Hrant Bagratyan, a member of the National Assembly Armenian National Congress (ANC) group, talked about Khosrov Harutyunyan’s accusations against him during a conversation with www.aravot.am. “That person criticizes the privatization, but we don’t have a single booth, Khosrov Harutyunyan owns the gas business, factories etc. He is a big businessman; therefore, he is in the ranks of the Republican Party. If he didn’t like our policy, let him sell his property and give it to the people,” Mr. Bagratyan said.
He also responded to K. Harutyunyan’s observation that the UN special commission used the term “massive emigration” for the first time in the international practice, when the very Cabinet of Hrant Bagratyan was in power, “No, the highest number of emigrants – 228 000 – was in 1992, when he and Gagik Harutyunyan held the office of the Prime Minister. They didn’t do a hand’s turn to operate an aggregate to have 24-hour electricity. After just 450-day work, the country had electricity for 24 hours… one just had to work.”
In Mr. Bagratyan’s words, K. Harutyunyan was chosen the Prime Minister and didn’t do anything, “He would criticize the privatization and would take one factory after another, one
asset after another. Then, wherever he stood, he would say that the Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) was ruining. And I, standing next to him, would say ‘do something, it is not only about saying that the PANM is ruining.’”
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H. Bagratyan also commented on Harutyunyan’s words that during Bagratyan’s tenure we had a debt in the amount of more than one-year pensions and benefits, also that a few months after Bagratyan became the Prime Minister, the whole country would demand both Bagratyan’s and Ter-Petrossian’s resignation, “There wasn’t such thing. The pension and benefit debt was incurred at the end of 1993-the beginning of 1994, when we were compelled to introduce dram, the Russians limitted the Russian area and on the contrary, during my tenure as the Prime Minister, since mid-1994 there have been no debts, there was a 1-2-month debt. Years 1994-95 are incomparable with 1992, when he was the Prime Minister. As for the people’s discontent, that is what he thinks and I can bring my people who will express their discontent and then we can count whose people are more. I would suggest that Khosrov Harutyunyan remember the bread lines and how they disappeared overnight, when I would tell him to liberalize bread prices, standing next to him as early as in 1992, let this story end and he wouldn’t do that. He would hand out knives, along with candles and would say ‘have you handed out matches to markets?’”
As for Harutyunyan’s observation that all the failures that we have had so far are the result of the irrational, unreasoned, absolutely non-prospective economic policy of the 1990s and we have been reaping the fruits of it up until now, Mr. Bagratyan said, “He laid the foundation of it, it was not a failure, was it? When I assumed the office of the Prime Minister, the economy grew by 16 percent in 4 years, did I fail? However, when he became the Prime Minister, the economic downturn was 42 percent, is it a failure or not? That man obviously ruined the work of the government. Or he said that we had robbed factories; if the gross domestic product increased by 16 percent, is it a robbery…? Robbery is when your gross domestic product falls by 50 percent.
“It is time to say who the Prime Minister of the dark in the 1990s was. I don’t want to say, I don’t know what would have happened, if I had been the Prime Minister, but I do think that neither Gagik Harutyunyan, nor Khosrov Harutyunyan, nor Vazgen Manukyan did a hand’s turn in order that the dark wasn’t there.”
Mr. Bagratyan thinks that K. Harutyunyan, accusing him, shows how he is ashamed, “He feels shame when he is among the Republicans, they have made him an MP, then they realized whom they had made an MP. He feels shame when he is among them, he doesn’t feel shame when he is among us, he is not that kind of a person. They say ‘why have we made this guy an MP?’”
Arpine SIMONYAN
