Edmon Marukian, who also served as ambassador-at-large until last March, said Baku’s objections to Armenia’s current constitution are just an excuse for not signing an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty.
“Azerbaijan has put forward preconditions that were not present at the very beginning of negotiations on the peace treaty,” Marukian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “They are new preconditions, and they are obviously unfeasible preconditions.”
He said that the treaty will not be signed anytime soon because Azerbaijan as well as Turkey “will continue to make new demands to Armenia.”
Marukian sits on the Constitutional Reform Council formed by Pashinian in 2022 with the aim of proposing amendments to the current constitution. An executive order signed by Pashinian in May this year changed the council’s mandate, saying that it must draft a “new constitution” from scratch before January 2027.
The order came as Azerbaijan continued to make the signing of the peace treaty conditional on a change of the Armenian constitution which Azerbaijani leaders say contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
Baku specifically wants Yerevan to remove a preamble to the constitution that mentions Armenia’s 1990 declaration of independence, which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. The only legal way to do that is to enact an entirely new constitution through a referendum.
Marukian insisted that a majority of Armenians would not vote for it in the referendum. This, he said, would give Baku a “pretext for a new war.”
“That is why I believe we must not touch the preamble to the constitution or get into any discussion of this. This is a trap,” he said.
Shortly after resigning as ambassador-at-large, Marukian criticized Pashinian for continuing to make “unilateral” concessions to Azerbaijan following the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh. He claimed that Pashinian’s strategy of resolving the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has been a complete failure and will not bring peace.
Marukian leads the Bright Armenia party that used to be one of the country’s main opposition groups. Like other opposition leaders, he 43-year-old lawyer blamed Pashinian for Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan and demanded his resignation in the wake of it. He accepted the premier’s offer to become ambassador-at-large nine months after his party failed to win any seats in the Armenian parliament in the 2021 snap elections.