Beniamin Matevosyan: instead of a visa-free regime with the EU, Pashinyan will introduce visa-free entry for Azerbaijanis

(The outcome of Pashinyan’s policy)

The synchronicity of political statements in the South Caucasus region is rarely coincidental, especially when it comes to fundamental questions of demography, history, and sovereignty. Recent remarks by Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, and Hikmet Hajiyev, Assistant to the President of Azerbaijan, have laid bare deep systemic processes that official Yerevan is trying to obscure behind slogans of “real Armenia” and peace. While Armenian society was fed for years with promises of an imminent visa-free regime with the European Union and integration into the Western sphere, the actual vector of state policy has turned in the diametrically opposite direction. The ideological and legal framework being constructed by the authorities suggests that the outcome of the “era of peace” will not be the opening of European borders, but the creation of conditions for the legal and mass return of Azerbaijani population to the territory of Armenia.

In his drive to rewrite the historical narrative, Pashinyan has gone so far as to effectively devalue the historical legitimacy of Armenian statehood itself, declaring that no independent state existed on these lands between 1045 and 1918. References to the Mongol-Tatar invasions, constant migrations, and the “mixing” of populations are intended to destroy, in the minds of citizens, the concept of Armenia as the historical and national homeland of the Armenian people. Pashinyan is deliberately attempting to normalize the idea that the territory of the republic has always been a thoroughfare for various ethnic groups.
Particularly alarming is his manipulation of statistical data. The Prime Minister claims that Armenians today make up 90% of the country’s population and asserts that such a high figure has never been seen before in history. However, the official data from the last census show over 98% ethnic Armenians, and the 90% threshold was characteristic of late Soviet Armenia prior to the outbreak of the Karabakh conflict, when a sizable Azerbaijani community still lived in the republic.

This deliberate numerical distortion takes on an ominous significance against the backdrop of a statement by Hikmet Hajiyev. Speaking in Baku, the assistant to Ilham Aliyev recalled the 300,000 “forcibly displaced persons” who were resettled in the 1990s, emphasizing that their primary demand remains the right to return to their native lands. The arithmetic here is straightforward and unambiguous. If those same 300,000 Azerbaijanis cited by Baku were to return to Armenia, whose current population stands at around three million, the share of the titular nation would automatically fall to approximately that same 90% figure that Pashinyan has “mistakenly” cited. The Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia cannot be unaware of the actual statistics, which means he is deliberately voicing tomorrow’s figure, preparing public opinion for an inevitable shift in the country’s demographic map.

By warning his compatriots that any attempt to “return somewhere”, referring to the rights of refugees from Artsakh, would trigger mirror-image demands from the opposing side, Pashinyan is in effect signing a capitulation on the question of preserving the national identity of the state. The logic of the authorities amounts to locking in the current status quo at the cost of colossal concessions, including the free admission of former residents of the Azerbaijan SSR to Armenian territory under the pretext of unblocking communications and upholding humanitarian rights. The Azerbaijani side, for its part, has been consistently advancing the concept of “Western Azerbaijan,” demanding institutional security guarantees for its returnees.

In the end, instead of the long-awaited visa-free regime with the EU, presented as the grand prize for Yerevan’s geopolitical pivot, Armenian society is facing the prospect of open borders with Azerbaijan. Pashinyan’s policy has brought the country to a point where the signing of a peace treaty would constitute the legal entrenchment of a demographic expansion capable, in the medium term, of irreversibly eroding Armenian statehood from within.

Think about that…