Аргументыифакты, in which he  allegedly said that "provocation in Khojaly was organised by the Azerbaijani opposition to topple him."

However, Ilham Aliyev dstroyed this blatant Pashinian falsification. "I want to clarify this situation, which unfortunately turned into an attempt by the Armenians to justify what they had done in Khojaly,” Ilham Aliyev said. “President Ayaz Mutalibov is alive, and he lives in Baku. Perhaps the Armenian side is not aware of this. He recently and repeatedly noted that he had never said that the Khojaly genocide was organised by Azerbaijanis. This is fake news made up by some Armenian journalists in Russia and promoted in the Russian media. Mutallibov never said that. The identities of those who committed the Khojaly genocide are known to everyone. These were local Armenians, Armenians from Armenia and the diaspora. Many books and articles have been written about the tragedy at international level. Therefore, claiming that Azerbaijanis themselves brutally killed 63 children, 100 women, and caused 1,000 people to go missing is the height of cynicism.”

Big lie about Tigran the Great

Having been completely pulverised after Mr. Aliyev’s statement, Pashinian fell back upon his last resort, making a reference to the so called Greater Armenia of ancient times, as if it  would give Armenia a ground to justify all the crimes committed in the modern era. According to Pashinian, "when the Armenian king Tigran the Great negotiated with the Roman military leader Pompei, there was no country called Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus and the whole world”, while "during the reign of Tigran the Great, there were only two nations in the region: Armenians and Georgians."

In fact, contrary to Armenian belief, a country called Greater Armenia has never existed, for there is not a single ancient document or artefact to confirm the opposite. Greater Armenia is a myth, a xenophobic ideology of Armenians responsible for death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Muslim Turks. This is a myth that the Armenian side has been trying to peruse it from the very beginning of the Karabakh conflict as an ideological cover for its military aggression against Azerbaijan.

As for Tigran, he was a descendant of Seleucid governors that lived in the geographic area of Greater Armenia (Not "Great Armenia", which is a definition coined by Armenian pseudo-historians solely for political and expansionist purposes) and was of Iranian origin.

Whereas an indisputable historical fact is that there was a state of Atropatena, which included South Azerbaijan and part of Northern Azerbaijan (the territory of the present Republic of Azerbaijan) in the second half of I millennium BC—beginning of I millennium AD. The rest of the historical Northern Azerbaijani lands was the territory of Albania—a state that also occupies a prominent place in the history of statehood of Azerbaijan. Atropatena (the Greek version of toponym) can be traced down to the very name of Azerbaijan, which was originally called Adorbaygan, Aderbadagan, and became "Azerbaijan" during the Arab rule and the spread of Islam in this region.

The facts about ancient Azerbaijan also demonstrate that during the time of Tigran the Great, there were no Armenians in the Caucasus! None of the descriptions of important events taking place in the Caucasus at that time referred to Armenians. This is not surprising, as Herodotus referred to them as ‘immigrants from Thrace’—a geographical area in the east of the Balkan Peninsula. Armenian ethnic group developed in Asia Minor, but not in the Caucasus, where the Armenians appeared in large numbers only in the first third of the 19th century, after their resettlement in Northern Azerbaijan following its conquest by the Russian Empire.

Thus, by making references to the times of Tigran the Great, Pashinian fell into the trap of his own ignorance.

Response is inevitable

A few days after the Munich debates, Pashinian further expanded his ideas. In his interview with the Public Television of Armenia, he openly stated: "We never said that we were ready to concede the territories. We just say that the issue of territories is irrelevant.”

In fact, Pashinian repeated this idea at the joint meeting of the security councils of Armenia and "NKR” in the occupied town of Khankendi, emphasising that Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan "can never and under any circumstances be in a common political space”. In other words, Pashinian confirmed that Armenia was not going to return the occupied territories, making the whole negotiation process meaningless, for the key subject of peace negotiations is precisely the de-occupation of Azerbaijani territory followed by the fulfilment of the terms of negotiations.

Also, after the Munich summit, Pashinian has made a very ambitious statement to replace the Madrid principles of the conflict resolution proposed by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs with the so-called Munich Principles, based on his own statements. However, this does not match the real potential of Pashinian to change the course and logic of the settlement process. In particular, any talk of satisfying Pashinian’s demand to recognise the so-called Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh as a third party to the conflict are meaningless. Azerbaijan repeatedly confirmed its readiness to establish a dialogue with the Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh, that is, full-fledged citizens of Azerbaijan of the Armenian origin, but only after the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the occupied territories.

Finally, during and after the Munich Conference, the Armenian armed forces deliberately escalated tension on the border and the line of contact, hence violating the ceasefire and killing three Azerbaijani soldiers in such a short period.

The warning of the President of Azerbaijan voiced at the Munich Security Conference is of particular relevance: "If the Armenian side derails the negotiations, then response will follow. They think that they can keep these lands forever. That will never happen!"