Political secretary for the “Liberated Territories Defense” NGO Armen Aghayan had this to say in response to the question as to whether it was possible to accuse Zhirair Sefilyan of not having a registered organization:
“Our organization is not violating the law by being or not being registered. There are thousands of registered and non-registered organizations and parties out there that can all fit in the same bus. Today, everyone in Armenia can pay 100-200 dollars, get the registered stamp and say ‘I’m the head of a registered organization’. If that’s the kind of party or organization we have, then we’re not distinguishing the two. That’s a way for the organization and party leaders to establish themselves. We don’t really need that for our organization at the moment and we’ll register when we need to.”
Armen Aghayan also talked about the political parties that didn’t help Zh. Sefilyan.
“The other parties just do their jobs; whoever helps, helps. Many show that they would help with pleasure, but can’t due to certain circumstances. We understand them. We will continue our work and as you can see, the authorities are afraid of this; they’re not afraid of the political parties no matter how radical oppositionists they are. As long as they stay unorganized, they’ll never reach anything. Now they’re going to try to bother us so that we won’t be able to organize; we, on our part, are going to try to show that we can be organized and will solve the issues. Some oppositionist parties had members and trusted people in the electoral commissions; we didn’t, but one of our representatives was able to have then presidential candidate Stepan Demirchyan be in first place at one poll, going against the police and parties that wanted to interfere.” He also clarified how that person had “made it” so that Demirchyan won.
“When the KGB came and told him to come with them for a chat, he had said ‘get the hell out of here,” said Armen Aghayan.