Beniamin Matevosyan: Pashinyan will hand over Azerbaijani soldier to Aliyev without preconditions

(Dangerous statements by Armenia’s prime minister)

Statements made yesterday by Nikol Pashinyan, prime minister of the Republic of Armenia (RA), clearly show how the country’s leadership intends to proceed in the case of the Azerbaijani soldier who entered Armenia.

To recap: according to the RA Prosecutor General’s Office, on the afternoon of October 1, Nasimi Musayev, an Azerbaijani citizen and serviceman, illegally entered a house in the village of Shaki in Syunik Province. After being discovered by the people inside, he opened fire and wounded a woman born in 1987. He then fled but was later found in another house and detained. The victim was hospitalized. Her two children also needed medical care, and one of them was diagnosed with a broken wrist. Musayev has been remanded in custody for two months.

The gist of what the head of government said was that, despite the crime committed on Armenian territory, the Azerbaijani soldier is to be returned to Azerbaijan without any preconditions and without even a swap for one of the Armenian prisoners held in Baku. Pashinyan’s claims that there was no intent, and his references to difficult weather conditions that may have caused the illegal crossing of the RA state border, sound like an attempt to soften in advance the consequences of yet another decision that runs counter to the country’s own security interests.

In trying to justify the step being prepared, Pashinyan manipulates the facts, artificially equating an ordinary soldier who got lost with someone who broke into a house, took children hostage and shot at a woman and children. Creating a false equivalence between a careless border crossing and a violent crime against Armenian civilians undermines the authorities’ much-touted claim that sovereignty is the highest value. What sovereignty can there be if the state lacks the means to punish a criminal who could have caused the deaths of four of its citizens? Separating the border-crossing issue from the humanitarian track for freeing Armenian prisoners of war also deprives Yerevan of one of its few levers of influence over Baku.

Moreover, with his musings about “whom we will hand over to Baku,” Pashinyan has planted an extremely dangerous mine under the status of Armenia’s former leaders, of people wanted in Azerbaijan who live in Armenia, and of all participants in the Karabakh liberation wars. The prime minister’s question about a possible exchange if an Armenian soldier ends up on the other side opens a deeply troubling prospect. Do these people now have any guarantee that they will not, at some point, be handed over to Azerbaijan on the pretext of needing to bring back Armenian servicemen who “accidentally strayed” onto Azerbaijani territory?

And if anyone thinks such a scenario is an exaggeration or scaremongering, they should ask themselves one simple question: as late as 1 September 2020, did they think it possible that the Azerbaijani flag would one day fly over the presidential office in Armenian Stepanakert? Political reality follows its own logic, and that logic must be understood in full so as not to end up in Baku’s captivity, as happened to Ruben Vardanyan and other members of Artsakh’s military and political leadership, who did everything but politics.

Pashinyan’s words are not just abstract comments on a specific border incident but a clear signal that another dangerous concession to Baku is being prepared. The prime minister is in effect making it clear that any incursion and any actions by Azerbaijani servicemen can be written off as thick fog and desertion, just to avoid setting precedents of firmly defending national interests. The opposition still has time to think through its tactics ahead of this concession, because otherwise they themselves could become Baku’s next one.

Think about it…