I have always encouraged my colleagues to treat former officials cautiously and carefully while conducting an interview with them. The main characteristic of most of them is being “resentful”: how come they dismissed such a state-devoted and smart person like me? Or, why do not they come, kneel and ask me to return to my office and my field? There are rarely some former officials who are not convinced that while they held their position, the country was a paradise, and then “those” came and spoiled everything.
Humanly it is certainly understandable: an office, a secretary, car service, an army of reptiles, which assures you that you are a genius for every moment, and assures so convincingly that you start believing in it. There are, of course, rare exceptions, for example, former Minister of Defense Vagharshak Harutyunyan, or David Shahnazaryan, the former head of the State Department for National Security, who do not suffer from the “syndrome of the former”, and assess the past and the present soberly. But in general, “resentfulness” is specific to any “former” person: former officials, former spouses, former friends, former Armenians. It is difficult to break relations without any bitter aftertaste.
But former officials, besides all that, have another disadvantage: they are always exaggerating their role in the history of the country. Usually, when you ask a former minister, an ambassador or even a head of a department what he was doing when he was in office, he will tell that he played a key role in the state, that no problem was solved without his consent. It is a bit like the stories about the Artsakh war: in their memoirs, people were usually commanders of some squads, very few people admit that they were fighting as ordinary soldiers. (By the way, in the case of the April war, it will not be so, because today there is an army with its clear structure and hierarchy).
As for the former officials, it should be noted that when people lose the soberness, even for a moment, they tend to re-evaluate the past and their role in the past, they really believe that their word was very influential and crucial. This is impossible to prove. That is why I urge you not to take their words for granted.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
