Former Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych’s pictures with golden walls palaces flooded the entire media. The topic about Yanukovych’s greed and his punishment has become topical today. It seems that such a negative public reaction and bringing Yanukovich to responsibility can become a lesson for other leaders, whose obsession is the appropriation of public funds. Anyway, the experience and history show that dictators’ punishment and their abandoned palaces are not becoming lessons for other leaders.
The evidence of what was said is the life imprisonment of the former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, what happened with the Romanian dictator Ceaușescu, and so on. What is this? A greed, or this phenomenon has a different name? Aravot.am talked with ethnographer Hranush Kharatyan regarding these issues. She noted, “In all of these examples, specific individuals and their power and management circles have not passed preparation in use of power. I think under bringing to responsibility they have always found leverages to evade from responsibilities and evade the law. In these cases, the court and the prosecutor’s office are supporting, or there are always guarantees, for example, Russia in this case, and so on.” The ethnographer believes that the inertia coming from Soviet morality and the Soviet times plays a serious role in this matter. Ms. Kharatyan, in particular, said, “We are all from the same moral plane, where the appropriation of state property has not been a theft; there was an opportunity for additional earnings. The Soviet trial court was judging, the morality was rejecting. This morality has come until now and the state property has become a perception of individual’s ownership exercising power.”
Our observation that this perception is still dominant in Armenia, Ms. Kharatyan responded as follows, “I think that now a more rational judgment prevails among the civil society activists. People see that this kind of concentration of power in the hands of individuals, and the infamous appropriation of all resources through personalities leads to a catastrophic situation.” Ms. Kharatyan does not know under which mechanisms the control of using levers of internal power there can be mutual control and balanced situation. Alternatively, according to Hranush Kharatyan, “will go to the square as Shant did and would say, “people, let’s usurp the power “. To our final question of whether what happened to Yanukovych will at least somehow make the leaders of Armenia sober up, Ms. Kharatyan responded, “I do not believe, I very much doubt. Our people are so much buried in all of these things that they can not just come out of the daily swamp. They have so much mutual responsibilities to each other and for each other. What? Can the solution be exercising normal tax mechanisms? But, how? In the event when they have taken money from these people, and be elected, and now they say give me money, they will not give it.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
