On march 14 the US State Department deputy secretary Matthew Bryza gave an interview to the Russian representation of Radio Liberty and characterized the processes in Armenia as a “tragedy” and petitioned the Armenian government one more time to raise the state of emergency and recover the independence of media. Answering to the correspondent’s question whether there has been an attempt of a colored revolution in Armenia as alleged by many specialists and announced by the Armenian PM recently Bryza said, “What happened in Armenia is tragedy as people died. It is a serious impact on democracy. It can be characterized as a revolution or serious civic conflict”. According to the American diplomat, “The elections have gone out of the normal process of elections and it is not important how it is called”. “Generally it doesn’t matter how we may call that process. The important thing is that Armenia and American should work together in order to recover the democratic development. I think it is realistic,” said the deputy to the US State Secretary. Concerning the assumption of the correspondent that the new president of Armenia will continue with the pro-Russian policy the American diplomat said that Armenia had always been in good relations with Russia. However, he says that it is not so important to the United States. “The most important thing to us is the loyalty of Armenia and the US to the common strategic interests and values, the most important of which is democracy. Armenia was very successful in developing democracy, due to which it was enabled to participate in the Millennium Challenges program. However, the recent incidents put the strength of democracy in this country under question. We are calling on the government to recover the independence of media, raise the state of emergency and start a broad dialog with the society,” Bryza said. The American diplomat, who is also a co-chairman of the OSCE Minsk Group, said that there is a great difference between the existing MG program on regulating the Karabakh conflict and the program presented during the office of Ter-Petrosyan. According to him, there are no grounds to compare the programs developed during the tenures of Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan and Heydar Aliev. “We have moved much forward since that time. There is a complex of principal recommendations in the agenda which can be discussed. These recommendations will result in returning the territories to the Azeris, returning refugees. It includes a corridor connecting Azerbaijan and Armenia and presence of international peacekeepers. It means that the mentioned recommendations will serve a ground for a peace agreement, which will support the prosperity of the region. In other words, today there are exclusive and main principles in the agenda, which need to be realized,” concluded OSCE MG co-chairman and deputy state secretary of the US Department of State Mr. Matthew Bryza.
