No:375/19, The Head of the Press Service Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Leyla Abdullayeva responded to a media request to comment on the answer of the Prime Minister of Armenia N. Pashinyan to the question of the Azerbaijani blogger in Milan
Answer: What the Prime Minister of Armenia said can be characterized at least as an attempt to mislead his own population. Another assessment of this is not possible.
Pashinyan, once again, referring to the Constitution of the USSR, pretentiously claims that the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) allegedly had a constitutional right to secession. For our part, we again recall that in accordance with Article 78 of the Constitution of the USSR, the territory of a union republic could not be changed without its consent. At the same time, in connection with the illegal actions of Armenian nationalists aimed at separating the NKAO from the Azerbaijan SSR, the supreme bodies of the central government of the USSR in their resolutions and decrees unequivocally confirmed the impossibility of changing the existing borders. For example, on January 10, 1990, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution "On the nonconformity with the USSR Constitution of the acts on Nagorno-Karabakh adopted by Armenian SSR Supreme Soviet on December 1, 1989 and January 9, 1990", which emphasized the illegality of attempts to secess Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan SSR. The same was said in the resolution of the USSR State Council of November 27, 1991 and the resolution of the USSR Constitutional Oversight Committee adopted the next day.Thus, in a situation where the unilateral separation of the Armenians of NKAO was contrary to Soviet law, how, apart from misleading his own population, can the Prime Minister’s attempts to justify this by the USSR Constitution be described? N.Pashinyan notes that the NKAO Regional Council exercised its right to self-determination, but the Prime Minister is silent that the so-called “referendum on independence”, held by separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh on December 10, 1991, was organized without the consent of Azerbaijan, despite the fact that this autonomous region was legally part of it, and the Azerbaijani population of the region did not participate in it.
The Prime Minister, who denies the Khojaly genocide and calls it a lie, thereby essentially ignores many independent sources, including the Armenian, local and international media, casting doubt on the eyewitness accounts of the tragedy. Apparently, N. Pashinyan is not aware of the recognition made in an interview with foreign journalists by the then Minister of Defense and former President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who did not hesitate to declare what he had done: “Before Khojaly, the Azerbaijanis thought that ... the Armenians were unable to raise their hands on the civilian population. We managed to break this stereotype.”
It is interesting that, unlike his predecessors, N. Pashinyan positions himself before the international community as an adherent of democratic values. Well, now he needs to confirm this and de-occupy the territory of Azerbaijan so that civilians return to their places of the original residence.