Epress.am News from Armenia
“When citizens understand that either they rule their fate or the so-called ‘devil,’ which is not a sly creature but is created in certain functions and situations, which stifles every thing that’s good, then there will be real changes.
“Let me give you a typical example: when in ’88, people were standing in the [Republic] square and even when those people left, negative changes took place in the purest people representing the movement; that is, the provisional Satan appeared,” said Karabakh Committee member Ashot Manucharyan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today.
He noted that civic duty should always be within people and the people retain its owner’s status, which doesn’t mean staying outside the whole day.
“In Armenia today, anything can serve as a spark, and connected with Liberty Square, it is a very enigmatic and very important place in Armenia, and it is a place of generalization. I think that soon, whoever wants to begin full activity, when the entire people have to participate in the work, in the function, if preparatory work has been done, then Liberty Square will again become that square where new Armenia will be reborn,” said Manucharyan.
Asked whether March 1, 2008, wasn’t that spark which was stifled, Manucharyan said on March 1, society was split into three segments: Levon Ter-Petrossian supporters, Serzh Sargsyan supporters and those who supported neither.
“In ’88, it wasn’t important, there were 1,000 people gathered there, or 10,000 or 1 million. Standing there was always the entire people, even if many weren’t there, it’s the same: it was the square that governed the country and the focus of making the people whole. That wasn’t the situation on March 1; whoever tried to protect the order of life with gunshots, they succeeded.”
To a journalist’s observation that there’s a point of view by the ruling authorities that whatever exists today had its seeds sowed in the years of Levon Ter-Petrossian’s rule, Manucharyan said:
“In 1990, when a change of power took place, a gross error was made, in terms of choosing the path of development. Making that mistake is tied not with a single individual, but with our completeness; our society at that time could not correctly perceive which was the path, and perhaps wasn’t in the condition to do so. The level we were at, our ideas were such that we had to take those western cliches, and being led by those, move forward; we didn’t see, that world in the West was already in a crisis period. We saw only the Soviet crisis and we threw ourselves in that direction. This is what those who express such opinions mean: those mistakes brought us to this situation, but that doesn’t justify anyone,” he concluded.