WITH WHOM ARMENIAN OFFICIALS DISAGREE

The Armenian Embassy to the United States can now set to its routine mode because they need not track the Web site of the U.S. Department of State any more to report to Vardan Oskanyan that the Americans have corrected the blunder. The Armenian diplomacy can celebrate a victory and even claim that it takes our diplomacy a few oral statements to settle everything in the world. However, let us see what they have settled. In this particular case we deal with the Country Reports of the U.S. Department of State. In Armenia country report the Department of State maintained that “Armenia continues to occupy the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani territories.” Official Armenia defined this statement as a blunder. In the edited report Armenia was replaced by the Armenian forces: “Armenian forces occupy large portions of Azerbaijan territory adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh.” In other words, Nagorno-Karabakh is not occupied. Meanwhile, a sentence was added to the report in the context of which the occupation of Karabakh is stressed. “Armenian officials maintain that they do not "occupy" Nagorno-Karabakh itself,” runs the edited report of the U.S. Department of State.
It is logical that the Armenian officials should maintain this because this is the truth. However, by including this statement in the report the Americans emphasize, in fact, that the opinion of the Armenian officials is different from their opinion. Meanwhile, in their opinion, Karabakh is an occupied territory. Otherwise, it would not be necessary to stress after editing the statement and removing the circumstance of occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh from the sentence “Armenia continues to occupy the Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding Azerbaijani territories” that the Armenian officials disagree they occupy Nagorno-Karabakh. Why does the Department of State stress it if it has been deleted from the document? With whom do the Armenian officials disagree? If they disagree to what the Azerbaijani officials maintain, the Department of State could have maintained that the Armenian officials disagree with the Azerbaijanis who maintain that Armenia occupies Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia disagrees, and when this fact is stressed, it means someone agrees. And since it is not specified who agrees, ostensibly it is the author of the report, i.e. the Department of State, therefore it did not consider it necessary to specify with whom the Armenian officials disagree.
Considering this as a correction is a sign of diplomatic blindness. Declaring the government’s stance as a blunder of an individual is another sign of it. What changed in the report of the Department of State can be considered as a notice that Armenia disagrees with certain thoughts. More exactly, it disagrees with the occupation of Karabakh. It appears that Armenia agrees to the occupation of territories. Ostensibly, when Vardan Oskanyan uttered the self-defeating word “occupation” a few years ago, it was not a mistake or a matter of mentality. And Robert Kocharyan did not need to refer to the sign in the lavatory of the French airport to prove it. It is clear without the lavatory that the Armenian government has always viewed these territories as occupied, and has always been ready to negotiate their return. Besides, everyone now cares for the territory of the president administration only.
HAKOB BADALYAN

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Headlines for April 25, 2007

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