Epress.am News from Armenia
According to People’s Party leader Tigran Karapetyan, Armenian National Congress leader Levon Ter-Petrossian and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan are speaking privately. “Ter-Petrossian knows this system very well and understanding that power is a piece of scrap iron [a weapon], it places the second [weapon] before it. By pressuring each other, they agree,” he said today at a discussion organized by the Yerevan Press Club titled “Aims, Problems, Obstacles and Possibilities of Political Dialogue in Armenia.”
Continuing, he said there are national security officials in the ranks of both the opposition and the ruling authorities: “they’ll find a [common] language, that’s clear. They found [a common language] from the very beginning. What can the people do, those who don’t accept Ter-Petrossian and Serzh Sargsyan?” he asked.
Dialogue, basically, depends on the Armenian president’s good will, Karapetyan continued. “We see no good will whatsoever. There is pillaging, an oligarchic parliament — we have to speak of this,” he said, while adding, “What are they dialoguing about?”
“He says, we achieved a result: let say, they released one political prisoner. They have to release them all; it’s not a matter of dialogue; it’s good will that the authorities have to form,” he said. According to the party leader, if Sargsyan and Ter-Petrossian today are negotiating, they aren’t speaking about the system: “they created and continue the system.” And it is this system that the party led by Karapetyan is against.
He again noted the absence of dialogue: “There are agreements — perhaps a number of them.” According to Karapetyan, the opposition threatens the ruling authorities with expressions tantamount to “if you don’t do this, I’ll sit here” and so on. “But it’s not like that; the people have to stand up; it has to be the people’s will.”
In addition, Karapetyan touched upon the Public Meeting. “What meeting is this where chiefs have gathered. I don’t understand: can’t you live without a chief?” Karapatyan is in favor of dialogue where on the plate are such key issues, which, according to him, lead the people to destruction.
On Sargsyan’s meeting with leaders of political parties in Armenia: “We spoke a thousand times about the Armenian-Turkish border opening, that it will fail; friends, they are Turks. At one time, Dashnaktsutyun [the Armenian Revolutionary Federation] had to speak to them with guns, [but] they didn’t. How did they speak [to them], that they gave them all the lands; they gave Kars; you shouldn’t have given Kars; we would’ve had Kars today.” According to Karapetyan, Armenians “have to talk [to Turks] with tanks.”