Epress.am News from Armenia
At a press conference in Yerevan today, head of the Heritage Party parliamentary faction Stepan (Styopa) Safaryan said it’s erroneous to assume that three years later, the Armenian National Congress (HAK) is the only political entity responsible for the events of Mar. 1, 2008, in which 10 people died in mass protests against alleged electoral fraud in the 2008 presidential elections when national police and military forces were called in to disperse the crowds and used “excessive force and violence.”
“We all bear responsibility, all political entities, all those political entities represented in the National Assembly, all state establishments for their failure to act,” he said, when journalists asked him about a statement he posted on his Facebook page according to which on the morning of Mar. 1, 2008, Safaryan, in HAK leader (and unsuccessful presidential candidate) Levon Ter-Petrossian’s home, asked the latter what message he would deliver to the people gathering in the area around Myasnikyan’s statue (a common meeting place for HAK supporters), to which Ter-Petrossian, according to the Heritage Party MP, responded, “My people are not gathered there.”
Recall that after this statement, Ter-Petrossian’s former head of guard Smbat Gasparyan denied Safaryan’s remarks, noting that no private conversation took place between Ter-Petrossian and Safaryan on that day.
In Safaryan’s opinion, Gaspayan’s refutation is not really a refutation because “have you seen [US President] Barack Obama’s bodyguard give a refutation and talk about with whom and about what Obama spoke?”
The opposition MP said that one of the aims of his statement was not to allow “people’s memory to fade so much that they say it’s not that [Heritage Party MP] Armen Martirosyan was stabbed, but that he was scratched or there was no one there from the Heritage Party.”
Nevertheless, Safaryan said the aim of his assessment was not to place blame, but rather to raise the issue of political accountability.