Karapet Rubinyan, the former deputy speaker of the National Assembly, about impeaching Serzh Sargsyan
There is a church custom, according to which when a high-ranking clergyman visits a place, the bells of the church should ring. Once a bishop enters a village and approaches the church – there is no ring yet. He asks the priest why he has not rung the bells. The latter responds, “Your reverence, there are a lot of reasons for that, first of which is that we don’t have a bell.” Karapet Rubinyan, the former deputy speaker of parliament, told this joke during a conversation with “Aravot”, in response to our question-observations that the Armenian National Congress (ANC) made a declaration on Friday where the legal and political reasons for Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation were presented. The items of that declaration have been voiced by many political forces, including ANC that also demanded Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation, during Sargsyan’s presidency. However, the demand for resignation has not yielded any practical result. Does the present political situation make possible the president’s resignation constitutionally? Is the ANC declaration viable? “There is a well-known item in that declaration that Serzh Sargsyan has become the president of the country through a rigged election, i.e. he has taken the power. The additional explanations are just decorations. We don’t have a bell in the first place – Serzh Sargsyan is not a president. Seriously the current parliament that doesn’t represent the people and is also a body formed through a rigged election will hardly start such a process. And impeachment is a process that starts and ends in the parliament, according to the Constitution. Therefore, such a thing is impossible”, said our interlocutor, adding that he didn’t think that the declaration made by ANC aimed at it. According to him, the declaration reminds once again of the ANC activities’ direction. In response to a question “what does ANC aim at in this round of struggle, struggle through ‘declaration’?”, Rubinyan said, “Firstly I haven’t seen struggle for quite a long time and the latest rallies, in my opinion, are some parodies of activities or an attempt to show that something is done. Nothing more.”
The first president expressed his personal opinion regarding the possible cooperation between ANC and the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) during a rally, and also made a favorable gesture toward the oligarchs, saying, “The biggest evil in our country are not the businessmen or oligarchs, but the system of government corrupted from top to toe. Business or oligarchy is just the results of that system, its associate and servant. From time to time the establishment representatives have deliberately made oligarchy the target for hatred in order to distract the society from their own crimes.” We inquired what our interlocutor thought of it. In response, the former National Assembly deputy speaker and a former member of ANC said, “Firstly I would like to remind all those who say that the accusations that there is no democracy inside ANC are groundless and that the Congress is the most democratic organization – I would like to say that if there is a political body that hasn’t made a decision on a certain issue, the leader of that organization should not allow himself to suddenly express his own opinion in a public statement. All the controversies should have this way or another been discussed inside the party, fixed and a common opinion should have been formed. This thing is a bit extraordinary. However, on the other hand, I don’t see any signs of the stated controversies, because none of the Congress member parties or political leaders seemed to disagree with Levon Ter-Petrossian’s statement.” In Mr. Rubinyan’s opinion, Ter-Petrossian’s so-called “political analysis” basically aims at one thing, to deepen the internal controversies of the pyramid of the rule of bandits, in the end to split the coalition by the means of Gagik Tsarukyan. “They suppose that Mr. Tsarukyan should refuse to cooperate with Robert Kocharyan who as far as I know is the sharer of a part of his businesses and confront Serzh Sargsyan. In any case, they try to incline Gagik Tsarukyan to that. It will be very good, if such a thing happens, because it will mean a split and a weakening of the pyramid of the rule of bandits. However, is it possible, I don’t know the readers will make their own conclusions”, said Mr. Rubinyan.
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In response to a question “will the recent exchange of offices, the internal problems of the coalition create such a political situation that a snap election will be unavoidable?”, our interlocutor said, “The natural process is the following – a deepening of internal controversies, a split starts as a result of the national movement or the opposition struggle and it is the reason why the establishment eventually loses the administrative leverage and is compelled to resign. During the whole current year we have witnessed the opposite process – the national movement or the opposition struggle gradually dies away, making the time-gaps between rallies longer, we have reached the three-month schedule, the most important factor is lacking. Under these circumstances, one should not expect that the internal controversies will deepen and there will be a split. On the opposite, the establishment has time left both to rearrange the rule of bandits peacefully and to take other preventive measures, i.e. to remove unreliable and dangerous people. This is not a picture of freeing the country from the rule of bandits at all. The lack of struggle strengthens the rule of bandits.”
NELLY GRIGORYAN
