Their Pan-Armenian Diplomatic Council (PADC) set up last month criticized the Armenian government’s foreign policy before aligning itself with Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, the protest leader demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s resignation.
A report drawn up by the PADC was presented during Galstanian’s latest rally held in Yerevan on Sunday. The PADC insisted that Pashinian’s decision to hand over several border areas to Azerbaijan is illegal and dangerous for Armenia in the absence of any maps or other agreed mechanisms for delineating the entire Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
The report dismissed Pashinian’s arguments that Baku and Yerevan have agreed that the border delimitation must be based on the 1991 Alma-Ata declaration in which newly independent ex-Soviet republics pledged to recognize each other’s Soviet-era borders. It argued that the declaration does not refer to any concrete maps showing those borders in detail.
Mirzoyan brushed aside the criticism when he was asked to comment on it during a joint news conference with Malta’s visiting Foreign Minister Ian Borg.
“The experienced diplomats mentioned by you are probably the deserters who left their posts, the trenches assigned to them, at a time when Armenia’s sovereign territory was subjected to military aggression,” he said. “After mentioning this fact, I cannot have any seriousness towards those people and their statements.”
Mirzoyan accused them of “continuing to undermine Armenia’s sovereignty, statehood and territorial integrity.”
Mirzoyan’s predecessor Ara Ayvazian is one of the founders of the PADC. Ayvazian was appointed by Pashinian as foreign minister in the wake of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. He resigned in May 2021, objecting to Pashinian’s cautious response to Azerbaijan’s seizure of several Armenian border areas.
Ayvazian’s four deputies, also tendered their resignations at the time. One of them, Avet Adonts, scoffed at Mirzoyan’s verbal attacks.
“When we resigned Mirzoyan was not in the Foreign Ministry or in the vicinity of the ministry and I don’t know what he was up to,” Adonts told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “He is not informed about the processes that unfolded at the time.”
Adonts said that he and his colleagues stepped down because Pashinian’s administration rejected urgent solutions proposed by them.