Did you see what happened?

12/05/2006 Arman GALOYAN

“Rule of Law” political party leader and NA speaker Arthur Baghdasaryan, who is part of the coalition, but always uses the moment to criticize the coalition and doesn’t stay behind the opposition, got a payback yesterday.

Yesterday businessmen Arshak Mkhitaryan and Melik Manukayn dropped their membership. We should confess that this was not a surprise to anyone. Recently, things haven’t been going so good between the coalition members and the NA president. For a long time, it was expected that the businessmen representatives of the Rule of Law would leave the faction. But it was expected that this boycott would be done not separately, but jointly with the participation of ten people. According to our information, as well as the other businessmen, MPs are going to leave the party soon.

In our previous editions, we have stated that over ten representatives of Rule of Law had presented a written ultimatum to Arthur Baghdasaryan and told him that they were independent and could drop their membership at any given time. As for Melik Manukyan, who has already left the party, at the time he told us the following, “I haven’t written anything, I respect Baghdasaryan a lot and will not do that either. If I have problems I will solve them myself, but won’t write anything”. Yesterday Mr. Melikyan told us the following, “I don’t want to make any comments”. We told him his words and he told us, “I respect Mr. Baghdasryan now too. But many things change in life. Life goes on”, he said and didn’t agree with the rumors claiming that they were obliged by the Republican party and president to leave that party. As for Arshak Mkhitaryan, he said, “Why do I have to give comments? I didn’t want to stay there and left it, what is wrong with that?” he said and added that there wasn’t any political context to this. “I don’t want to be a deputy any more. I look at things differently and I don’t want to stay in the faction any more,” he said.

According to our information Arthur Baghdasaryan is going to leave the coalition. He wanted to publish this information, but the plane crash tragedy in Sochi altered his plans. Recently Arthur Baghadasaryan announced that if there were conflicts between the other coalition members and their party, they would leave the coalition so as not to undermine the activities of their colleagues. Now these conflicts have reached a critical level and he is ready to leave the coalition, after which he may be punished. The parliamentary majority will boycott the NA sessions and will not attend the parliament. Besides that according to Article 74.1 of the RA Constitution, the president can dissolve the parliament if it doesn’t work during the course of three months. This means that Arthur Baghdasaryan has fallen into a very bad situation, and he did this after his expectations to be the next president. We hope Kocharyan will not do the same with Arthur Baghdasaryan what he did with A. Tumanyan. On the other hand, he may fall into an even worse situation.