Whatever you write today, it will turn out that you are writing in favor of or against this or that political team, although I personally have no such intention whatsoever. And since I will talk about Vartan Oskanian who is on the top of the Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) list for the Yerevan City Council election, let me say in advance that there will be nothing terrible, if Mr. Oskanian becomes the mayor of Yerevan; he is a knowledgeable and educated person who is able to express his thoughts understandably. (Although the list of the Armenian National Congress (ANC) topped by Vahagn Khachatryan is dearer to me.) It is just that political forces should not rely on people’s short memory, and when they, Mr. Oskanian, in particular, struggle for freedom of the press today, they should not forget that they were among those who suppressed that freedom for many years.
What is going on with the Civilitas Foundation, certainly, has a political element. As far as I can tell, the target, however, is not the information agency working within that foundation – which, by the way, was able to gain a well-earned reputation very quickly – rather than Mr. Oskanian himself; the interest of the National Security Service (NSS) in him is ignited before different kinds of elections, in particular, and dies out, depending on a certain result of those elections. Certainly, our colleagues also suffer because of that, but, fortunately, the information agency continues to work.
Yesterday Vartan Oskanian gathered foreign ambassadors and presented the state of affairs in Civilitas. The ambassadors expressed their support to the former Foreign Minister. Surely, it is a positive thing in itself. However, did Mr. Oskanian not remember during that meeting to how many ambassadors and to how many international organizations he, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, would explain for 6 years, starting from April 2, 2002, when his President Robert Kocharyan deprived A1+ of broadcasting, that freedom of speech was not suppressed in Armenia, that A1+ had just lost a competition? How many times did he justify by that a much more violent attack on freedom of speech than today?
Certainly, we, employees of A1+, are not so close to ambassadors and don’t have a possibility to gather them because of our problems; our contacts are more modest. However, suppose we managed to organize such a meeting during Kocharyan’s presidency. Can you imagine in what tone “free, but responsible TV channels” would have talked about that – “a fifth column,” “a betrayal of the treacherous Pan-Armenian National Movement (PANM) members,” etc. Now they talk such nonsense very rarely. This is the difference.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
