“For the first time in international practice, the UN Special Commission used the term ‘massive emigration.’ It was registered during the years of Hrant Bagratyan’s Cabinet. We had debt of more than one-year pensions and benefits, we had an economy in a terribly bad condition. The privatized companies would sell their tools, would sell them as scrap metals as if to survive, then they would start to sell buildings brick by brick, window by window, they would sell the roofs… the bad state of agriculture. All that was a result of unreasoned and incomprehensible revolutionary economic policy,” Khosrov Harutyunyan, a Republican MP, said about the years when Hrant Bagratyan’s Cabinet was in power during a conversation with www.aravot.am, getting back to Armenian National Congress (ANC) MP Hrant Bagratyan’s observation made a few days ago that Harutyunyan had been dismissed from the office by the president for bad work.
Mr. Harutyunyan assured that he was not dismissed. He resigned, “President Levon Ter-Petrossian’s order as of February 1, 1993… to dismiss Khosrov Harutyunyan for violating the rules of ethics, there was no mention – and it couldn’t have been – about ruining the economy or disrupting the Cabinet’s work. The reason for my resignation was ideological controversies, which existed between the Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) team and me regarding the conception of the economic policy. They as revolutionaries shaped, destroyed the present at every turn based on their vague perception of the future.”
In Mr. Harutyunyan’s words, he resigned immediately after H. Bagratyan had submitted his budget, “That budget, which I put forward, was devised by Hrant Bagratyan’s team, that budget was not supported during deliberations in the Cabinet, but I myself proposed to put the budget forward for the legislative body’s consideration, in order to move the political debate to the Supreme Council. I myself made a speech against that budget, because of which during a meeting of the Security Council in the evening, I said that I was handing in my resignation and Ter-Petrossian said ‘OK, let’s agree that I am dismissing.’”
K. Harutyunyan is convinced that if he had managed a failed Cabinet, rallies would have been organized demanding his resignation during his 6-month tenure, “During my whole tenure, there was only one rally on November 27. That rally was organized by the PANM to tell that Khosrov Harutyunyan’s Cabinet was not their Cabinet. Bagratyan took over from me as the head of the Cabinet and a few months later, the whole republic demanded the resignation of both Bagratyan and Ter-Petrossian. All failures that we have had up to now are a result of the irrational, unreasoned, absolutely non-prospective economic policy of the 1990s. We have been reaping the fruits of it up until now.”
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Arpine SIMONYAN
