Epress.am News from Armenia
Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun or ARF-D) MP Vahan Hovhannisyan, speaking to journalists in Yerevan today, criticized a recent statement by Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan in which he said that those who cooperate with the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) will win, while those who don’t cooperate will find themselves before a “broken trough” (that is, will come up empty handed).
“Let me briefly weigh in on the essence of what was said — leaving aside the trough ideology. Let them keep their trough, they and their friends, the issue is otherwise.
“The prime minister says whoever cooperates with us… he basically makes a division between those who cooperate and those who don’t. What does it mean to cooperate with them, and what does it mean to cooperate in general? It means to be respectful toward one another, to mutually take into consideration [each other’s] views. On the other hand, to not only consider, but also to employ by making compromises. This is how we imagine it,” he said.
In the Dashnak’s opinion, as a rule, HHK understands cooperation to mean being obedient.
“Whatever they say is right and you must comply, vote like so, and not criticize,” he said.
According to Hovhannisyan, in Armenia, whoever points out mistakes and tries to rectify the situation is viewed as an enemy, who hinders “their smooth, placable governing process.”
“Ay, if they really had an intention to cooperate [with other political forces] and did cooperate, Azerbaijan wouldn’t have been selected as a UN Security Council member, there wouldn’t have been mistakes in the Armenian-Turkish issue, and there wouldn’t be catastrophic errors in the country’s economy,” he said.
On the memorandum signed by the ruling coalition in February, the MP said that “where it says that the parties won’t be fighting to change relations among them, that means that from the beginning, the coalition parties were obliged to accept the Republican [Party of Armenia’s] ruling and principal role — which the prime minister confirmed with his statement.”