When in the same text, either written or oral, the word “people” is used too often, it seems a bad sign to me. From the emotional phrase “the condition of this people” to “all the people are in this square” to “the people condemn” to “the people welcome” to “the people will not be deceived anymore” etc. If one talks about the whole Armenian ethnicity, about those 10 million people who identify themselves with that ethnicity, 2/3 of them are not citizens of the Republic of Armenia. A part of them are citizens, but try their luck outside the country with this or that correlation between the feelings of love and bitterness toward the fatherland. It is impossible to say what those 10 million people think of this or that politician in Armenia. It can be assumed that the majority doesn’t feel anything; they even don’t know their names. Moreover, we have worked badly with those 2/3 over the past 20 years and don’t even understand what those people really want.
Most probably, they talk about the citizens or the voters of the Republic of Armenia. By the way, we have several tens of thousands of citizens who, living abroad, are deprived of the right to vote, and that obvious discrimination is one of the salient flaws of our legislation. However, the treatment of the citizens, the voters living in Armenia should be respectful and personal. When some people state under the influence of strong emotions that “all the Armenian people voted for Raffi,” it seems a politically incorrect generalization to me, because I for one, as I have said many times, voted for Bagratyan. Am I deprived of being a part of the people by that? The phrase “the people’s struggle,” which is often used is also a relative category. I read recently that if there was only one common way of struggle, such a struggle was doomed to fail. This is an absolutely sober judgment. Naturally, it is about struggling also against electoral fraud. The word “people” is not a party membership card, nor is it a certificate that is in some individuals’ pockets, and those individuals reserve the right to think that they “stand by the people,” “are with the people,” and those who don’t have that certificate are not with the people. That way of blackmailing was often used by the movement of 2008. Fortunately, now we have only slight recurrences of it. For example, if you go on a student strike, good for you. If you walk down the streets and call for joining you – probably, “the people” again – it is wonderful. But standing outside the university doors and blasting those who don’t want to go on a student strike is not right. As Raffi Hovhannisyan would say, their opinion is as protected as yours. The indisputable advantage of the current opposition leader is that he really thinks so.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
