PEOPLE LIVING ON THIS LAND MUST SPEAK ON BEHALF OF NAGORNO KARABAKH

Lragir.am
04 July 06

Ashot Bleyan announced July 4 at the Pastark Club that he is ready
to visit Baku again. "I will go to Baku directly, not to be taken
there by other ways. A politician is obliged to step into fire if
the resolution of the question requires that."

In the meantime, Armen Ashotyan, who debated with him, thinks
that the best variant for us is the status quo in the question of
Nagorno Karabakh. "We need to digest these territories, resettle
these territories. If there are only soldiers, there are no farmers,
doctors, teachers, there is no society, it contains certain dangers."

"There cannot be a status quo. It would mean that life stops,"
counters Ashot Bleyan. "If the occupied territories are your homeland,
you are government, go and live there, build houses there. Establish a
branch of the National Assembly and live there, set a model. You have
money and power. Whereas you tell people living in Armenia to leave
their houses and move to live there because I want you to go. This is
adventurousness. Are we captives?" asks Ashot Bleyan. He is convinced
that we turned the question of self-determination of people into
struggle against the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. "We did
it. Ashot Bleyan did not do it," noted Ashot Bleyan.

According to him, people who live in that land, should speak in the
name of Nagorno Karabakh. "Honor and glory to the people of Nagorno
Karabakh, who showed that they struggle for the land by living in
that land. We benefited because the people of Artsakh stayed to live
on this land. But there were more people until 1988. I do not think
that it is in my interests that the ethnic Azerbaijanis left Nagorno
Karabakh," announced Ashot Bleyan. And the loss, the greatest loss
for Ashot Bleyan is that "in 1988 250 thousand Baku Armenians became
refugees and now we do not know where these people are. The loss of 250
thousand Armenians of Baku with their property was a destructive loss,
people who could have privatize the oil pipeline. The Mantashov family
came from Karabakh, and at one time they bought Baku with money. We
also lost Shahumyan and Getashen forever."