A simple question. If a single investigator from Armenia’s Investigative Committee, accompanied by one police officer, had gone to the home of Gagik Tsarukyan and summoned him for questioning, would he have refused to go? Of course he would have gone.
Instead, an entire performance was staged: masked officers of Armenia’s National Security Service of Armenia armed with assault rifles, Tsarukyan being thrown to the ground, other people having their arms twisted behind their backs, lions being tranquilized, and one of them, in effect, being killed.
What was all this for? Was armed resistance expected? Were the lions and the tiger supposed to testify in a money-laundering case?
Isn’t it obvious that the whole operation was staged to inflict pain on Tsarukyan, humiliate him, and, at the same time, please the lower strata of Nikol Pashinyan’s supporters?
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But even that was not the main objective.
The footage of the raid—the forced entry, the takedown, the tranquilized animals and everything else—was needed so that Nikol Pashinyan could watch it and derive his own petty satisfaction from it.
The driving force behind this entire spectacle was retaliation—petty vindictiveness: “You criticized me during the campaign. You dared me to enter your lions’ enclosure. Now see what happens to you.”.”
Had the Prosperous Armenia Party not participated in the elections, there would have been no “legal process” and no “restoration of justice.”
Inspections were conducted at Tsarukyan’s properties in the past as well. But never before had such “mask shows” been staged.
In reality, this performance discredits and humiliates not Tsarukyan, but the petty-minded and short-sighted person who ordered it and consumed it—as well as one of Armenia’s key state institutions, the National Security Service, whose officers have been reduced to playing the role of actors.
Armenia has never before witnessed such a brutal dictatorship or such a personalized autocracy.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
