The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) although accepted Turkey’s criticizing report, however, it did not make a political decision on conducting monitoring in Turkey. In an interview with Aravot.am, a member of the Armenian delegation to PACE, leader of the ARF faction, Armen Rustamyan reported from Strasbourg that many people, being unaware of, begin making conclusions about the adoption and the vote of the Turkey report. We had already reported that Armen Rustamyan had voted “against” this report, which contains a criticism against Turkey.
In an interview with us, Mr. Rustamyan explaining his motivation for being “against” reminded that 99 percent of the reports are criticizing but the question is what conclusion is made after it. Mr. Rustamyan announced the same at the meeting of the Monitoring Committee, arguing that a political assessment should be given to the criticisms addressed to Turkey rather than to list that this-or-that issues are bad in that country, “We know that it is bad but what conclusion is followed. You should have seen how the Turks were fighting not so much for the amendments to pass but against the amendment, which assumed at least monitoring. And this was not passed.”
According to Mr. Rustamyan, being unaware of these nuances, people “were taking only the newspapers to read and make incoherent conclusions.” Armen Rustamyan noted that they have fought that all this ends up with political conclusion and assessment, “They did not give a political assessment being affected by the Turkish-Azerbaijani lobby. Turks were doing a tremendous work, they were accepting everything but only this political conclusion was not adopted. This is the problem that we voted “against”. But I fully understand those who voted “for”. Both “pros” and “cons” are explainable. The subtexts for each of them are necessary to understand.”
Note that Armen Rustamyan delivered quite a tough speech on this issue up to announcing, “it is not a death penalty that Turkey escapes from monitoring. If you say that therewith you offend Turkey, it means that you offend all countries that are exposed to monitoring.” Armen Rustamyan stated that a political process is taking place next to all this, and people being unaware of are making conclusions.
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To our observation that in fact, we should not be so excited by this document as no political assessment was given to it, Mr. Rustamyan wrapped up, “All previous reports on Turkey were criticizing but Turkey escaped from the monitoring process after mentioning 12 major problems, and I was against all of it too.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
