It was about 30-35 years ago. One of my relatives was charged for fighting in the street. Young students, who were slightly drunk, started a fight with their counterparts, showed a knife and blood was shed. The police immediately reached the scene of the fight and arrested both of the parts of the fighters. All the influential people of our family have tried to use their connections to release the young bully young kid. But they were not able to. The thing is that among the two sides of the fighters there were sons of influential fathers (during Soviet times occupied high ranks), who released their sons on the night of the fight. The case was launched and some of them must have been sentenced for sure. One of the some was my relative. Perhaps I wouldn’t remember this incident if I haven’t have heard the speech of Artashes Geghamyan on September 29, whose father was a high-rank Regional Committee official during the Soviet times. During his speech he blamed Levon Ter-Petrosyan of the whole corrupt system in Armenia. I could have remembered another incident but I remembered this one because Artashes Mamikonich likes to brag about his “tough” young years by using the occasion that journalists are young and not experienced. During the “tough guy wars” as he calls those every single kid, whose parents were common laborers would definitely get a sentence. But our “tough guy” Artashes not only didn’t get a sentence but had also become Komsomol secretary. Later he has become a communist, secretary of the Regional Committee and ultimately President of the Regional Committee. Now he wants to become President of Armenia in order to destroy the corrupt system established by Ter-Petrosyan. If Ter-Petrosyan is somehow guilty of the corrupt system then it’s because he didn’t give a relevant assessment about corruption at the right moment. If he had given that assessment former secretaries of the Regional Committee would have been quite embarrassed. Ter-Petrosyan perhaps wouldn’t be blamed like this if he was a populist politician, if he had organized a show of the judgment day of some of the former corrupt ones. Was the first President right? He was definitely right because the powerful All-Armenian Movement was not to punish the guilty ones. Because if he had done that clean-up of the Avgyan chair inherited by the Soviet period not only the corrupt people but also all of Armenia would be lost. Geghamyan perfectly knows that the reasons of the energetic crisis were connected neither by technical malfunctions, nor the lack of raw material. It was connected with the corrupt system, which includes the simplest electricians, who would cut a deal with the consumers. There were dozens of thousands employees in that system. What was Ter-Petrosyan supposed to do? Send them to jail? Former Minister of Education Vardgen Gnuni, who worked during Ter-Petrosyan’s presidency in his interview to “AR” weekly in 1993 was saying that he cannot find 400 uncorrupt professors to organize admission exams. How could these poor professors become so corrupt during three years? Does Geghamyan understand what would happen if cases were filed against ten of those 400 professors? I imagine the complaints of the oppositionists of the mentioned period. They would scream saying that the ANM is destroying the professors and lecturers of our country and that he drowns the educational system of the country. Did the officials of the road patrol, judges, doctors, employees of the Regional Boards and even Territorial Service Commissions become corrupt after the independence? The ones, who don’t have the answer to this question may open the humorous editions of the Armenian “Vozni” and Russian “krokodil” magazines, where bribery has always been criticized in mild dozes as imperceptible flaws of the Soviet system. Is the son of the former secretary of the Regional Committee and himself former secretary of the Regional Committee, Artashes Geghamyan aware of this?
