I often walk along the streets of Yerevan city and travel by subway at least once a day. I see great many faces of people: happy, sad, indifferent, concentrated and so on. But all of them are normal people’s faces. Once in 4-5 years, as well as this time already “extraordinary”, I see the faces of the district mobs in the footage shot by my colleagues, the mobs whom the government authorities are using during the so-called “elections” and “referendums” events over 20 years. In other circumstances, I do not meet this “contingent”, probably they do not walk along the streets and travel by subway.
The main function of these “problem-solving mobs of the district” is to spread terror among the people who have come to the polling stations to follow the legal process of the elections. When the latter, as a rule, are young people from good families, educated and believing in some ideas, and are trying to prevent any illegality (stuffing, supplementary, etc.), these people with outdated views begin pouring threats, pushing and beating. Naturally, they do all of this in collaboration with the chairman of the precinct committee and the police.
All this, of course, is resentful. And people after every elections and referendum, since 1995, feel resented (I do not know whether I am using the right word). I assume that this is also the reason for migration and not just the material problems. Of course, in Russia and elsewhere, they are also resentful, but it is clear that in your country, you feel more pain. People are resentful first and foremost with the authorities, and it is normal. To some extent, it is acceptable that people are a little offended with the opposition, whose programs are often obscure.
But it’s absolutely unacceptable when people are resentful with people. “And isn’t this your people?” they are asking contemptuously by pointing out the above-described “zombies.” No, definitely, “it is not.” Nor the ones who are afraid of this riffraff or take bribes from them. They are all, of course, Armenians, but the people is a collective image and to identify our people only with any of these groups, it seems to me, is a big mistake. The majority of the people, I am sure, is composed of decent and normal people. But they are unable to be self-organized when the cockroaches came out of their dark corners.
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They say that in 1987 when signatures were collected in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region in favor of accession to Armenia, most people were afraid to sign. A few years later, the same people were fighting like lions.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
