Interfax News Agency, Russia
Russia & CIS Military Newswire
March 6, 2008 Thursday
Kosovo not precedent for Nagorno-Karabakh – Sargsyan
MOSCOW March 14
Armenia’s President Elect Serzh Sargsyan sees no reason to compare
the situation surrounding Kosovo with the conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh.
"We do not see Kosovo as a precedent for a Nagorno-Karabakh
settlement because we are convinced that every conflict has its own
roots, its specific dynamics and solutions. But each time a people’s
right to self-determination is realized somewhere in the world, we
welcome it," Sargsyan said in an interview to be published in
Friday’s edition of the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.
Sargsyan said he favors an exclusively peaceful solution to the
Nagorno-Karabakh problem on the basis of mutual compromise.
"Paradoxical as it may sound, I think that Azerbaijan should
recognize the right of the Nagorno-Karabakh people to
self-determination and Armenia should recognize Azerbaijan’s right to
territorial integrity," he said.
Born in Nagorno-Karabakh, Sargsyan is perfectly familiar with its
problem.
Commenting on the recent events in Yerevan, he described them as an
attempt to organize a "color revolution" in Armenia.
"All this did look like an attempt to organize ‘color revolution’ but
it was doomed from the beginning. Unlike in those countries where
‘color revolutions’ were a success, in Armenia there are factors the
organizers of the unrest did not take into account," Sargsyan said.
First, people in Armenia have firm trust in the government, he said.
Second, "the majority of Armenians supports the evolutionary and
sustainable development of the past 7 years and opposes a revanche
sought by the former elite. What happened was an attempted revanche
orchestrated by forces that ruled Armenia in the 1990s, the gloomiest
and coldest years the country has ever seen," Sargsyan concluded.