Khosrov Harutyunyan, a member of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) parliamentary group, is not impressed by the behavior of Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first President of the
Republic of Armenia, at the Armenian National Congress (ANC) convention on April 13. “If I had stated that one should not criticize a person who was at the barricades, I would have closed; I wouldn’t have talked on that subject anymore. However, he did something that was even worse than mocking. Anyway, Raffi Hovhannisyan is an estimable politician. At least, he was the only one who entered into the struggle, took on the responsibility for all the difficulties of that struggle. He was the only one who took on sole responsibility for post-election developments without hesitation. I don’t agree with many steps of his, but his attitude, as that of a politician, is praiseworthy. If you state that the person who is at the barricades should not be mocked, you should stick to that thesis of yours. Whereas at the very next moment, you not just mock him, you destroy him, turn him into a political corpse. This is not acceptable for me,” Mr. Harutyunyan said during a conversation with www.aravot.am. In his words, one of the reasons for the ANC members’ criticism of Raffi Hovhannisyan is jealousy. “I am sure that they are looking forward to Raffi Hovhannisyan’s fiasco; the upcoming developments will concern not the relationship between the government and the opposition, but the opposition itself.” Mr. Harutyunyan doesn’t see any objective prerequisites in our reality for carrying out the bourgeois democratic revolution mentioned by L. Ter-Petrossian at the ANC convention. “Even the one or two rich people mentioned by Ter-Petrossian will never take that step, because bourgeois democratic revolutions are not carried out by the richest people, but by representatives of small and medium entrepreneurship as a rule. They are those who make up the bourgeoisie. Oligopolists, oligarchs, rich people never represent the national bourgeoisie. I cannot say what political goal this thesis pursues. Perhaps, one of the goals is to justify the individuals presented by himself, to try to rehabilitate them in the eyes of the public and to try to win them over by that. It is no accident that the final formula was to tear them away from the government, i.e. to tear them away from the government, attach them to us, and try to use the political capacity of those commercial institutions. This is not a way of curing public life.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
