In the U.S.A. the RA finance minister, Vardan Khachatryan, and the head of the U.S. “Millennium Challenges” corporation, John Danilovich, made a contract, on the basis of which Armenia will get about 235 million dollars for the purpose of implementing road reconstruction and agricultural programs.
But what is the real purpose of giving such money to Armenia? Is it intended only for economical development purposes?
“I don’t think this money has only economical meaning, because the fields where this money is going to be spent don’t play a key role in our economy”, yesterday said head of the “New Times” political party, Aram Karapetyan. According to him this program has political meanings and is connected with the Karabakh conflict. According to him there are rumors in the opposition saying that “in July-August it is planned to locate international peacekeeping troops in Karabakh, and as well as there will be American troops located in the Northern territory of Iran. As I know, the details regarding these troops and other terms are still under discussion. This means that they can organize “deuteron” if they give money. This is what all oppositionists think”, says the head of the NT. Yesterday he was debating with the head of the parliamentary party on financial, budget and economical issues, Gagik Minasyan. Regarding the political meaning of the mentioned program Mr. Minasyan said, “The political meaning was discussed together with the terms: developing democracy, good management system, straggling against corruption and forming good civil society”. Regarding this Mr. Karapetyan noted that these opportunities were missing in Armenia but still the money was given. “The terms haven’t been fulfilled, but the money was given, this means that there were other meanings which were fulfilled”, said Mr. Karapetyan and meanwhile wandered whether this money would be wasted or not. “There were a lot of violations during the “Linsi” program implementation and as far as I know now they are claiming three million dollars back from Artashes Tumanyan. He has been called to the police and national security departments. If he has been called there this means that they have something to claim back from him”, said Mr. Karapetyan and assured that a part of this money would be grabbed too. By the way, it is worth mentioning that the discussion agenda was “the energetic problem of Armenia”, but this discussion was mostly of political character. Mr. Minasyan was doing his best not to turn to another issue and reminded everyone for several times that their subject of discussion was the problems of energetic field, but later he started to discuss political issues and praise our “complementary foreign policy”. At least when they started discussing energetic issues, the NT head said that there was no sense to discuss issues regarding the energetic security. He said that the 80% of this field was under the control of Russia, but it would be better to leave it for Armenia, “but the situations are changing so fast that we can’t criticize what has been done. I hope Russia will not change its approach to us and will not increase the gas price up to 250 dollars. If these units had to be given to someone, they had to be given to Russians”, said Mr. Karapetyan and added that it would be better to found joint companies with the countries providing raw materials. He also made some interesting announcements. According to him the Iran-Armenia gas pipe line will be given to Russia soon, it will be given to the “Gazprom”. Even more, according to him as well as one more electric stations will be given to the “Gazprom”. Mr. Karapetyan was sure about this because he had “just had a meeting with Iranians”.
As for Mr. Minasyan, regarding this announcement he said, “Consider this information as rumors. There is no fact proving that the pipe line will be given to Russia for sure. It is impossible”. But he didn’t exclude such possibilities and said that everything was possible. Answering to our question regarding whether he would agree that he was wrong to say that it is not possible if this happened, he said that if something like that happened first of all people should “understand what the real reasons are for that”. It is worth mentioning that the debate was closed by Mr. Minasyan with the following words: “Grigor Artsruni said a very clever idea: we, Armenians, are like Russians from the political point of view”.