“Both the man who gave an election bribe to Manvel Badeyan and Manvel Badeyan himself, as a bribe taker committed a crime. We must fight against that crime through propaganda and supervising methods. We must explain to the people that they must never make such criminal deals, because when they are given 5 or 10 thousand drams, afterwards they will lose $1000 or more”, Levon Zurabyan, the Armenian National Congress (ANC) coordinator, expressed such a position in regard to taking or not taking election bribe during a conversation with Aravot.am when we asked him to comment on Republican MP Manvel Badeyan’s statement on taking 5000 AMD made during a press conference recently.
In response to a question whether there was expected cooperation between political forces in the short-run, he said, “I have already stated that the Congress expresses readiness to be involved in a process where interested political forces can establish a joint platform, in order to amend the Electoral Code and present it to the government and the international community as the joint viewpoint of the Armenian people and opposition. I am sure that it is possible to realize. Admittedly, we were blamed that we condemned and did not participate, when they were participating in the discussion with the government at the time. But that, certainly, is a distortion of the issue, because in reality we were against and are against our participation in the discussions organized by the government.”
Let us remind that on Saturday Vahan Hovhannisyan, the head of the parliamentary faction of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), referring to the ANC readiness to establish a joint platform to propose amendments in the Electoral Code with all interested political forces for conducting free and fair elections, stated during a meeting with journalists that he was aware of the ANC initiative, but he refused to join the platform proposed by ANC, saying why they would get involved. “Let them come, join ours”, responded he. V. Hovhannisyan observed that all initiatives of ANC, especially recent initiatives are based on making impression, rather than achieving real results. “A year and a half ago ARF and the Heritage Party joined forces and started a struggle for the new Electoral Code. We wrote a letter, along with Stepan Safaryan, to the Venice Commission where all our offers were included. We were engaged in fighting at the National Assembly in front of you for weeks, we made some progress. During that entire struggle ANC did not join mocking and deriding. Now when it is really hard to start such a fight, I think it is an attempt to strengthen their position”, said V. Hovhannisyan.
We asked L. Zurabyan to comment on this statement of V. Hovhannisyan. “The problem is not joining this or that political force, the issue is establishing a joint electoral platform. The issue is that if there is a joint platform established, it is a more influential factor, than when the political forces act separately”, said the ANC coordinator in response.
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Recapping the passing political year, L. Zurabyan stated that the most important conclusion they had made from the political processes in 2011 was that the establishment had denied the option of transferring to democracy through negotiations, “Although they satisfied our three preconditions at first under the people’s pressure, it quickly turned out that they were not honest in the process and they were just using it to ease the people’s pressure and were not ready for serious negotiations toward democratic reforms in Armenia. Therefore we can do nothing else than put forward the issue of Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation to the people. If the regime doesn’t want to cooperate, one can speak only the language of pressure with it. That is the reason why we adopted the declaration of legal grounds for Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation at the last rally to activate and organize that process – this declaration will serve as grounds for organizing the dismissal process.”
Lusine KHACHATRYAN
