The more Armenia approaches the upcoming parliamentary elections, the more some forgotten political parties start reminding the Armenian public who they are and former Prime Minister of Armenia, current leader of the “Dignified Future” party and university rector Armen Darbinyan is no exception.
Perhaps there’s no need to mention the fact that in order to be respected by your electorate, you must take on the role of an oppositionist. Armen Darbinyan has chosen to take this role for his PR. During November, Darbinyan made his comments on a variety of issues which, in fact, are against the authorities’ point of views. However, if we pay close attention, we’ll see that those comments are “slight” critique. In other words, the statements may seem emotional; however they are at the second and third level.
For example, on November 14, Darbinyan made a statement criticizing the law amendment, which allows customs and taxation officers to get involved in politics and join parties. The “Dignified Future” party considers that an offense to the “fragile political system of Armenia”.
“With that law, pro-government parties, first and foremost the Armenian Republican Party, are forming a state force against their opponents in order to attack them. It’s forbidden to use state levers in the political struggle, if, of course, the abovementioned parties really want to start a political struggle. These kinds of developments go to show that there is no such intention and that the government will use all its resources, including state pressure, with the purpose of coming back to power. I must remind my fellow authority figures that the state levers and state force must by used for a totally different purpose-to make the lives of the people better and that that’s their job,” as stated in the announcement.
Let’s not talk about how justified this statement is. Let’s recall that “168 Hours” was one of the first presses that responded to that legal initiative. The following was the official reasoning of the law amendment-the amended Constitution doesn’t prohibit taxing and customs officers to join political and religious organizations. The laws, as we know, shouldn’t contradict the Constitution; they must correspond and for that it is proposed to make some changes in the laws.
Let’s start from that. If any political party has defended the constitutional amendments, then, whether it liked to or not, it has also defended the approval of these kinds of bills.
So, a question comes up: what role did the “Dignified Party” have on the constitutional amendments? We can get the answer to that question by reading the statement made by the party a year ago.
“Taking into consideration the “evident progress” of certain clauses of the bill “compared to the existing constitutional clauses”, the “Dignified Future” party board has decided to “confirm a Positive role on the bill regarding the “Armenian Constitutional Amendments”” (reference from statement).
The opportunity for dual citizenship and “the spread of the fortification of human/civil rights and freedoms on legal persons” were considered as the evident progress. We could say that the party members hadn’t read the part about human rights carefully because the 28th article of that section gives a list of organizations whose workers don’t have the right to work with parties. The workers include Armed Forces soldiers, the Police, National Security officers, public prosecutors, judges and members of the Constitutional Court. As you can see, taxation and customs officers aren’t listed. This is probably what Darbinyan and his party members didn’t see. Instead, they got such an impression after reading the word “Armed Forces” that they used that word in their statement a year later:
“The “Dignified Future” party calls on the public’s attention to the demand of having the Armed Forces stay neutral when it comes to political issues…”
It turns out that at the time they were in favor, but didn’t know what they were in favor of. However, the name of the party predicts that they should get serious when it comes time to foretell the future of Armenia. Armen Darbinyan’s last statement (on November 28) referred to the resignation of vice-president of “GasProm” Alexander Ryazanov. The former Prime Minister of Armenia is fairly content with that because “Ryzanov himself was rather daring and cynical to ignore the interests of Armenia when he talked about the Iranian gas transit in Yerevan, saying “that can’t happen because it can never happen”. In his speech, A. Darbinyan said that he’s certain that the “GasProm” administration is responsible for being more considerate when appointing officers. The slogan “Whatever benefits “GasProm”, benefits Russia” is not always correct, according to Darbinyan.
I must agree with the former Prime Minister on this. The interesting thing is that the press department of the Russian-Armenian university is presenting the opinions of Mr. Darbinyan and it seems as though the university press department also serves as the press center for the “Dignified Future” party. That’s just a minor detail.
What’s more interesting is that Armen Darbinyan is calling Ryazanov a “failure” out in the open after his resignation. In response to the question by “Aravot” newspaper as to why the former Prime Minister of Armenia decided to show the real face of Ryazanov now, Darbinyan gave a rather interesting reply: “…I am speaking about this now because they just fired Ryazanov. Armenian authorities don’t have the courage to say that, but I do.”
The former Armenian Prime Minister also mentioned that he had made negative comments about “GasProm” before too. But the closing statement was startling: “…I hope that Russians will understand what I’m saying and forgive me.”
As far as we know, one forgives another for the error that he has committed. If one asks for forgiveness beforehand, then that means only one thng-he accepts that he’s guilty. In this case, what Armen Darbinyan did is simply a mischievous act and you don’t need a lot of “courage” to criticize someone who has resigned, especially since in similar cases (let’s say, the issue concerning the diameter of the gas pipeline), it would be much more logical to criticize the Armenian authorities for giving in easily rather than “GasProm”. A. Darbinyan places high emphasis on being forgiven because he’s the rector of the Russian-Armenian university, which gets a considerable amount of financing from the Russian Federation’s budget. If they don’t forgive him, it’s quite possible to see the word “former” in front of “rector”, which also means that the university’s press department will stop working for the “Dignified Future” party and for Darbinyan personally, and won’t ask for comments from different presses and spread that. In a word, the expenses for the pre-election campaign will increase. Being the good economist that he is, it’s clear that Darbinyan is not in favor of that at all.
It’s hard to say how much “courage” Armen Darbinyan will have to sharply criticize the Armenian authorities during the next couple of months and especially on the threshold of the Armenian parliamentary elections. For now, Armen Darbinyan is instilled in the minds of the people as a young man, but “professional” economist and whose major achievement was to add the word “professional” to Armenia’s political/economic life.