In his attempt to boast about his government’s approach to the Artsakh issue, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday compared this national struggle to pregnancy, saying “to extend a pregnancy for another nine months is absurd.”
Speaking to lawmakers, Pashinyan perhaps was attempting to say that the Artsakh issue, from his perspective, has run its course.
“After nine months, something has to happen,” Pashinyan said in his analogy to pregnancy. “The child either must be born or not, most likely causing the death of its bearer. [The child] should be born either through Caesarian section or natural birth. It [the child] should either live or be stillborn; either be a boy or a girl… The notion that we must extend that pregnancy for another nine months is an absurd notion.”
“Karabakh is not independent. Karabakh is not [part of] Armenia. Karabakh is not [part of Azerbaijan]. Then what is Karabakh?” Pashinyan prefaced his remarks to lawmakers during Tuesday’s discussion of the 2025 state budget.
The “pregnancy” comparison, naturally, shocked many opposition lawmakers, who have accused Pashinyan of kowtowing to Azerbaijani demands as Yerevan seeks to sign a peace accord with Baku.
One of those lawmakers, Gegham Manukyan of the Armenia Alliance, countered Pashinyan by using his analogy to paint an opposite perspective to the prime minister’s latest effort to abandon Artsakh.
“He seems to be forgetting about another scenario as it relates to those nine months: when they can kick a pregnant woman and cause them to use abort the child, like Nikol Pashinyan did and he aborted and doomed Artsakh,” Manukyan said.
“Two years ago, I announced from this podium that if we manage to maintain our statehood for a year or two, it will mean that we have created and are creating a real opportunity to have a state in the coming century,” said Pashinyan.
“And now, two years later, I … must state that in the medium term, our strategic objective for the century has been achieved. But we must not let our guard down for a second,” he added.
In his effort to claim that his government successfully has confronted the difficult challenges facing Armenia, Pashinyan reiterated that the key to Armenia’s survival is to focus on the economic development of its internationally recognized territory and create a new “security system” of which a strong army will not be the main component.
“Armenia must act only and only in accordance with the interests of its own economic development,” he said.
Pashinyan said that in order to achieve his vision, Armenia must leave behind the “martyr state” mentality, presumably saying that Armenia must refrain from acting like a victim, a point he has stressed in previous remarks.
Yet, Pashinyan’s perceived approach to a so-called “successful” nation building, has meant to abandon—or downplay—several key national aspirations, among them the Artsakh Liberation Movement, the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide and its pursuit of justice within the international arena.
Last week, Pashinyan also made a comparison between Western Armenia and the fabricated notion of “Western Azerbaijan” being advanced by President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and his government.
