Presenting his evaluation of the discussion itself, Manukyan said: “In general, I don’t understand well the whole concerns of the recent period. There are people in the country’s leadership who had gone through war and this whole process and they are not the people who would make concessions concerning our national interests. In any case, this process will be long and I have warned that one has to be prepared for that.”

Meanwhile, Paruyr Hayrikyan, of the National Self-Determination Union, said he did not receive anything new from the discussions.

“There was nothing new there at least for me. No surprises,” he said in the context of the so-called Madrid principles of settlement for Nagorno-Karabakh proposed by international mediators last November.

In regards to Sargsyan’s perceived position of favoring a compromise-based solution to the long-running dispute, Hayrikyan said: “Since the president is a living person, he will say what he is due to say, what he finds appropriate, but I don’t think that he said anything he had not said before.”

http://www.armenianow.com/?action=viewArticle&AID=3392&CID=3258&IID=1210&lng=eng

If so, why thousands of soldiers and field commanders were NOT saying so at the time, or immediately after the war?? If they really thought so, it would be impossible to hide. In the Armenian society, there was NO such discourse, NO interviews, NO kitchen table talks about the native Armenian lands of Fizuli, Agdam, etc. To the contrary, practically everybody was talking about the “buffer zone”. And that is a fact, and not a perception.”

http://artashes98.livejournal.com/63337.html

“In November 1998, the OSCE proposed “a common state” as a new basis for negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Naira Melkoumian, foreign minister of Karabagh’s self-declared Republic, explains its rationale: “We want to create a common state on the former territory of Soviet Azerbaijan, in which relations between Karabagh and Baku are horizontal rather than subordinate.” Accepting that such an entity would enjoy “something between autonomy and independence,” she continued, “the world need not recognize Karabagh as a state. But Azerbaijan must recognize our right to determine our own laws, political system and, above all, our own defense.”

http://artashes98.livejournal.com/62773.html