The part of Serzh Sargsyan’s election program entitled Foreign Relations and Security reads: “The foreign policy of our country should become more active and proactive, ensuring Armenia’s influential participation in international and, particularly, regional processes.”
What does the work done by the President of the Republic of Armenia and his team in the past 5 years show, what results do we have in the foreign policy?
Arsen Hambardzumyan, an alternate representative of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Supreme Body, thinks that there is no progress. He went into detail during a conversation with www.aravot.am: “The ARF has always put forward its reservations about the foreign policy. We don’t think that the foreign policy has been proactive and active in the past 5 years, since we judge by the results, what we have as a final result. The Armenia-Turkey relations are in a worse condition than they were before that, the protocols as they are now are unacceptable for us and cannot be implemented. Basically, we cannot say that we have made progress in the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. We have probably made some progress with regard to the relations with the EU, which one cannot help but notice.”
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We asked to clarify whether one could draw a conclusion that the President of the Republic of Armenia and his team hadn’t done a good job, and the president hadn’t kept his promise. Mr. Hambardzumyan said: “To put it mildly, we are not impressed by that work.”
Ruben Mehrabyan, an expert at the Armenian Center for Political and International Studies, graded the work done by the government “C-” using the A-F grading system and said in response to the question: “It is one thing to have an active and proactive policy and it is another thing what we have gained from that. There are serious problems with the results. Otherwise, the policy can be called, as you wish – active, proactive, decorated, adorned. It is a matter of adjectives and not of essence.”
Assessing the results, the political scientist noted: “We have no results with regard to normalizing the Armenia-Turkey relations, the dependency in the relations with Russia hasn’t changed in any way, moreover, it has a tendency of deepening. So we have no results there either. With regard to the rhetoric, I see some elements aimed at improving relations
with the West, but I would put a plus very carefully. Not to mention that the Armenian economy has gained no benefits from the foreign policy, the Armenian export markets have not expanded; it hasn’t had any impact on our economic indices. If someone likes to call this foreign policy active and proactive, I will help him find better adjectives for that.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
