Dashnaktsutyun Responds to Aram Manukyan’s Statements on Electoral Reform

Pan-Armenian National Movement (HHSh) party leader Aram Manukyan, a guest on Kentron TV’s “Urvagits” program on Nov. 2, made defamatory and overtly false statements about the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun, or ARF-D), reads a statement issued today by the ARF-D public relations office.

The statement notes that Manukyan insisted that his party issued four conditions to conducting fair elections which the ARF-D neither joined nor supports. These conditions are: the use of election ink (applied to the forefinger of voters) in order to prevent double voting; monitoring the electoral process; filming; and publishing voter lists.

Dashnaktsutyun notes that unlike the opposition bloc Armenian National Congress (HAK, of which HHSh is a member) which turned its attention to organizing elections at the last rally, ARF-D (and the Heritage Party) proposed an alternative electoral legislation back in May, which contained around 20 provisions that would make elections more free, fair and transparent.

“The demands put forth by HAK were long raised, more complete and coordinated, by ARF-D save perhaps for the election ink, which Dashnaktsutyun proposed to replace with a more civilized version of passport scanning. Thus, we can assume that the HHSh leader either is uninformed of pre-election processes or the positions of political forces or is gerrymandering them.

“It’s obvious that the HHSh and its offspring HAK are trying to mislead the Armenian public, presenting themselves as the only ‘true’ opposition or political force, which is capable of uniting political opposition forces, while by saying ‘pan-civic mobilization’ they mean only to follow them blindly,” reads the statement, in part.