Pashinyan Touts ‘Positive Narratives’ in Speech at UN Summit

Despite ongoing and continued threats from Azerbaijan, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Monday said that he wanted “positive narratives” to guide the future and refrained from using an international forum to address Baku’s uncompromising positions.

“The most important thing we can do for the future is to create positive narratives and focus on the possibilities of creating the foundations for them, regardless of whether they exist at the moment or not,” Pashinyan said Monday during an address at the United Nations Summit of the Future, which is being held in conjunction with the UN General Assembly.

“One of the reasons for today’s global crisis is that international formats have long become an arena for mutual accusations, threats and the places where crises and deadlocks take place,” Pashinayn said.

“I can hardly remember a positive speech on behalf either of myself or other leaders on international platforms. And there are objective reasons for this: there is little material for positive discourse. And maybe it’s because in the past there was very little or there was not any positive narrative at all,” the prime minister added.

“We usually come to the UN to declare how bad it is going to be, because the facts proving this are a lot and everywhere, so it doesn’t require much efforts to see them. Efforts should be made to see the prerequisites of a good future and think about them, because what happens in reality, first happens in our minds,” Pashinyan said, adding that his Civil Contract party had adopted the slogan of “There is a future,” under adverse conditions facing Armenia.

He said that the slogan had prompted him to utilize the UN summit to concentrate on “positive” opportunities, rather than “accuse neighboring countries,” in hopes of creating opportunities for “positive thinking and for talking about the possibilities.”

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement welcoming the adoption of a pact at the UN Summit of the Future.

“Given the challenges, both on the global and regional levels, Armenia contributed to the reflection in the pact of the commitments to end impunity for violations of international humanitarian law, genocide and crimes against humanity as well as to counter hate speech and disinformation,” the foreign ministry said, adding that “Armenia shares the vision for a resilient, more inclusive and sustainable future.”

In an Independence Day message to the nation on Saturday, Pashinyan apologized for his “mistakes” and said he will inevitably commit more of them while in power.

“I apologize for all the obvious and possible mistakes that we have made and, speaking between us, will continue to make because man is fallible,” Pashinyan said in his statement, without specifying what those mistakes were.

“The level of our country’s independence is increasing day by day due to democracy, balancing and balanced foreign policy,” Pashinyan claimed.