Things are not looking too good for head of the Constitutional Rights Union Hrant Khachatryan and deputy head of the party and head of the union’s “Iravunk” official newspaper staff Hayk Babukhanyan.
Citizens of Armenia found out about this last week after the CRU union voted Hayk Babukhanyan out of the union. A couple of days before, director of “Iravunk” Gegham Grigoryan was also kicked out. The quarrels between the head of CRU and the deputy head became more apparent during a conference hosted on September 16. H. Babukhanyan’s followers claim that this is an order from the Defense Minister of Armenia Serge Sargsyan, while editor of “Iravunk” Hovhannes Galajyan remembers when the pressure all began: back when “Iravunk” had a problem with Alexander Sargsyan (Serge Sargsyan’s brother) and now H. Babukhanyan is protecting H. Galajyan by writing an open letter to the defense minister. In other words, the followers of Babukhanyan are accusing the followers of Khachatryan of being “Serge’s chosen ones”, while Khachatryan’s followers are accusing Babakhanyan of taking advantage of “millions of drams”. Since there were some financial problems after the research, during the conference H. Khachatryan proposed removing Babakhanyan from office for three months. However, after seeing the reaction of the members, he left and the conference continued without him. Only 16 members out of the 296 present voted for removing Babukhanyan, and the new presidential administration was elected during the conference. H. Babukhanyan was elected deputy head, while H. Khachatryan was elected head of the union despite the fact that he wasn’t present. It’s worth mentioning that Khachatryan and Babukhanyan don’t speak harshly when talking about the abovementioned. In any case, H. Khachatryan said that he doesn’t consider the results of those elections as valid because according to him, there were some violations and none of the members have received the minimum number of votes for getting elected, which is stated in the CRU charter. According to Khachatryan, it was expected to see a revolt among union members during the past couple of months and it broke out during the conference.
Khachatryan doesn’t want to be the head of a union that is slowly yet surely losing its identity and that’s why Khachatryan wants the deputy head to resign. He thinks that that’s the only way that the union will work more efficiently. Khachatryan says that electing Babukhanyan during his absence is similar to a state revolt. The head of the union calls on all the people who have an influence on Babukhanyan to “stop him from making errors”. According to H. Khachatryan, he had assigned Babukhanyan to be in charge of finances and says that there haven’t been any errors. He says that there were only two disagreements-the incompatibility of two documens worth 3 million AMD between a newspaper edition and “Iravunk”. Head of the union also says that there have also been some financial contributions made to the party.
Khachatryan said that if Babukhanyan doesn’t leave the party for a three month period, then he will leave the political field for good and won’t even do social work. During interviews with journalists, he even called on companies in need of radio/technicians (that’s his profession). Khachatryan isn’t even thinking about dropping his deputy mandate in case of leaving the political field because he plans on defending his union as a parliamentary union and after all, he still hasn’t left the political arena. Babukhanyan, in his turn, said that he is not planning on leaving the party anytime soon, stating that the party had chosen him to be in charge of regulation. As for the financial problems, Babukhanyan said: “The head of the union and the financier must be held responsible for that.” He assures that the political orientation of the union won’t change if Khachatryan does decide to leave and that the union won’t become a plaything for other parties.