While making assessments of the local elections, the Monitoring Mission of the Council of Europe stressed that in Armenia, people’s eyesight was weak and it was necessary to open eye care centers, because people quickly found their names on the voting lists, but they had problems with putting checkmarks in voting booths. www.aravot.am inquired of Galust Sahakyan, the leader of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) parliamentary group, how he would comment on that assessment of the international
observers. He replied, “But why don’t you want to focus more on the fact that the observers made a rather positive assessment of our elections. Moreover, let me say this – it is convincing also given the fact that you were not able to find certain things on the election day to fill websites and TV channels with all that. Naturally, it is a monitoring group; it may say that amongst positive things. You are talking about the negative things now forgetting about the positive ones.”
In response to our observation that they had said it only in front of cameras and had described an absolutely different picture without cameras, Mr. Sahakyan said, “They didn’t present an absolutely different picture. The observers presented them as positive and said that we were engaged in rather serious processes.”
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When reminded that the observers had just stated that “there is a small progress” as a positive side, he said the following, “Even if there is a small progress – this is a massive event – you may have one opinion, the observers another, I a slightly different one. The important thing is that we have made some progress; be satisfied with that.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
