President of Nagorno Karabakh Arkadi Ghukasyan hosted a press conference on December 11. There were journalists from Karabakh, as well as journalists from different countries who had come to Karabakh to provide coverage of the Constitutional Referendum of Karabakh.
While talking about the need to approve the Constitution, Ghukasyan mentioned that the people of Karabakh have not only been able to resist the war that they were forced to fight in by the Azerbaijani, but also they have been able to get ahead of Azerbaijan in terms of democratization.
“First of all, we the people of Karabakh are approving the Constitution for ourselves; it’s the laurel of achievements of the Karabakh people and those achievements began 15 years ago during Karabakh’s independence referendum.”
He also mentioned that Karabakh didn’t rush into approving the Constitution because “it wanted to approve the most democratic Constitution of the region and it did.”
“I’m certain that we have approved a Constitution that will strengthen the governance of Karabakh and develop the democratization processes. I hope that the international community accepts this. I’m also certain that the approval of the Karabakh Constitution will help resolve the Karabakh conflict; we could have solved our issues with Azerbaijan if it were a democratic state and had a Constitution like Karabakh does. I consider Azerbaijan as a totalitarian state and Azerbaijan’s Constitution serves for only one purpose: to eliminate Nagorno Karabakh with documents,” emphasized Ghukasyan.
During the press conference, the president also talked about the conflict negotiations process.
“The intermediaries are offering Karabakh the independence referendum.”
“Which territory and whose participation are we dealing with?”
In response to this question, Nagorno Karabakh President Arkadi Ghukasyan mentioned that they aren’t suggesting organizing a referendum now and are simply discussing that.
“I think that it’s possible that they offer that. If the intermediaries guarantee Karabakh that the international community and Azerbaijan will recognize the results of the independence referendum, then I think that we can start thinking about accepting or rejecting the offer. As for the territories and other issues, since it’s supposed that the referendum is going to take place with the guarantee of the international community, it’s obvious that the international community is going to come to terms too” emphasized A. Ghukasyan.
According to Ghukasyan, the fact that Karabakh isn’t participating in the conflict negotiations is because Azerbaijan isn’t ready to resolve the conflict.
During the press conference, journalists also brought up the question concerning the current problems of the Kashatagh region, to which the President of Karabakh said:
“There really are objective and subjective issues to deal with in the region and those issues have been discussed at the Security Council. We know how to solve those problems and are already taking some steps. We either have to have more people come back to live there or manage to create all the substructures. As for the subjective issues, we will solve them quickly; however, we need the help of Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora in order to solve the objective issues.”
He also mentioned that it’s impossible to solve the problems with only state funding.
“I’m certain that the issue regarding bringing people back to settle down is not only Karabakh’s problem; so we expect to see Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora lend a helping hand. It would be possible to solve that with only state funding if we didn’t have issues concerning the strengthening of the army and the development of other regions,” said Ghukasyan.