Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan faced criticism for blaming Artsakh’s (Nagorno-Karabakh) ethnic Armenians for fleeing after Azerbaijan’s military offensive in September 2023. His comments, urging them to have “stayed and fought,” sparked backlash from opposition figures and human rights advocates.
“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,” Simonyan repeated amid the journalist’s objections.
Azerbaijan’s attack on September 19, 2023, left Artsakh’s leadership in a position where, lacking Armenia’s support and facing overwhelming odds, it agreed to disband the Artsakh Defense Army to stop hostilities, leading over 100,000 residents to flee to Armenia.
Simonyan’s remarks have been widely condemned by activists and politicians. Some Facebook users responded by sharing the names of fallen soldiers from the war in protest.
Opposition MP Kristine Vartanyan denounced Simonyan’s remarks, emphasizing that Artsakh forces fought fiercely, citing at least 203 Azerbaijani casualties.
Artsakh’s human rights defender, Gegham Stepanian, called Simonian’s words “cynical and disrespectful.”
Stepanyan noted that even after Freedom House’s report documenting Azerbaijani war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, such remarks were still made by Armenian high-ranking officials. He pointed out that the hate speech generated by these narratives continues to be propagated by political authorities and their media allies, and combating it requires confronting the state’s propaganda machine.
The Ombudsman wrote that the existence of numerous facts, stories of struggle, and acts of self-sacrifice becomes meaningless when faced with the level of immorality, villainy, and cynicism that transcends human understanding.
Human rights activist Zaruhi Hovhannisyan also condemned Simonyan’s statement, calling it inhumane and dismissive of the suffering endured by displaced Artsakh Armenians. “Choosing life is not a crime,” she wrote. “To say, ‘You should have stayed and fought; you should have died,’ is not just heartless”it is a deliberate act of dehumanization. It is easy to enjoy power, wealth, and privilege without facing real suffering. But those who fled made the only most important choice”to live. And suddenly, for some, that became a problem?”
Simonyan later attempted to clarify his remarks but continued to criticize Artsakh leaders. “I didn’t mean to say that nobody fought for Karabakh,” Simonyan said later in his speech. Still, he criticized the Artsakh leadership for pleading with the Armenian government to “open the border” following the Azerbaijani assault.
