Discussion
Intro to Tatev Hayrapetyan
You were
elected to the National Assembly in the early parliamentary elections of
December 2018, as a member of the My Step (Իմ Քայլ) Alliance, which supported Prime Minister Pashinyan’s
Civil Contract party after the so-called “Velvet Revolution” events in May
2018, to form the ruling alliance in the parliament until June 2021.
● What attracted you to My Step, Pashinyan, and
the events of May 2018?
● What was your experience with civil society work
before May 2018? Were you considering a life in politics?
● How did you end up on the December 2018 MP list?
Who recommended you to the Prime Minister?
● Were you satisfied with the political life in
Armenia throughout 2019 and 2020, leading up to the 44-day war?
● What led to the war? Was the war unavoidable?
● We’ve all had that “face the mirror” moment
after the war, to come to terms with where we are right now. Can you describe
how you felt during, and after the war, both as an Armenian, and also as a
parliamentary representative of the ruling party, which lost the war and
suffered the loss of nearly 4000 Armenian lives?
● After the crushing defeat in the war, you did
not leave the ruling party, or resign from parliament. However, you did not
participate in the June 2021 early parliamentary elections. Have you parted
ways with My Step and Civil Contract? Why?
● Are you tending towards any political parties?
● What are your thoughts about the current
government, and the direction of the country?
Armenia
Going in the Wrong Direction?
In
a IRI poll that came out a month ago, results indicated that 88% of Armenians
feel that Turkey is the greatest security threat to Armenia, and 81% believe
that Azerbaijan is. All other countries are comparatively negligible.
There
are two other poll question results: one indicates that Armenians put Turkey
and Azerbaijan at the bottom of their list of countries to improve relations
with. They want our relations improved with our strategic partner Russia (53%),
then the US, France, and China. And the other result indicates that only a
third of Armenians polled think that the country is going in the right
direction, while a majority now think we’re going in the wrong direction. This
is a major change since 2018.
The
question is this: Armenia’s foreign policy is trying to make friends with our
enemies, completely contrary to the wishes of the Armenian people as the poll
indicates, so naturally Armenians think our country is headed in the wrong
direction. Why is the government doing this?
Does
Pashinyan’s government even have the option of changing course,
when the terms of its direction were given to it by the winners of the
war in 2020?
Fig. 1: From IRI: Public Opinion Survey:
Residents of Armenia - Dec 2021
Negotiations with Aliyev
Without rehashing
the last 16 months of negotiations, violence, loss of territorial integrity,
and so on, let's fast forward to one of the latest interactions between the
leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Tatevik, you just published a comprehensive article on EVNreport.
On February 4,
Prime Minister Pashinyan and President Aliyev had a teleconference summit
facilitated by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Council President
Charles Michel. Following this, Azerbaijan released 8 Armenian POWs, and also
the EU announced a €2 billion
financial aid package for
Azerbaijan, as part of
an economic investment plan. Throughout 2021, Aliyev had complained about the lack of financial aid parity with
Armenia from the EU.
● First of all: What were the topics discussed at
the summit on February 4, and what agreements were reached?
● Why should there be EU financial aid parity
between democratic Armenia and Aliyev’s dictatorship? Why would the EU
facilitate €2 Billion to a country flush
with petro-dollars, and which kills and tortures its opposition?
○ Is the 2 billion a quid pro quo for Azerbaijan
in exchange for something? What?
Reportedly
Pashinyan agreed to help Azerbaijan to deal with its so-called quote-unquote
“missing persons” from the first war in Karabakh, 28-30 years ago. This is the
second time since the war that Aliyev has injected negotiating points that were
not part of the trilateral November Agreement. The first was the issue of the
minefield maps.
● How is Armenia agreeing to all these new
conditions? Is Azerbaijan a master negotiator, or are Armenians terrible negotiators?
● How can Armenia agree to introduce brand new
topics into the dialogue, especially when they no longer even have control of
the lands where the events of the first Karabakh war happened?
● We’ve already read in Azeri media that Aliyev is
injecting terms like “missing persons”, or “mass graves”, and so on. Does our
government realize the legal trap that Azerbaijan is setting, because the
ramifications in international justice of such terminology being applied to
Armenia can have bad consequences.
On Monday, Putin
signed declarations to recognize the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk
People’s Republic. Then on Tuesday Aliyev was in Moscow and met with Putin, and
they signed a declaration to elevate their relations to an allied level.
● Many Russian analysts think that this agreement
contains nothing new from the 2008 agreement they already had. What do we know
about the content of the Putin-Aliyev meeting? And what does it mean for
Armenia?
