Armenia's Declaration of Independence was adopted on August 23, 1990
YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s political team has not yet made a final decision on whether to try to remove from Armenia’s constitution any reference to a 1990 declaration of independence resented by Azerbaijan, a senior lawmaker said on Tuesday.
“I want to make clear that we do not have a final conclusion,” Hayk Konjoryan, the parliamentary leader of Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, told reporters. “It’s still too early to make a final conclusion and raise questions from that standpoint.”
Konjoryan at the same time stressed: “We must not regard any text as sacrosanct.”
The declaration in turn refers to a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast and calls for international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide. It is cited in a preamble to the current Armenian constitution adopted in 1995.
Pashinyan again criticized the declaration last week, claiming that Armenia “will never have peace” with Azerbaijan as long as it is mentioned by the constitution. Accordingly, he defended his plans to try to enact a new constitution that would presumably make no such reference.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said on February 1 that Armenia should remove that reference and amend other documents “infringing on Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity” if it wants to make peace with his country. Armenian opposition leaders portrayed Aliyev’s statement as further proof that Pashinyan wants to effectively declare the 1990 declaration null and void under pressure from Azerbaijan as well as Turkey.
“Aliyev and Pashinyan almost simultaneously … presented the same demands to the people of Armenia,” one of them, Artur Khachatrian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “It is obvious that Aliyev is thus forcing Pashinyan to make concessions.”
Konjoryan denied that Pashinyan wants to change the constitution at the behest of Aliyev. Pashinyan sounded less categorical on this score in a reportedly pre-recorded radio interview broadcast on February 1.
Khachatryan is one of several lawmakers from the main opposition Hayastan alliance who have been allowed by the Armenian Foreign Ministry to see in recent weeks written proposals regarding an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty exchanged by Yerevan and Baku. In a joint statement issued on February 2, the lawmakers insisted that the Azerbaijani terms of the treaty are extremely unfavorable for the Armenian side.
“I stand by our assertion that the country which presented such proposals to us has no desire or intention to sign a peace treaty with us,” Khachatrian insisted on Tuesday.
Edmon Marukyan, an Armenian ambassador-at-large and political ally of Pashinyan, likewise charged on February 2 that Baku is not serious about signing the peace deal. He said Aliyev’s demands for the constitutional change in Armenia amount to a “new precondition.”