"Karabakh Wasn't Ours" – Pashinyan Disavows 100 Years of History 26 Days Before Elections | Profe...
On May 8, during a campaign meeting with voters in the village of Kornidzor in the Syunik region, Nikol Pashinyan said something that no Armenian politician in post-Soviet history had ever said. Verbatim: “They say we lost our land. How was this land ours? How was it ours? Please explain how it was ours? I don’t want to speak behind the backs of the dead, but this territory was under the control of a few generals who, for example, sowed wheat there. Did we build a school, a kindergarten, a factory there? Did we live there? It wasn’t ours. It wasn’t ours.” On May 11, Pashinyan added another point, calling the movement for the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, which began in 1988, a “fatal mistake.” Context bomb: On May 11, in response, Putin proposed for the first time that Armenia hold a referendum on EU membership—a new, harsher formula than all previous Kremlin threats. Aliyev declared in Zangilan on May 10: "Certain foreign leaders are now portraying themselves as false heroes, as if they are saving Armenia from us. There is no need to protect Armenia from us. We have achieved what we wanted." The reaction in Armenia: mass shock. Those same 150,000 Karabakh refugees of the fall of 2023, for whom this was their homes, schools, and cemeteries, heard from their own prime minister that Karabakh "was not ours." Fifty Karabakh Armenians are still in Azerbaijani prisons. There are 26 days until the June 7 elections. Kocharyan and Karapetyan have already mobilized street protests—for the first time since the fall of 2023, Karabakh refugees will come to Yerevan en masse. A unique angle: Pashinyan has chosen a "bridge-burning" strategy—he's deliberately going into the elections with the most toxic theme for the Armenian audience, because he understands that the opposition will mobilize Karabakh against him, and the only way to win them over is to publicly declare, "Forget it, it never happened." This is either political suicide or a long-term strategy, counting on a new generation. A possible headline: "Karabakh Wasn't Ours: How Pashinyan Burned 100 Years of Armenian History 26 Days Before the Elections—and Why This Will Decide Everything."