Vaհe Apelian
Բնագիրները կցուած են։
Unlike the four foreign ministers who served after him, Vartan Oskanian remains the most outspoken, especially for a former FM, to the point of partisan meddling in Diaspora affairs.
Vartan Oskanian is a repatriate who joined the Foreign Ministry and worked his way up the diplomatic hierarchy during Ter-Petrosian’s rule. But Vartan Oskanian was a complicit, along with Robert Kocharian, Serzh Sargsyan in orchestrating the most consequential palace coup in Armenia that resulted in the unseating of the president Levon Ter Petrosyan and eventually in the loss and depopulation of Karabakh of its native Armenians.
Historically on November 1, 1997, Levon Ter Petrosyan published his “War or Peace, Time to get Serious” position paper to resolve the Karabagh conflict advocating concessions. It was LTP’s negotiating position outlined in that document that resulted in the most consequential palace coup engineered by Robert Kocharian, Serzh Sargsyan, Vazken Sarkissian and Vartan Oskanian. The coup unseated president LTP’s a few months later, on February 3, 1998 and Robert Kocharian assumed power with Vartan Oskanian as his FM.
In a recent posting on his Facebook page, Tatul Hagopian labelled that palace coup a political crime and wrote, “in 1997-1998, a political crime was committed in Armenia, as a result of which the historical opportunity to settle the Artsakh conflict was aborted.” . From there on “Serzh Sargsyan, like Kocharyan before him, each for ten years and Pashinyan for two years, failed to act decisively. Consecutively they missed the opportunities to settle the Artsakh conflict.” .
The rest is another tragic page of the much-tortured Armenian history, the loss of Artsakh. Historians will study this catastrophic loss from here and on and certainly will refer to the LTP’s historic political stand where he noted that, “Rejection of compromise and maximalism (striving to achieve the maximum and not the possible) is the shortest way to the complete destruction of Karabakh and deterioration of the situation in Armenia. It is not about giving up or not giving up Karabakh. It is about keeping Karabakh Armenian. It was inhabited by Armenians for 3000 years and it should be inhabited by Armenians after 3000 years.”
However, history will not exonerate president LTP either from responsibility for the loss of the Mountainous Nagorno Karabagh Oblast and the depopulation of historic Artsakh from its native Armenian inhabitants. LTP was, after all, the leader of the Karabagh Committee that sounded the battle cry for unification. Instead of pursuing a negotiated settlement for the Mountainous Nagorno Karabakh, LTP let the first Karabagh war be waged under his watch, instead of resorting to negotiated settlement. The first Artsakh war ended with a ceasefire agreement (the Bishkek Protocol) between the warring parties that came into effect on 12 May 1994. The Bishkek Protocol was a ceasefire agreement, signed by the representatives of Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, and Russia on May 5, 1994, in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
I could not find English language translation of LTP”s historic. Consequently, I resorted to translating it and posted it below it in four segments, titling each segment with a quote from the document as follows: The only option for solving the Karabakh question is compromise, the path of adventurers will lead to inevitable defeat, the five myths and two riddles, our only ally is refusal of adventure. Բնագիրները կցուած են։
Part 1 – The only option for solving the Karabakh question is compromise,'
http://vhapelian.blogspot.com/2024/10/war-or-peace-time-to-get-serious_23.html
Part 2 - The path of adventurers will lead to inevitable defeat
http://vhapelian.blogspot.com/2024/10/war-or-peace-time-to-get-serious_29.html
Part 3 - Five myths and two riddles
http://vhapelian.blogspot.com/2024/11/war-or-peace-time-to-get-serious.html
Part 4/4 - Our only ally is the refusal of adventure
http://vhapelian.blogspot.com/2024/11/war-or-peace-time-to-get-serious_12.html
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