Armenia’s Prosecutor General’s Office, the Investigative Committee, the Anti-Corruption Committee, the National Security Service, and several other state institutions are today operating not in line with their core, legally defined functions, but as active participants in the election campaign — instruments serving the effort to keep Nikol Pashinyan in power. There are certainly professionals within these bodies who are uncomfortable with this reality, but high salaries are probably a stronger incentive to stay silent.
In practice, these individuals are now tasked with giving a “legal” veneer to political statements made by Pashinyan. Does anyone really think the Investigative Committee was unaware that Narek Karapetyan is exclusively a citizen of Armenia? Of course it was aware. But once it was “suggested from above” that he also holds Russian citizenship — and, presumably, a draft statement was sent down from the same source — the Committee’s role was reduced to adding references to a few legal provisions and publishing the text. The purpose here is purely propagandistic: not to initiate any genuine legal process, but simply to circulate a threatening statement designed to energize the pro-Pashinyan electorate.
At campaign rallies, Pashinyan casually claimed that Andranik Tevanyan, number two on Gagik Tsarukyan’s electoral list, had committed a grave crime — high treason. As is well known, Armenia effectively has one investigator, one prosecutor, and one judge: Nikol Pashinyan himself, while everyone else functions as his service apparatus. In this framework, the NSS or the Investigative Committee are expected either to produce some text of their own or to polish whatever is sent from above, and then publish it in order to “justify” the absurd claim and report back on a “completed task.”
The same applies, of course, to the attempt to seize the Ararat cement plant owned by Tsarukyan as retaliation for his political activity. Again at a rally, Pashinyan announced that he had received a document from the Prosecutor’s Office stating that the plant’s assets were “subject to nationalization.” The implication is obvious: whatever document is requested is duly produced. Had he demanded, for instance, a paper declaring that he himself is Christ’s representative on Earth, the Prosecutor’s Office, the NSS, and the two committees would likely have issued a “fully substantiated” joint statement, complete with references to the relevant provisions of the Constitution and the Criminal Code.
Read also
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
