Echoing Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s earlier claims, he said that Karabakh’s army did not put up strong resistance against Azerbaijani troops.
Simonian made the claims, strongly condemned by the Armenian opposition, when he was asked by an exiled Karabakh reporter what Pashinian’s government is doing to assert the Karabakh Armenian’s right to return to their homeland.
“You got out of there because it wasn’t safe, even though you could have stayed and fought,” he said. “But you got out.”
“You should have fought. You should have fought. You should have fought,” Simonian repeated amid the journalist’s objections.
Azerbaijan launched the offensive in Karabakh on September 19, 2023 nearly three years after a ceasefire deal brokered by Russian halted a six-week Armenian-Azerbaijani war. Its troops greatly outnumbered and outgunned Karabakh’s small army that received no military support from Armenia. Also, Russian peacekeepers deployed in Karabakh did not try to prevent or stop the offensive.
Nagorno-Karabakh – A residential area in Stepanakert damaged by Azerbaijani shelling, 19 September 2023,
After 24-hour hostilities, Karabakh’s leaders agreed to disband the Defense Army in return for Baku stopping the assault and allowing the region’s more than 100,000 remaining residents to flee to Armenia. They maintain that this was the only way of guaranteeing the physical safety of the Karabakh Armenians.
At least 198 soldiers and 25 civilian residents of Karabakh were killed during the 24-hour hostilities. The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry acknowledged roughly 200 combat deaths among its military personnel involved in the operation. Armenian opposition lawmakers emphasized this fact when they strongly condemned Simonian’s accusations.
“Alen Simonian is outraged by the fact that the Artsakh Armenians didn’t stay on under the threat of genocide and weren’t exterminated,” Kritsine Vartanian of the main opposition Hayastan alliance charged on the parliament floor.
“Within hours, the Artsakh Armenians killed at least 203 Azerbaijani soldiers and wounded over 500 others,” she said. “This figure is five times the official average number of Azerbaijani soldiers killed on a daily basis during the 2020 war. This is how they fought.”
Gegham Stepanian, Karabakh’s exiled human rights ombudsman, also condemned Simonian’s “hate speech” against the Karabakh Armenians.
“In response to the National Assembly speaker, one can cite numerous facts of struggle and self-sacrifice, but all of that is meaningless when we are dealing with immorality, meanness, and cynicism on a cosmic level,” Stepanian said in a Facebook post.
Coffins are placed outside a morgue in Stepanakert, September 24, 2023.
“I didn’t mean to say that nobody fought for Karabakh,” Simonian said later in the day. Still, he scorned the Karabakh leadership for pleading with the Armenian government to “open the border” following the Azerbaijani assault.
Pashinian likewise alleged last June that Karabakh forces did not fight back the Azerbaijani offensive because the authorities in Stepanakert as well as the Armenian opposition wanted the region’s population to flee to Armenia to topple him. Samvel Shahramanian, Karabakh’s Yerevan-based president, rejected the allegations.
“Within hours we realized that we are alone, that resisting the Azerbaijani armed forces outnumbering us by a factor of 12 to 1 was not possible and we had to save lives,” Shahramanian said at the time.
In a joint report released in November, U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House and six other human rights groups concluded that the exodus of the Karabakh Armenians was the result of Azerbaijan’s systematic “policy of ethnic cleansing.” They said that even before the offensive that restored its full control of Karabakh, Baku sought to drive them out of their homeland by “creating conditions of severe insecurity, hardship, and psychological duress.”
