Armenian President Speaks of Armenians’ Superiority, Baku Protests Interracial Nuances

Azerbaijan’s Permanent Representation to the UN has sent a message to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in which he called unacceptable RA President Serzh Sargsyan’s remarks to Diasporan Armenian journalists in Goris on Oct. 16, report various Azerbaijani media. 

The opinion in Baku is that during his speech, Sargsyan spoke about “the Armenian nation’s superiority over other nations, including Azerbaijanis, which the Armenian president ranked among Turkic nomadic tribes.” Baku asks that “interracial and inter-religious nuances” not be ascribed to Karabakh.

According to the official website of the RA president, on Oct. 16 in Goris, Sargsyan said:

“A large scientific team of geneticists and linguists, in which there are no Armenians, conducted a complex and lengthy investigation. According to the latest results, the Armenian language has at least an 8,000-year-old history. This means that as a nation, we have existed for at least 8,000 years.”

“Anti-Armenian fascism has clearly spread in Azerbaijan — it is carried out systematically and at the highest level. We’re talking about state ideology, according to which ‘modern Armenia was created on Azerbaijani lands.’ That is, not only Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh], but also Yerevan, Sevan, and Holy Etchmiadzin are ‘historical Azerbaijani lands.’ The last time we heard about this was just yesterday, from the lips of the president of Azerbaijan.”

Commenting on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s remarks that certain place names in Nagorno-Karabakh are Azerbaijani, Sargsyan said that the Armenian name of the region — Artsakh — was evidenced in 8th century BCE.

“For thousands of years, the population in the region was homogenous; there lived only Armenians, which is confirmed even by 18th century official Turkish sources. Only in the second half of the 18th century did a small number of Turkish-Muslim nomadic tribes begin to settle here, whose number in the early twentieth century was barely five percent of the total population,” said the Armenian leader in Goris.