Usually people discuss the political developments of the year and give estimations on the threshold of the New Year. Although the past year was full of developments, the most important developments that could happen didn’t take place. In 2005 two big “actions” were organized: the dance around the Aragats Mountain and the Constitutional referendum. And what is more important, both these actions had the same aim and were organized according to the same mechanism and principles. The aim of both these actions was to show how happy our people are, how much they trust the authorities and how united they are… Even more, these two actions were alike from the legal point of view too: the dance was not included in the Guinness Book of Records and the international institutions didn’t consider the referendum as democratic. But anyway, nothing changed. Neither people got more united nor the authorities started to follow the Constitution.
Even more, the Constitutional referendum brought to another negative result too. It is already clear that people don’t have to take part in these kinds of developments. And this “innovation” will be applied during the parliamentary elections of 2007 too.
During the past year the opposition was not able to protect the votes of people, and as well as they were not able to organize rallies. Even more, it turned out that a lot of oppositional leaders can slowly become “constructional oppositionists”, thus trying to stay in the political field. By the way, this was a positive development, because people got a chance to know who the “heroes” are.
There wasn’t any serious development in the process of Karabakh conflict negotiations either. Instead of this the officials spoke much about the possibility of these kinds of good developments. Of course they spoke about virtual programs and developments by saying that the Armenian troops would be taken out of the occupied territories, international peacemaking troops would be located there and later they would organize a referendum in Karabakh to define their status, but Armenians didn’t like this idea. The reason was not whether they liked these suggestions or not, but the fact remained that it was already clear that the authorities of Armenia would never sign such a document.
There were two important developments in the economical field of Armenia in 2005. The first one is the gas price increase on the part of Russia and the second one is the dollar exchange mark definition in the budget of 2006 as 420 dram. By the way, both these two developments will first of all affect the activities of the local producers and the development mark of Armenia can hardly be impressible in 2006. Instead of this we were promised to get more financial help to implement programs in Armenia than we expected to get.
So after all this was 2005 a successful year or not? The reputation of our country in the international community went down (first of all because of the referendum), the risk of isolating our country from other countries in the world increased (as a result of the adoption of Kars – Akhalkalak – Tbilisi railway construction program), the economical development didn’t improve the life standard in Armenia, the corruption capacity increased (according to international estimations), both the united opposition and the coalition are to collapse…
Anyway, 2005 had a very good positive result: nothing “very bad” happened. And this is a very good achievement already. It could be worse.