The blog post of the UK Ambassador to Armenia caused heated debates, many members of the RPA, including Eduard Nalbandyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, called it “politically incorrect,” described her action as interference in the internal affairs of Armenia. When asked during a conversation with Aravot yesterday whether this wasn’t a violation of diplomats’ professional ethics, Arman Melikyan, a candidate for president and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, said: “I consider it as a way of expressing an idea by an interested party. As for the overreaction of the RPA members, when they beg money abroad, don’t they think that foreign countries interfere in Armenia’s internal affairs by that? When they call on this government not to engage in fraud, this suddenly arouses resentment. Let them not engage in fraud. I am sure there will be no such posts then.” We also inquired whether the candidate for president shared the ideas of Ms. Ambassador on the parliamentary opposition’s approach to the presidential election. Let us remind that Katherine Leach asked the following 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?” In Arman Melikyan’s opinion, those are rather grounded concerns. “The parliamentary opposition isolated itself, although I think that the parliamentary election was uniquely intriguing. This election basically offered an opportunity to deprive the Armenian National Congress (ANC) of the monopoly of being opposition, and it was carried out rather skillfully. Appearing in the parliament, the ANC found itself next to the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), which had become opposition, and naturally, it was cornered. During the past few months, we have seen the ANC weaken. So it was a very successful action taken by the government, and I think that the ANC, the PAP, and the ARF didn’t participate in the election for different reasons.”
The Armenian government overreacted to the PACE monitoring mission’s preliminary report on our election too.
Let us remind that it was about correcting voter registration lists and public mistrust in the electoral processes. In response to Aravot’s question regarding this, Mr. Melikyan noted: “Speculations about voter registration lists are a way to distract attention from the main issue. Voter registration lists will always need to be corrected; there is always an issue of dead people or newly-born people. At the end of the day, inaccuracies will
hardly have a considerable impact on the outcome of the election. Whereas the absence of thousands of people from Armenia opens up opportunities to use their votes in favor of the ruling party’s candidate without them knowing about it.”
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