● Do you see any relevance in Putin’s recognition
of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, to the case of Artsakh?
There is as of
yet no response from the Armenian side, but the opposition has blamed the
authorities’ diplomatic failure, especially in managing its relations with our
strategic partner, Russia.
● What should the Armenian “response” be? What
does Armenia need to do to manage relations with Russia better?
Aliyev and his Regime After the
War
We rarely hear
about the domestic politics in Baku. After the war, if we were to read their
propaganda, we would think that Aliyev single-handedly won the war; with a little help from Erdogan. You have actually written about how Aliyev has done everything to take
full and sole credit for winning the war.
● How has the 44-Day war changed Aliyev’s regime
and his rhetoric?
● Has the war changed the Aliyev clan’s financial
bottom line?
Now and then we
hear that there is domestic pressure on Aliyev that he is compromising too much
with Armenians.
● What are the domestic pressures on Aliyev?
We know that
there is a heavily repressed, one can even say, brutalized opposition in
Azerbaijan.
● Is it a legitimate political opposition? Are
they represented in parliament?
● Is there popular unrest? What are the issues
that fuel popular discontent?
● How does Aliyev deal with these issues?
● Does Aliyev have weaknesses that Armenia can
exploit?
● Is Armenia a bogeyman to rally Azeris around a
perceived external threat and forget about the lack of democracy at home?
The Shushi and Moscow Agreements
In June 2021,
Aliyev and Erdogan signed the Shushi Declaration which heightened collaboration
between Turkey and Azerbaijan in defense, energy, gas corridor and talked about
the so-called “Zangezur Corridor” in a manner which the Armenian MFA stated was
“a provocation against the security and peace in the region.”
● Can you talk about the importance of this
declaration vis-à-vis Armenia’s security, and how we should be responding to
this threat?
● Do you think that Azerbaijan is preparing for
war, this time against Armenia, in order to control all the territory that
divides Nakhichevan from Azerbaijan?
In the past week
Artsakh’s parliament passed
an important bill
that it says is in response to the Shushi Declaration, and deals with defending its Occupied
Territories. Earlier this week when the opposition Armenia Alliance (Hayastan
Dashinq) moved to discuss the Armenian parliament’s response to the
declaration, the ruling party boycotted the parliament session and thus blocked the discussion.
● How can Armenia support the Artsakh government?
● How can Armenia defend Artsakh given the current
situation, and going forward?
Armenia’s Foreign Affairs
Establishment
I’ve always
thought that the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is too inert and
unresponsive, for my taste. A lot of anti-Armenian things happen around the
world, these days particularly from Turkey and Azerbaijan, and then there’s no
response from Armenia. But before 2018
there seemed to be a degree of institutional stability and
establishment-building.
Since 2018, the
MFA seems to have been nearly dismantled. Foreign Minister Zohrab
Mnatsakanyan left after the war, then in May 2021 FM
Ara Ayvazyan resigned in frustration, then three out of four of his deputies
also left, then for months there was no new appointment, then for a month there
was the temporary appointment of National Security Chair Armen Grigoryan as Deputy Foreign Minister, and finally Ararat
Mirzoyan, who had no diplomatic background prior to his appointment.
● Why is there so much turnover in the MFA, and do
you think we have the right people in place in the ministry now? Can the
foreign ministry deal with the extremely challenging problems facing Armenia,
and are the right people in the establishment?
● Does the establishment have the right talent in
the pipeline? The right educational system to generate the needed talent? Does
it have a strong and professional connection to the various policy expert
think-tanks of all perspectives?
● Do PM Pashinyan and FM Mirzoyan have a complete
understanding of Armenia’s long term national interests? Do they know what
they’re doing? Because after the 44-day war, I can say with a high level of
certainty that the Diaspora does not have any confidence that they do.
● How do we rebuild Armenia’s Foreign Affairs
establishment, to successfully navigate through the country’s challenges?
Wrap-up
That
concludes this Conversations On Groong episode.
As always, we invite your feedback, Thanks to Laura Osborn for the music on
our podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel on YouTube, Like our pages
and follow us on Twitter. On behalf of everyone in this episode, we wish you a
good week, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon.
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Keywords
Tatevik Hayrapetyan, Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, Artsakh,
Nagorno Karabakh, 44-day War, War in Artsakh, Ararat Mirzoyan, Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, MFA, Foreign Minister, Civil Contract, My Step, Azerbaijan,
POW, War, Corruption, Arsen Kharatyan, Sos Avetisyan, Ararat Mirzoyan, Armen Grigoryan,
