Another multi-thousand rally of the extra-parliamentary oppositional Armenian National Congress was held recently in Yerevan. According to the ANC’s representatives, they don’t believe the government’s promises to conduct fair and transparent elections. And there is a solid basis foe such a mistrust: pre-election bribes, attacks against some representatives of parliamentary candidates, destroyed voters lists, the refusal of the government to show the lists of voters absent from the country at the moment as well as to install web-cams on the polling stations. “May 6 is a good occasion to deprive the ruling regime of their parliamentary majority. We regard the parliamentary elections as the first stage of the presidential elections. The authorities regard them in the same manner, or else Serge Sarksyan wouldn’t have headed the proportional list of the Republican Party of Armenia and wouldn’t be campaigning”, said Gagik Djangiryan, ANC member, ex-military prosecutor.
For the first time Serge Srksyan’s son in law was subjected to the opposition’s criticism. Mikhail Minasyan is an ex-head of the presidential administration and now he is the vice-president of the RPA’s election headquarters, but he never makes any open political statements. However, according to the ANC’s coordinator Levon Zubaryan, this ‘new oligarch’ and the ‘empire of lies’ created by him is a much bigger threat than all the ‘old oligarchs’. ‘Using his father’s-in-law resources he controls a lot of media-agencies, such as Internet-papers Tert.am, News.am, 1in.am and ‘Armenia’ and ‘Armnews’ TV channels. He dictates the results of the ‘polls’ saying that ANC’s rating is only 3-5%. And today Minosyan and his ‘empire of lies targets the only true center of control over the polling process, which means that the regime is scared that the center can catch the falsifiers’, said Zubaryan.
The rally speakers also the considerable growth of poverty, unemployment and emigration (as the result of the previous two). According to the oppositionists, the true reason for the current situation is the monopolization of the economy, the absence of competitiveness and the great level of corruption and ‘shadow economy’.
“The same people who try to make the world recognize ‘Armenian genocide’ conduct the same genocide in their own country. And these are not my words, these are the word of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Charles Aznavour, appointed by President Sarksyan himself”, said the ANC leader, ex-President Levon Ter-Petrosyan. There are different international research projects on Armenian shadow economy, and some of them show that the shadow economy envelops 2/3 of the country’s economy. It means that only 1/3 of the economy gives revenues to the budget. According to ter-Petrosyan, if this missing money would be included into the state budget, if would be possible to double the pensions and allowances, to triple military and science expenses as well as salaries.
The Armenian government’s approach to the two principle issues of Armenian foreign policy – the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – was also subjected to severe criticism. According to Ter-Petrosyan, the government committed a number of mistakes, and these mistakes made some negative processes irreversible. For example, the infantile address by the Armenia’s second President Robert Kocharyan to the UN in 1998 led Armenia to a catastrophe in the process of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation. Kocharyan used the UN rostrum to demand the world to recognize the Armenian genocide, thus making the issue of the genocide recognition the headstone of Armenian foreign policy. Ankara’s response was swift: turkey offered Armenia to create a joint commission of historians which would carefully study the events that took place in the Ottoman Empire in the beginning of the 20th century. Kocharyan fell for this trick and said that the two states have to restore their diplomatic relations and open the border first, and than create a large inter-governmental commission t discuss all the issues existing between them. Later the idea of the ‘historians’ commission’ was written into the Armenian-Turkish protocols.
According to Ter-Petrosyan, even though the protocols weren’t ratified by either government, now Turkey has a right to demand Yerevan to create such a commission – which doesn’t answer the interests of Armenia but is very beneficial for Turkey. The ex-president said that making the genocide recognition the headstone of Armenian foreign policy was a huge mistake, and that he has a project of how to avoid the commission’s creation.
Another fatal error made by Robert Kocharyan (and inherited by Sarksyan) was the exclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh representatives from the negotiation process. When Kocharyan declared that he used to be Karabakh president and now was and Armenian President, and thus he can represent both parties in the negotiation process, he made a great present to Azerbaijan and the international community. At the same time, it worsted Armenia’s positions, as compared to the time when Nagorno-Karabakh was a full party in the negotiations.
In 1994 the OSCE recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as a rightful party in the negotiations, which was very beneficial for the Armenian side as it gave them the space for maneuver. Before Kocharyan came to power the OSCE Minsk Group had to work out solutions that would stisfy three parties. But since 1999 there were only two conflict parties which reduced Armenia’s options as far as the negotiation process is concerned.
According to Ter-Petrosyan, another irreversible mistake of the Armenian government in this process was the recognition of the so-called Madrid principles of the conflict resolution by Kocharyan in 2007. The mistake is irreversible as the principles have already been unreservedly accepted by the Minsk Group co-chairs as well.
At the same time the two major principles –Azerbaijan’s right for territorial integrity and the right of Nagorno-Karabakh for self-determination – remain incompatible. “It is a paradox, it’s absurd. So why did it happen? These two alternative principles have been included into the document so that both Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents could feed this paper to their peoples”, says Levon Ter-Petrosyan.
Ter-Petrosyan also pointed out that there’s no principle difference between the ‘Madrid principles’ and the ‘Lisbon principles’ of 1996, which were vetoed by him: “I wasn’t afraid to veto this document as the people supported me, as I was no criminal or bandit, and none of the world’s powers had any dirt on me”.
The head of the ANC is convinced that a legitimate government could approach these matters in a completely different manner, even despite these irreversible mistakes. He promised that is he becomes President again he wouldn’t let Armenia sign any document that wouldn’t be also signed by Nagorno-Karabakh representatives. Ter-Petrosyan explained that it is already impossible to change the basic principles of the conflict settlement, but when push comes to shove it is most important that three signatures would finalize the concluding treaty: the Armenian, the Azerbaijani, and the Nagorno-Karabakhi.
“Our current regime is a national catastrophe, and they are so vulnerable that they’ll agree with anything they’ll be offered, so we have to get rid of them before that happens”, said Levon Ter-Petrosyan.
Susanna Petrosyan, exclusively to VK
