Epress.am News from Armenia
The most important question in the political agenda in Armenia is the possible dialogue between the Armenian National Congress (HAK) and the authorities, said HAK leader Levon Ter-Petrossian at the opposition rally Thursday.
Ter-Petrossian noted that despite Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan’s Jun. 17 statement that his administration, since 2008, has expressed willingness to dialogue with all political entities, “it’s clear that the authorities never intended to dialogue with HAK, but rather, from the start, set out to trample, destroy and eradicate its existence. Only after the failure of all attempts to this end were they forced to change tactics.”
“I would like to draw your attention to the following idea by Serzh Sargsyan: ‘I appreciate our work with the Armenian National Congress over the past few months and I hope there is an mutual understanding that the process that has been initiated has to be maintained and developed with joined forces. It’s easy to destroy that which has been built; an indicator of political maturity is the ability to add to that which has been created.’
“On one hand, we must appreciate the fact that Sargsyan realizes the importance of the process, but on the other hand, it’s puzzling, his calling forth secondary, purely ceremonial problems, which can lead to the failure of the process.
“I confess, despite my best efforts, my academic training is not enough to understand, for example, the phrase ‘attempts to turn dialogue into negotiations are simply unacceptable.’
“In my humble opinion, these words [i.e. negotiations and dialogue] are almost synonyms and they must be differentiated, then the most convenient explanation is perhaps the following: dialogue is the content of the phenomenon, while negotiations is its form. But this is not the issue, but that which, stressing the importance of this process, Serzh Sargsyan, for whatever reasons, currently cannot decide the format of the dialogue or, which is the same, negotiations.
“I am confident, however, that this is a temporary uncertainty conditioned by the unusual situation or the incomprehension of his entourage, which will soon be overcome… Consequently, no matter how much the authorities persist, all the same, in the end they will speak with us appropriately; that is, at the level of delegations,” he said.
According to the opposition leader, recently, government officials “like parrots” have been repeating left and right that there are no grounds for holding pre-term elections in Armenia. So the rigged presidential election of 2008, the massacre of Mar. 1, the torture of hundreds of [opposition] politicians, the zero rating of the National Assembly, the profound socioeconomic crisis, widespread corruption, the emigration that has reached catastrophic proportions, the “mad” inflation, complications in the Karabakh issue and so on are not grounds for early elections? he said.
“What other grounds are necessary for early elections and regime change when in civilized countries these happen because of much more secondary issues compared to [these which I] enumerated?” Ter-Petrossian asked.
“To lose the current opportunity means to exhaust the last hope to build a decent future for our country. Let’s wish, though, that this time common sense won’t betray the regime’s ringleaders, and in the coming one, two months they will finally be decided in the issue of early elections. Otherwise, the so-called reasonable time period will be deemed to be exhausted in September and there will be only one demand on our agenda, that is, the immediate resignation of Serzh Sargsyan and the ruling coalition,” Ter-Petrossian concluded.