The show was great

23/12/2006 Lilit SEYRANYAN

Yesterday since early morning NA Deputy Hmayak Hovhannisyan left hope and went to the National Assembly to do what he loves to do – signature collecting.

Of course, he knows that these days when there is no session it’s hard to find deputies but meanwhile he thought there might be a bit “sentimental” deputies, who by being informed through media will come to the NA to participate in the signature collection, he’s organizing for Zhirayr Sefilyan, “Protection of Liberated Lands” NGO. But when entering to the Parliament he realized that he should have hoped for anything because the doors of the offices of NA deputies were locked. Yesterday he succeeded in collecting only 220 signatures out of 131 deputies. Of course, Hovhannisyan doesn’t regret about this “bright” initiative because he thinks it’s worth getting at least 20 signatures of concrete people. According to him, even if only him signed under this initiative, it would succeed anyway. “There is no need to have more because it’s not going to the Constitutional Court. This is a political announcement, through which we express our support to Zhirayr Sefilyan,” said Hovhannisyan. According to the deputy, almost all the oppositionists and the independent deputies joined the signature collecting and that they’re waiting for the response of the coalition – ARF, RPA and ULP.

When we reminded Hovhannisyan that the total number of NA oppositionists and independent deputies is so much more than 20 (about 40), he confessed that the “National Unity”, which considers itself an opposition party and several other independent deputies, haven’t joined the initiative. “As usual only one opposition party, Geghamyan’s National Unity, opposed the initiative of the whole opposition. Stepan Demirchyan hasn’t participated either because he’s in Paris nowadays.” He didn’t much comment on why Geghamyan’s party hasn’t joined them. Only mentioned that Gagik Tsarukyan, Tatul Manaseryan and several other independent deputies refused to join them. The 20 collected signatures will be sent to media through an announcement, by which they request the authorities to release Sefilyan. According to him, this initiative is only a moral support to the arrested soldier, nothing more. As political secretary of the “Protection of the Liberated Lands” NGO, board member of “Arax-Kur” NGO, Armen Aghayan yesterday announced that arrested Sefilyan lives in jail in so much better conditions than President Kocharyan, as everybody relates to him as a high-level official of “future government of Armenia”, we asked Hovhannisyan whether Sefilyan needs such a moral support. “How can the person live well in jail? Aghayan probably means that nobody has ever tried to humilate Sefilyan there. His lawyer has also told me that nobody ever tries to offend Sefilyan in jail. They treat him well. Even the prison warden treats him well because he knows that some day Sefilyan will be the leader of Armenia. Everybody knows that the latter is a national hero and that he gained his awards and titles not in the office but out there on the battle field,” said Hovhannisyan. He also added, “Every person must take this into account even the ones who by chance are representing the punitive institute of the state. Sefilyan definitely needs our moral support because he’s type of person who’s never given up or obey the enemy even in the battle field.”

Also, when the journalists asked Aghayan whether Sefilyan eats red caviar in jail after the statement that his conditions are perfect there, Sefilyan said, “No he doesn’t eat red caviar but the jail personnel is being very correct to him, knowing that some day Sefilyan is going to occupy a higher post than all the NSS agents all together. However at the moment of the arrest, when everything is more publicized an open they want to prove to people that he’s some kind of terrorist or an extremely dangerous entity.” According to Aghayan Sefilyan’s arrest was not an accident and it’s just aimed to spread fear in the society around the current regime, especially for the ones, who have proved that they have certain purposes to have power later on. Otherwise this arrest wouldn’t be so open. “All this has a certain portion of a show. They also came to my apartment but were not looking for anything in there, just spending time. They could have taken the computer but luckily the my child kid has broken it the other day. That’s why they refused to take it. It means their objective was to show that they know the activists of this movement. Perhaps they wanted to show that they have revealed a very important case, made noise and maybe even wanted to brag that they reveal important cases and prevent conspiracies. Maybe it would be very hard to persuade Sefilyan to leave the country. That’s why they picked this option. They want to prove that despite the fact that he’s a war hero, he was planning conspiracy in the country. So by deporting him we do a favor for him too. That was the scenario and we’ll do our best to make it fail,” ensured Aghayan. He believes that in order to show itself the government has picked Sefilyan because he’s the only “organized person” unlike other oppositionists. “Comments on why Sefilyan is so much different than the others. The first comment was heard regarding the surrender of the liberated lands. I don’t want to exclude this version, however I don’t think it’s a priority issue for are because at this moment there is nothing about that. This is evidently an inner political action by the government. We all know that during our previous elections many oppositionists because of their unorganized manners, lack of professionalism and very often by selling their votes, were not able to prevent the process of election violations on the part of the government. Together with other issues the Union of Armenian Volunteers has also set an objective to prevent the process of vote sale because the number was great. And perhaps the government has realized that by trying to prevent it. In this regard, we think that the government has might slightly the wrong decision by arresting Sefilyan because it’s impossible to arrest all the activists. By doing this public attention is focused on us and it becomes so much harder for the government to do something like this again. In other words they eased up our work,” said Aghayan when complaining of the oppositionists, who were collecting signatures in an unorganized way.

To the question of journalists whether Sefilyan wouldn’t be calm and silent after he’s released just like many others before, Aghayan answered, “I don’t think anything can stop Sefilyan and nothing will ever make him cut a deal with the current government. Only time will show after his release his further activity and only then people will judge his behavior.”

P.S. “I state that this video exists. It was in our office but it was confiscated during the police search. There is also the voice recording, which we tried to find and publish in any newspaper,” announced Aghayan during yesterday’s press conference. When speaking to us Hovhannisyan said that they have the recoding only Aghayan doesn’t speak about it loud. “If he says so they’ll confiscate it as well,” he said.