"Armenia sustained a defeat"
"Armenia has sustained a defeat," Hrant Margaryan, a representative of the ARF Bureau, said during today's roundtable on Armenian-Turkish relations.
"A year ago, Turkey did not have any moral right to voice any stance on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: it was not even considered a conflicting side. Turkey also made it clear that the settlement of the Karabakh conflict is a vital step in the normalisation of Armenian-Turkish relations. Today Turkey has proven that it is an interested party in the Karabakh issue. At this juncture, the Armenian side must accept the fact that it has lost out", said Mr. Margaryan.
He says Armenia could have enjoyed a victory a year ago as it agreed to open the frontier without any preconditions. Then Turkey was considered to be intolerant and ill-disposed towards Armenia.
"Armenia has lost out since it conceded certain principles that the Armenian government had adopted since 1990. "If we had held fast to those principles today the Turkish side would be perceived as the guilty party. Today Turkey has changed its image and is represented as a country seeking friendly relations with its neighbours," Mr. Margaryan noted.
"National issues are one unity, and none of them must be given preference to. Our approach to national issues needs uniformity, and that uniformed approach must be based on an overriding perspective. We fall into a trap when we believe that we can concede nothing when it comes to the Karabakh issue but that we can give much elsewhere.
This is what we need to understand - that the issues of Karabakh, the Genocide, Javakhk, the liberation of Western Armenia and Armenia's independence, are all intertwined and comprise a totality. They all must be tackled as parts of a whole, in which one cannot be sacrificed at the cost of another," said Mr. Margaryan.
The ARF Dashnaktsutyun member called on the Armenian leadership to draw back from its preliminary agreements. "I do think that the Armenian side should adhere to its principles. If once Armenia agreed to establish a commission of historians, to discuss historical issues or recognise Turkey's territorial wholeness or borders, today we must refuse all of them," added Hrant Margaryan.
"The Armenian Genocide is Armenia's open nerve and the one who dares to touch it, will be backfired," concluded Mr. Margaryan.
