Katherine Leach, the UK Ambassador to Armenia, talked about the February 18 presidential election in Armenia, the internal political situation in Armenia and the electoral process the other day. Talking about the reasons for the position of the Armenian parliamentary opposition – the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP), the ANC and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) – the ambassador asked a question: “Are these parties not standing because they lack finance, because they lack trust in a fair result, or because they are not really opposition parties as we would normally understand the concept?” At the request of www.aravot.am, Khosrov Harutyunyan, a member of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) parliamentary group, said about the questions asked by the ambassador that Ms. Ambassador had asked appropriate questions. “Nonetheless, why did the opposition lose ground step by step? The easiest formula is ‘The government did everything it could….’ Excuse me, but the government didn’t cause contradictions in the ANC, did it?”
The RPA parliamentary group member is convinced that the government was very honest when it offered the ANC a dialogue. “The government thought that it would even give a chance to the extra-parliamentary political force by that to ascend to the level of the parliamentary political forces and play its own very responsible role in the run-up to the parliamentary election. Who missed that opportunity? The opposition itself.”
According to Khosrov Harutyunyan, the fact that the government responded to the opposition’s questions on 85 pages with answers on 135 pages testifies to the government’s attitude toward the opposition. “It was a deep analysis of all the questions raised. Couldn’t there have been a constructive discussion on those? No doubt, there could. However, the distorted perception of the opposition in our country – the opposition is who curses everything – impeded everything. I think that the oppositional part of our political forces was hoist with its own petard and couldn’t overcome those difficulties.”
Talking about the ambassador’s questions, he added: “We impede ourselves. I have been repeating since 1995 that it is the time for us to understand that the only stimulus of political forces’ activities is a joint line of organizing public life. I would very much like it, if all political forces, first of all, the opposition, learned a lesson from all this, reorganized itself based on an ideology, which undoubtedly is the best way to ensure the right to vote.”
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Adding to all this that the civil society’s role in public life has increased recently, Khosrov Harutyunyan thinks that we don’t need any other prospects of development. At least, he would very much like it to be so.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
