“Our main goal is to realize the rights the people of Artsakh to return to their homeland, live there safely and determine their political status based on self-determination,” Ashot Danielyan, the acting Karabakh president, said during hearings held in Yerevan.
The hearings organized by Karabakh leaders were also attended by Armenian opposition politicians and public figures. Danielyan said that they will open a “new chapter” in the Karabakh Armenians’ struggle to return home. He did not clarify what concrete actions it will involve.
More than 100,000 Karabakh Armenians, the region’s virtually entire remaining population, fled to Armenia in the space of a week following Azerbaijan’s September 2023 assault. Baku denies forcing them out of their homes and says they could live there under Azerbaijani rule.
Karabakh’s leaders and ordinary residents rejected such an option even before the exodus. Danielyan said that only “international security mechanisms” could convince the refugees to return home.
Yerevan has refused to seek such guarantees since recognizing Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh in 2022, with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian indicating that the Karabakh issue is closed for his government.
Shortly after his August 8 talks with Azerbaijani President Aliyev hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump, Pashinian said the refugees should stop hoping to return to Karabakh and should “settle down” in Armenia instead. He said that discussing the repatriation of the Karabakh Armenians and other refugees from the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict would be “dangerous for the peace process.”
“We just need to hold normal negotiations and anything will be possible as a result of those negotiations,” countered Danielyan.
The Armenian opposition holds Pashinian responsible for the fall of Karabakh that happened three years after a disastrous war with Azerbaijan. Opposition leaders say the premier paved the way for the 2020 war by recklessly rejecting in 2019 a compromise peace plan drafted by the United States, Russia and France.
Bowing to opposition pressure, Pashinian’s office disclosed last week this and other peace proposals made by the three mediating powers. It was thus officially confirmed that the 2019 document was the last updated version of the so-called Madrid Principles that upheld the Karabakh Armenians’ right to self-determination while calling for their withdrawal from Azerbaijani districts around Karabakh occupied in the early 1990s. The proposed peace deal also envisaged that Karabakh’s internationally recognized status would be determined through a future referendum.
Danielyan said that Pashinian had not notified the then Karabakh leadership of the existence of such a plan. He insisted that it would have been largely acceptable to the authorities in Stepanakert.