The report of the investigative commission created by the government to study the circumstances of the 44-day war more than two years ago is ready. But the government members of the commission are not in a hurry to talk about the reasons for the defeat, the possibility of avoiding the war and the culprits. they suggest waiting for the discussion of the report in the parliament, which, by the way, will take place in a closed format.
“In any case, we should try to ensure that the most important parts of the report, which do not contain state secrets and do not contain security risks for Armenia, are at least publicly available,” said Vahagn Aleksanyan, a member of the NA Defense Committee.
After the defeat in 2020, when the opposition forces proposed to create such a format for studying the circumstances of the war, where the government will not be the leader, and the opposition will not lose in numbers, the “Civil Agreement” did not go ahead. At the urging of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, his teammates created a committee focusing on the negotiation process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.
Before the commission was created, representatives of the ruling power were already claiming that the negotiations of the previous years had made the war inevitable. Nikol Pashinyan repeated the same thing at the commission session, even today, when the report is already ready, Vahagn Aleksanyan, a member of the commission from the ruling power, believes that the part related to the negotiation process should be made public, but not only that.
“Perhaps it will be right for our public to be fully informed about the negotiation process and for various political and quasi-political actors to finally get out of the roles they regularly enter, trying to distort the negotiation process,” Aleksanyan noted.
The parliamentary opposition, which from the beginning boycotted the committee meetingsconsidering that the people who led the country during the war cannot carry out an objective investigation, they have not yet decided whether they will participate in the presentation of the report or not.
Deputy Anna Grigoryan from the “Hayastan” faction continues to insist that the purpose of creating the commission is to assign the guilty, so the prepared report will have that logic.
“It is obvious to us that the final version of the results formed by the commission cannot be accepted in any way by the force bearing political responsibility, a force that was the main responsible and guilty of the war, only the KP members examined the 44-day war, only the KP members were present in the hall. will discuss the report with mines and no one will be aware of it, I mean the people. This is simply absurd,” said Grigoryan.
The report of the investigative commission will be presented to the deputies in October
What did the investigative commission made up exclusively of government members find out, what was the main omission of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan before and during the war, it is still not clear whether the investigative commission will answer these questions. But Vahagn Aleksanyan considers it necessary to remind that the war was not led by one person, and the problems were systemic.
“The actual military operations were led and managed by the General Staff, the Chief of the General Staff, and this should be understood. As for the gaps in the field of general management, there will definitely be a place for it in the report,” the committee member emphasized.
On the eve of the 2021 elections, when relations between Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and former Chief of General Staff Onik Gasparyan were strained, Pashinyan made accusations related to various episodes of the war against high-ranking military personnel, including former Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces Onik Gasparyan.
“Onik Gasparyan will still answer for Shushi. “He should explain in court why the group to help Shushi arrived 1.5-2 days late,” the Prime Minister said.
It is not yet clear whether the commission received the answer to these questions from Onik Gasparyan. In any case, three years after Pashinyan’s accusation, the former chief of the general staff is not accused of any episode of the war. The report of the parliamentary investigative commission on the negotiations throughout the war and before it will be presented to the deputies in October, but it is not clear what political and legal consequences it will have.
