Armenia’s National Assembly Speaker Ruben Rubinyan told parliament on Thursday that all talk of the return of the ethnically cleansed Armenian population of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to their homeland is “conflict-generating,” though a binding 2023 ruling by the International Court of Justice requires Azerbaijan to permit their safe and unimpeded return.
“I am not saying it is unjust; from a human perspective, it may be justified,” Rubinyan said. “But when you formulate this as a state objective, it means reviving the logic of conflict.”
Rubinyan’s proposal was to close the question. “We propose acknowledging the current situation, moving forward and ensuring 100 years of peace,” he said. The Armenian verb he used, ??????, means to fix or record in place.
He was responding to remarks by MPs from the Armenia faction, and directly to Kristine Vardanyan, who observed that the peace document signed with Azerbaijan did not address the root causes of the conflict. Rubinyan named Arega Hovsepyan, an Artsakh-born public figure and Strong Armenia party member who has campaigned on the right of return, as his illustration. “From Ms Arega Hovsepyan’s perspective, of course, it is justified: she may say, I want to go to my home.”
Hovsepyan has argued that no government has the authority to open or close the Artsakh question, and that displaced Artsakh Armenians retain the right to speak of returning to their homeland.
The Court Ordered What He Called Conflict-Generating
The International Court of Justice ruled on November 17, 2023, by 13 votes to 2, that Azerbaijan must ensure Armenians who left Artsakh after September 19, 2023 and who wish to return are able to do so in a safe, unimpeded and expeditious manner. The order also covers those who wish to depart and those who wish to stay, and requires Azerbaijan to protect registration, identity and private property records. The order is binding, and Azerbaijan was directed to report to the court within 8 weeks on the steps taken to implement it. Azerbaijan has not complied.
More than 120,000 Armenians were forcibly displaced from Artsakh within a single week in September 2023, following a nine-month Azerbaijani blockade that cut off food, fuel, and medicine. Former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo published a legal opinion in August 2023 concluding that the blockade constituted genocide under the Genocide Convention.
Rubinyan Dated The Conflict To 1905
Rubinyan told the chamber the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict did not begin in 1988. “I believe there is a consensus among historians that the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which lasted until August 8 of last year, began in 1905,” he said, referring to what were then called the Armenian-Tatar clashes.
The date places the origin of the conflict 13 years before Azerbaijan existed as a state. Azerbaijan was established in 1918. The events of 1905 to 1907 are documented as intercommunal violence during the 1905 Russian Revolution, involving Armenians and Caucasian Tatars, later known as Azerbaijanis. Historians typically describe them as interethnic massacres within the Russian Empire, with the most violent clashes occurring in Baku, Nakhichevan, Shushi, and Gandzak.
He gave two causes for the conflict. The first was that Armenians and Azerbaijanis settled together in the same geographical area, and he cited Bosnia, Cyprus, Kosovo and North Macedonia, saying conflicts between small and medium-sized nations often arise where different ethnic groups share a territory.
The second cause he named was imperial pressure. He noted the 1905 clashes came while the Russian Empire faced revolution at home and defeat in the war with Japan, and said conflicts of this kind begin when an empire is weakening and still needs to hold its influence in a region. He traced the pattern forward: escalation when Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent and formed regular armies in 1918, freezing under Soviet rule, and repetition in 1988.
He Cited Lausanne As The Model
For how such conflicts end, Rubinyan pointed to the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, saying it produced compact majorities in both countries and, in his assessment, prevented another interstate ethnic conflict between Greeks and Turks.
That exchange was carried out under the Lausanne Convention and forcibly transferred roughly 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Anatolia to Greece and roughly 400,000 Muslims from Greece to Turkey. It was compulsory. It followed the systematic massacre and expulsion of Christian populations from Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, including the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Assyrian Genocide, and the Greek Genocide. Lausanne is cited by international law scholars as the leading historical precedent for compulsory population transfer, which is now recognized as ethnic cleansing under international humanitarian law.
Rubinyan then applied the logic. “Yes, we have seen many injustices, pain, casualties and bloodshed,” he said, describing a present in which Armenians live in the Republic of Armenia alongside Yazidi, Kurdish, Assyrian and Russian citizens and alongside Armenians from Artsakh, whom he called not guests but people in their homeland, while Azerbaijanis live in Azerbaijan.
“If we do not want to revive the cause of the conflict, then we should not restore or talk about restoring the architecture that would bring us back to roughly the same situation as in 1905,” he said.
Rubinyan, 36, is a founding member of Civil Contract, the ruling party of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and deputy chair of its board. He was Armenia’s special representative for normalization with Turkey from 2021 to August 2026, when he stepped down from that role upon being elected Speaker of the National Assembly following the June 7 elections. His remarks come as 19 Armenian hostages remain unjustly held in Azerbaijani custody, and as Armenia continues to receive no independent international access to its citizens held in Baku.
