Let’s try to find out what the purpose of organizing parades is. The main purpose of organizing parades is to demonstrate the power of the country to all potential enemies. In this case this power was demonstrated to “Rule of Law” party. On April 13, during the parliamentary voting of the 2001-2003 governmental privatizations program, Arthur Baghdasaryan extremely criticized this program and the government and said that their faction would not vote for it. In spite of this, most of the “Rule of Law” MPs abstained. What’s more, A. Sargsyan voted for it. On the same day the board of the party punished the MP that didn’t obey them.
Since the criticisms of the “Rule of Law” were addressed to the Republican party, everyone was sure that they would get a good payback very soon. After some transparent hints they got an opportunity to start acting. A. Baghdasaryan gave an interview to a German newspaper, where he expressed his opinions concerning the past elections in Armenia and the relations between Armenia and NATO. Another time the Republicans would hardly criticize this announcement, besides that Galust Sahakyan would hardly say that it is not good to undermine the security of the country because of elections. Besides that, since A. Baghdasaryan also spoke about the elections, which directly concerned the president as well, it wasn’t difficult for them to get permission for a “payback”. And they did it…
At first, businessmen and “Rule of Law” faction member Melik Manukyan and Arshak Mkhitaryan got out of the party. And then some other members joined them. According to our information, Khachik Petrosyan and Edward Gabrielyan are going to leave too.
We didn’t try to get any comments from any of these MPs, because we know that they were obliged to do so.
This is how the republicans and the president demonstrated their power. And now they proudly speak about their victory and say that people saw it. But what did people really see? People saw how fragile our political and economical fields are, they saw that all the announcements about fair economical competition were baseless, etc.
It is not a secret to anyone that it doesn’t make any difference for these businessmen how they will appear in the parliament and which party will back them up. All they need is a place in the parliament. In spite of this it is not good of them to leave the party without any serious explanations. We understand that they had to do that because they had been obliged. How can they be obliged? We shouldn’t forget that it is very easy to pressure businessmen. The authorities have all the leverages to pressure businessmen, and the most effective tools of pressuring are the customs and internal revenue services. At the same time this is not a direct punishment to bring a case against anyone or something like that, the mentioned services are just ordered to keep their eyes open and do their work efficiently, as well as check up the activities of these businesses as they should. As for these businesses, these are more important for the owners than their places in the parliament.
As for the taxation services, they can find violations any time they want. It is not a secret that it is impossible to do good business in Armenia without violating the laws. If someone tries to pay all the taxes and other payments, he will not get any profit, and he may even lose. Once the internal revenue service (IRS) deputy head Armen Alaverdyan said to our correspondent that there were more violations and shady income in registered companies than in unregistered ones. Besides that at the end of last year the head of the IRS, Felix Tsolakyan, said that the information that the list of the biggest tax-payer companies had was not fair and they had serious problems because many businesses were backed by powerful people. Revenue services don’t mind to “take” money from these businesses, but in order to do this they need to get “permission” from the high deputies.
Do you think that it is impossible to punish any of these businessmen? No, it is very easy to do that, we would like to bring more detailed information on how it could be realized, but the purpose of this article is not to show these methods, but to show how vulnerable our economy is, that there isn’t fair competition and that businesses are backed by powerful politicians in Armenia.
We knew all this before too and it was not a secret for us. One month ago during the discussions of the World Bank report concerning Armenia, discussions were going on about the negative influence of businessmen-politicians on the economy.
On the other hand it is impossible to do good business in Armenia in another way. We understand that in the whole world businessmen try to influence politicians to bring up the legal provisions that they are interested in. The only difference in Armenia is the fact that businessmen just need to be backed by powerful politicians. The places in the parliament have become a security guarantee for businessmen and a good tool to protect their businesses from the taxation and other governmental bodies. Even though we mentioned that businessmen don’t care about who the backing power is, anyway, there is some difference. Businessmen are not interested in the ideological background of parties, but they are interested in how well these parties can back their businesses. As for backing, only governmental parties can back. It will be wrong to assume that the NA speaker was mistaken to give membership to these MPs. They were all interested in it. The businessmen provided financial support and the party backed them politically and gave places in the parliament and backed their businesses. But later the “Rule of Law” MPs left the party and didn’t want to be backed by a misbalanced political power any more. This is understandable and complies with the rules of business. Even more, there have been a lot of reasons to be suspicious about Arthur Baghdasaryan. In other words we understand the approach of the businessmen. Besides that, they have enough reasons also due to the fact that Arthur Baghdasaryan makes decisions in their party solely and forgets about the fact that they got financial support to move forward from these businessmen and thus they should consider their approach when making decisions. At least they shouldn’t forget how A. Baghdasaryan became NA speaker: they made violations too.
There is only one question: if the positions of the “Rule of Law” in the political field of our country are undermined, what are the high deputy members of the party going to do? It’s no secret that A. Baghdasaryan and his party members don’t have a good financial status. Can they protect themselves? Some people say that the “Rule of Law” will struggle till the end and A. Baghdasaryan will resign from his position. But if he does so, he will undermine the businesses that are under his cover. And if he does not do so, it will be clear that all of them have the same principles and interests and there are no traitors among them.
Taking into account all this information we may assume that all the parties may be faced with such a situation in the future. The republicans have not forgotten how most of the members of “Armenian National Movement” party dropped their memberships overnight and joined their party. Many people remember that A. Baghdasaryan used to be a member of the “Armenian National Movement” and left in 1998, when the party was facing hard times.
So, the politicians that smile and are proud of what they did should better think about whether this was a victory or just another way of showing the face of our country. The people who pass laws for the whole nation are people that can do whatever they want to whenever they want. In such conditions it is very amazing to be in such a happy mood and think that this is some kind of parade.