Regardless of who will be the candidate of the united opposition for the presidential election and whether there will be such, regardless of what results that election will yield, one can assert that at the moment, a relatively free working area has been established for the political, social organizations, as well as mass media. I stress relatively, because we are too far from the European standards of democracy and freedom of speech and in order to approach
those, one needs the sincere desire of the majority of our population, which obviously is not there. If you ask people in the street whether they are for those standards, the majority will not understand at all what you are talking about and will start to complain about social troubles and a few of them will spit out a curse from the bottom their hearts. By the way, OSCE/ODIHR should take that into consideration while preparing reports. However, being too far from Europe, we don’t fall far behind Georgia and Turkey with this and are a few steps ahead of the other neighbors.
It is well-known what the Armenian National Congress (ANC) and its supporters think about all this – this is the same gang regime, which was there during Kocharyan’s rule. It is absolutely right – generally we have been living under an “independent” gang rule for 21 years, in 1956-1991 under the Soviet gang rule and not only had there been a gang regime before that, but it had also been a totalitarian and bloody one. However, thaws occurred from time to time in that period, in 1956 and 1985, in particular. There have been minor thaws in independent Armenia too – the thaw of the first administration ended in the summer of 1992, with the exile of Hrayr Marukhyan, the thaw of the second one ended with October 27, the thaw of the third one started last spring and hasn’t ended yet. Sooner or later, unfortunately, it will end, because it is initiated “from above” and not under the pressure of the society. The thaw will be followed by stagnation, at best, or God forbid, by a new tyranny. Naturally, the longer today’s relative peace lasts, the better.
Could you imagine 4-5 years ago that Robert Melkonyan, Deputy Chief of Yerevan Police (whom young oppositionists called Bazaz (merchant) at the time), will have a page on Facebook and will participate in the discussions on social networks?
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
