To be honest, I really do not like when our opponents publish “people’s verdicts”. If there are “people’s tribunals”, then there should be “people’s” judges, prosecutors and executioners, and the subjective factor here is quite big of whom to hang, whom beheaded, and so on. If “revolutionary committees” should be established, whose powers include implementation of “people’s jurisdiction”, then, I’m afraid, they will not be limited only to the government officials.
When the “enemies” are destroyed, afterwards the “punishing sword” is not put into the case with glory, the turn comes also to own people, first, to not-so-close people, then to not-so- loyal people, and then to the most close ones. It is a well-known story. Not only in Russia. Read the work of Prince Pyotr Kropotkin about the French Revolution. The idea of “people’s tribunal” sounds in Armenia and in the world not the first, nor, I am sure, the last time. To say that democracy is established in some place in this way would be a strong exaggeration.
But if the manifestations of “revolutionary romanticism” can be qualified as an inevitable manifestation of the disease of the maturity of our young statehood, then the government’s strive to explain everything by the intrigues of the external enemy is a “rabiz” (I can’t find another word) Soviet tradition. The Head of RPA faction, Vahram Baghdasaryan, first, takes the smell of the West money from the opposition speeches and now the smell of Azerbaijani oil-dollars.
Such open accusations are repeated by the government officials over 20 years, do not say anything bad about us, thus you are supporting the enemy’s hand. The RPA MP has gone further and accused of being corrupt by the enemy. True, he was very cautious and has not uttered any name, otherwise, it was a true slander, for which he would better pay a fine. So, not only the mass media should not be fined for defamation and insults.
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Seeing an enemy in the opponent is bad. Seeing a paid agent of the state’s opponent in it is just terrible. The problem is not only that it is not an argument for debate, but also the fact that such approaches generally create suspicion, if not, an atmosphere of paranoia. We may have diametrically opposite opinions on all issues, but be sure that this is what your opponent thinks rather than he is a «proxy» and voices someone else’s opinion.
Of course, for the sake of fairness, I must also say that the parliament sessions are mainly followed by the journalist and a few hundred politicized people who are interested in this-or-that outcome of the “resistance”. The rest of the population does not particularly follow the debate. Perhaps, also because of the low level of the debate.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
