After the speech by Chief Secretary of the European Union
Parliamentary Congress Terry Davis, no matter how amazing it may seem,
the opposition was not the one causing the new wave of criticism, but
rather it was the authorities, with the help of Foreign Minister Vartan
Oskanyan and representative of the coalition member federalist party
Vahan Hovhannisyan. The minister and the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation (ARF) had to do everything they could for the speech not to
be heard. Delegation member of the EUPC in Armenia and representative
of the “Artarutyun” (Justice) union Shavarsh Kocharyan consider those
announcements “nervous breakdowns” before the upcoming “developments”
of the Karabagh conflict.
“Finally, there has to be someone in the foreign politics arena to make
sure serious flaws don’t take place. The problem here is not Terry
Davis. The whole atmosphere is like that. The same thing happened when
President of Russia Vladimir Putin compared the Beslan attacks with the
Karabagh conflict, or how everyone is talking about the totalitarian
rule of Azerbaijan. Doesn’t that say a lot? What were the authorities
thinking about? After the 1998 elections, the “slogan” used in politics
was “we are a nation”, but the side-effect of that was there would come
a day when the aggression would aim and hit us, which it did. That was
proven during the Karabagh conflict negotiations. If you exclude the
Karabagh conflict from the negotiations and if all documents state that
the Karabagh conflict must be solved between Armenia and Azerbaijan,
then there is no self-determination. Our authorities tolerate this
making it favorable for Azerbaijan. Robert Kocharyan has always stated
this every time whether with Heidar Aliyev or even now, with Aliyev’s
son. After all that, what were they waiting for? I don’t understand how
people can put the country in this situation by their political
strategies and then get furious when exact documents show up.
“Before Davis’s speech, Armenia’s authorities have considered all the
other similar speeches as “great achievements”. This is ironic in that
the authorities were the ones who considered them “disturbing”. What
happened?
“This document is still not the one that the congress has
confirmed. But we should not rest with that because we have no
guarantee whether or not there will be other formulations in the next
speech. An even worse speech may be passed. It is very difficult to
persuade the members of congress-they already picture everything. When
you try to explain something to them, they just ask you two questions:
Why hasn’t Armenia recognized Karabagh’s independence, and why is
Armenia the one leading negotiations and not Karabagh? Now how can I
answer that? They ask two simple questions and after that we get tied
in a knot. In a series of documents, it says that the Republic of
Nagorno Karabagh (NKR) strives for independence, but it also states
that even Armenia hasn’t recognized its independence. What, they want
for us to recognize? Now go and convince the congress.”
“Some expressed their point of views regarding the announcements made
by Vartan Oskanyan and the ARF, stating that those announcements are
not in favor of the Karabagh peace settlement and are being made
beforehand so that they can protect themselves from any future
accusations.”
“One must be pretty naive to think that there can be a favorable
suggestion made regarding this issue. Our only hope is that this issue
gets delayed, so that it does not move at a more rapid pace. But if you
do not do anything at all, the delaying can be worse due to the
increase in opinions and those opinions in turn become even more
unfavorable. We lost our main playing card-democracy. If Azerbaijan’s
card was oil, ours was democracy for our country’s future.”
“Vahan Hovhanniesyan and Robert Kocharyan’s presidential adviser
Garnik Isagulyan are making allegations that Terry Davis has presented
the interests of the British oil companies, and they assure that the
same will happen with Atkinson. Is there a basis for those
justifications?”
“Who said that if some country has oil then the others have to defend
that country? How is it that the entire Muslim world has oil, but they
defend Israel. If it were like that, then all of us had to destroy
Israel. That is not how things should be. They can bring up similar
justifications, but that is not right. Even in the case of trying to
take control of oil, you do not have to rely on the one who has oil,
but rather the competitors. So, our authorities do not have to relate
their failures with those kinds of simple factors and say that if they
have oil, then England could be dangerous in that issue. If England is
dangerous, then so are the rest. The thing is that we want to lead
foreign politics with this primitive mentality. If an analyst were to
say such things, that would be his problem, but when the Foreign
Minister expresses himself this way, that is pretty awkward. The
minister is insuring the future outrageous developments which await us.”