It’s a natural phenomenon. People who have a lot to lose are worried about their assets and perhaps their freedom, and they do everything in order to be saved by some miracle, and everything goes back to the way it used to be. They are going to be disappointed; it’s impossible for the “pre-April” era to return to Armenia. They need to find serious arguments in order to defend themselves. “Political persecution,” in particular, is not an argument. If someone became a public official with almost no money on their hands, and they leave owning a multimillion dollar palace, then the state has the right to ask where they got all that money from. That’s not political persecution. Presumption of innocence doesn’t work here. Someone who has connections with state resources cannot be part of “innocent until proven guilty.”
Justification that “I didn’t own a business, my family did,” is also not serious. First, it’s a “strange coincidence” that only the families of high-ranking officials were extremely talented in business. Secondly, if that’s even the truth, then the state needs to check those “success stories,” and find out how that person’s position of power affected the wealth of their business. That won’t be political persecution. I understand that solving these circumstances is difficult, and perhaps transitionary methods need to be carried out here, but it definitely needs to be done in order for us and the aforementioned business owners to calm down. If those businessmen and their powerful relatives have nothing to be worried about, then it’s not clear why they’re complaining about “political persecution.”
Overall, there needs to be people in Armenia who are millionaires who own palaces and luxury cars who have all that through their businesses. Jealousy doesn’t work here, either. We need to get rid of all the negativity surrounding the word “business.” Business in and of itself is a great thing; it creates jobs, advances the nation, and develops new ideas and technology. But so that we can trust that these people didn’t become rich because of us, business owners, their relatives, and their friends need to have no ties with the current or elected governments for at least the next few decades. Otherwise, taking into consideration what happened over the past three decades, there will always be doubt.
