After a long break the WikiLeaks has started a new series of scandalous discoveries. A large amount of cables posted in the web site concern Armenia.
The first phase was on August 24, when thou8sands of cables were posted on the web site, including several dozen cables concerning Armenia and cables sent by Ambassadors.
Later the WikiLeaks announced that approximately 150,000 documents had appeared on the web without their knowledge. According to them, due to the negligence of the correspondent of their partner The Guardian from the Great Britain the passwords were discovered by several internet servers, who published the full packages. However, on August 30 new documents were posted in the WikiLeaks.
Armenia had not even yet got introduced to half of the publications when new materials were posted in the website. There are so many cables that it is impossible to get acquainted to them in a day. Anyway the Armenian media has a lot of job during the coming days and they will cite the important parts of those cables.
We will also inform our readers about the most important pieces of that information. This time we have selected a cable concerning a meeting, which took place three years ago but is still very important.
On December 16, 2008, the US Ambassador to Armenia Marie Yovanovitch sent a letter classified as ‘SECRET’ to the State Department. In the secret cable the Ambassador told about her meeting with Serzh Sargsyan on November 16. The meeting took place at a dinner table. Assistant to the president Vigen Sargsyan, American diplomat Matthew Bryza and the American adviser on regional conflict were also present at the meeting.
During the meeting they discussed economic, political and foreign politics issues.
Economy and crisis
According to Yovanovitch, during the meeting Sargsyan said that he thought that the world economic crisis would have an influence on Armenia in the first quarter of 2009. Sargsyan said that the Armenian economic system had resisted the first wave of the crisis, however the reduction of export, demand and private money transfers from Russian would result in significant reduction of vacancies and production. Sargsyan said that Armenia needed the support of IMF urgently. “Unfortunately the American president of the IMF board did not want to give borrowing to Armenia as far as the economic conditions of the country were not worse. Sargsyan said that when the economic indicators became worse, it would be late to demolish the consequences of the economic dangers with such borrowing.”
Forgetting “Wikileaks” web-site for a while, let’s try to recall what our government used to say about the possible consequences of the crisis in November 2008. They assured that Armenia would avoid the crises and called for the media not to create unnecessary panic by their pessimistic previsions. Moreover, speaking about the possible negative consequences of the crisis, the Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan assured that Armenia may profit from the crisis if all the financial resources flowed to our financial system. However the given massage of “Wikileaks” comes to prove that our government had serious concerns about the consequences of the crisis still in November and had already managed to request from the USA to accelerate the lending of credits. It turns out that they either try to cheat people or nobody perceives the seriousness of the situation except Tigran Sargsyan. During the “political” meeting Bryza addressed the question concerning the arrest of the former minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Arzumanyan, mentioning that “such “political” arrests result in doubts of impartiality of the judicial processes.” Sargsyan replied that legal processes as such should proceed on their own. According to the massage T. Sargsyan said “those people tried to change the government by force and it is not possible to simply release them by avoiding the judicial system”. The ambassador noticed that these processes may last for years which will be harmful for the political development of Armenia and international reputation. “Yovanovitch wondered if there was no political solution, like, for example, amnesty”. The rest of the massage is presented without any changes. “Sargsyan, who was obviously irritated, rejected the given possibility, mentioning that unless Armenia respects human rights, then European Court of Human Rights will act as a judge. Sargsyan promised that they would respect the decision of the ECHR even if it is against the Armenian government. Millennium challenge, Karabakh conflict and Armenian-Turkish relations were a discussed at the meeting as well. By the way this meeting of the President is not mentioned in any official news archive.