Leon Ter-Petrosyan’s speech concerning the Armenian-Turkish relations during the opposition’s recent rally should have been a reason for the ARF to revise its policy in relation to the Armenian National Congress and ARF board member Armen Rustamyan’s announcement. Specifically in his announcement Armen Rustamyan said, “We have big conflicts of opinions with the congress (in terms of the Armenian-Turkish relations – L.A.). We wander whether the congress would not do the same if being in power too. Our opinions are different concerning this topic than Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s policy. Does he have many different opinions?”
The international workers’ day, May 1, was met with demonstrations of thousands of workers worldwide. People were in the streets on May 1 in Yerevan too. It was a non-working day and many people attended the opposition’s rally to listen to Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s speech. It was a celebration for the ANC’s supporters. His speech was consistent with the soul of the previous speech on March 1: it was critical, did not contain slogans to change the power immediately. Logically the ARF should have liked this speech too. Due to the fact that the opposition holds rallies with two months frequency the issues addressed at the rallies are discussed in the media so much during the periods in between the rallies that they stop being so important to people even if these issues are addressed by Ter-Petrosyan himself.
The issue of the economic problems, the exchange rates of foreign currencies and also the state policy of embezzling people was more interesting during the rally of March 1 than during the recent one. The broadcast of the case of seven, the cases of Alexander Arzumanyan and Suren Surenyan, which have been separated from the case of seven, as well as the information about the sold testimonies are casting a shadow on any analysis concerning the mentioned topic. It was difficult to find anything new in Ter-Petrosyan’s speech concerning the upcoming mayoral election. Even his announcements, which praised the policy of Heritage party, were not made in the right time.
Perhaps the most expected part of Ter-Petrosyan’s speech was the part concerning the rapid and drastic change in the Armenian-Turkish relations. The Armenian society does not have any reliable and serious source of information concerning the development and prospects of development of the Armenian-Turkish relations, thus it has to listen to limited sources of information concerning the mentioned issue. It is strange but the only source of information for the Armenian people is the outflow of information provided by the Turkish Sabah daily and even the assurances of the leaders of our country can’t stand against this information, according to which no document or agreement resulted from negotiations between the Armenian and Turkish diplomats can be an obstacle for the genocide recognition issue and crucial compromises concerning the issue of Karabakh conflict. If these assurances are reasonable, we wander why they abstain from publishing this information. There have been such roadmaps in the history and an example is the roadmap on the conflict between Israel and Palestine in 2002, which was presented to the societies as soon as it was adopted by the parties. Of course we understand that the sources of information the first president has should be reliable, but based on the content of the speech concerning the Armenian-Turkish relations we may assume that in his estimations the first president based on the mentioned source of information outflow, which has several basic points such as developing diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey, mutual recognition of the borderlines, in other words rehabilitation of the agreement of Kars, opening the border and founding a commission consisting of Armenian and Turkish historians. Ter-Petrosyan’s resume was rather critical: “Serzh Sargsyan sold the genocide in favor of prolonging the term of his tenure. His next step will be selling Karabakh for sure, after which, certainly, he will become the first father who will be granted a Nobel Prize.” This is really a bad nomination.
It is very strange that there has been outflow of information only in Turkey but not in Armenia so far, which would be a reason for the Turkish society to originate mistrust and suspects to their government as we do now.
Concerning the similarities between the approaches of the ANC and ARF as specified above it is worth mentioning that despite the assurances of the ARF officials that there is no way of collaborating with the ANC, there are a lot of similarities in the approaches and critics of both the ARF and ANC concerning the policy of the incumbent government. Specifically, the ANC and ARF think that if the announcement was not published on April 22 as a result of the negotiations intermediated by Switzerland, the US president might have pronounced the word Genocide. The ARF and ANC have the same approach to the issue of founding a commission of historians, which was suggested by the Turkish PM Erdogan and agreed by the Armenian president. Both of these political powers believe that this agreement is really illiterate and puts the issue of the Armenian genocide under question. If the members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation read the speech of Ter-Petrosyan during the rally on March 1, it is not excluded that in parallel with the development of the Armenian-Turkish relations the relations between the ANC and ARF may become warm as well.