Artsakh’s exiled leadership on Wednesday demanded that parliament speaker Alan Simonyan apologize for lambasting Artsakh Armenians for fleeing the region following Azerbaijan’s large-scale military assault in September 2023.
Simonyan said they should have “stayed and fought” when he was asked by an exiled Artsakh reporter on Tuesday what the Armenian government is doing to assert their right to return to their homeland. The remarks sparked a storm of condemnation from Armenian opposition leaders and public figures as well as Artsakh refugees.
The latter included relatives of some of at least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Artsakh killed during the 24-hour hostilities followed by the exodus of the region’s remaining 100,000 or so residents. Dozens of other Artsakh Armenians remain unaccounted for.
“With this statement, Alan Simonyan tried to denigrate the heroic struggle of the people of Artsakh during the more than nine-month [Azerbaijani] siege and the large-scale military operations that followed it,” read a statement released by the office of Samvel Shahramanyan, Artsakh’s Yerevan-based president.
“Samvel Shahramanyan considers it necessary to emphasize once again that the people of Artsakh did everything in their power to continue living in their historical homeland,” it said. “However, the fight is not only waged on the battlefield but also on the political and diplomatic fronts where Alan Simonyan has also been at the forefront.”
“The Artsakh authorities spared no effort to ensure that the servicemen who defended the homeland do not feel alone and are able to safely exit their occupied or encircled positions after the cessation of hostilities,” added the statement.
Simonyan, who is a key political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, refused to apologize while seemingly walking back on his inflammatory statement. He claimed that he slammed not ordinary Artsakh Armenians but their leaders who he said always wanted to “empty Artsakh” of its ethnic Armenian population.
“I didn’t mean to say that women and children should have stayed there,” the controversial speaker told reporters.
Gegham Stepanyan, Artsakh’s exiled human rights ombudsman, dismissed the explanation as “laughable.” He said Simonyan’s claims are part of a broader pattern of Pashinyan’s political allies and other supporters trying to absolve him of blame for the fall of Artsakh.
Shahramanyan already rejected Pashinyan’s allegations last June that Artsakh forces did not fight back the Azerbaijani offensive because the authorities in Stepanakert as well as the Armenian opposition wanted the region’s population to flee to Armenia to topple him.
“Within hours, we realized that we are alone, that resisting the Azerbaijani armed forces outnumbering us by a factor of 12 to 1 was not possible, and we had to save lives,” the Artsakh leader said at the time.
