The policy pursued by Raffi Hovhannisyan, the Heritage Party leader, after the election is often described by different opposition forces as unclear. In particular, their main argument is that R. Hovhannisyan doesn’t clearly define his demands. www.aravot.am tried to get clarification from Stepan Safaryan, the secretary general of the Heritage Party. We noted during a conversation with him that there had been no explanation as to why Hovhannisyan’s headquarters, according to the official information, had requested from the Central Election Commission (CEC) to open only 10 polling places and make a recalculation, whereas both they and the people gathered in Freedom Square were convinced that the largest frauds had been committed during the calculation of votes. Mr. Safaryan said in this regard: “It is obvious for us that the election has been rigged; it has been rigged in many polling places. And since they haven’t opened any polling places, we have presented the ten most contentious polling places to prove that the election had been rigged. We choose the most obvious and crying polling places, where there had been violations and ballot box stuffing, and there surely are polling places among them, where there was ballot box stuffing; therefore, we demand not only to make a recalculation, but to find the election null. What difference does it make how many polling places are presented? All the same, there is little hope that even these polling places will be opened. I don’t rule out that they have already arranged the picture. If they had wanted to open them, they would have opened them a few days ago when each of us made a request regarding his polling place. We had made requests before those ten; I personally made ten requests, and yesterday I received ten refusals.” In response to our next observation that R. Hovhannisyan hadn’t clarified yet whether he wanted reconsideration of the election results, so that a runoff election was held, or just to demand Serzh Sargsyan’s resignation, S. Safaryan said: “Today Raffi Hovhannisyan will say what he demanded from Serzh Sargsyan.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
