The “Alternative” NGO/political initiative (“Impeachment” alliance) held its subsequent meeting at the “Freedom” square on Friday. It was held near the Tumanyan statue because there was some kind of stage installed in the center of the square.
In the beginning of the meeting, Vahagn Khachatryan drew the gatherers’ attention to the fact that although Armenia is still in a pre-election campaign, it looks as if the news broadcasts on television are from the battle field (explosions, assassination attempts, etc). In his speech, Aghasi Yenokyan recalled that Prime Minister of Great Britain Tony Blair congratulated Robert Kocharyan “for taking the post of president of Armenia by means of the oath” after the 2003 presidential elections. He also recalled that in November 1999, Robert Kocharyan signed the OSCE Istanbul charter, according to which Armenia recognized Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.
“Everything created by the illegitimate authorities is illegitimate,” announced A. Yenokyan. Vahagn Khachatryan touched upon the fact that many of Armenia’s top-ranking government officials lose huge amounts of money in casinos and brought up an example which the presses had already written about. After one of the events dedicated to the Armenian year in France in the French city of Nice, some Armenian government officials lost nearly 1.2 million dollars in the casinos of Nice. After hearing all this, quite possibly some of the “low-class” relatives of those officials will label the “Impeachment” alliance representatives as disrespectful because they don’t want to see anything positive and only talk about the bad things. For example, hasn’t there been a time when our officials have actually won in the casinos? It has happened, right? But “Impeachment” only talks about the bad things like losing which, as a result, misinterpret the reality and people get the impression that our government officials don’t know how to play (which is, of course, a humiliating falsehood). But let’s get back to the “Impeachment” public meeting.
Among the 4-5,000 participants, there were also representatives of the Armenian National Movement, “New Times”, “Republic” and other political parties, as well as the leaders of “Republic” political party Aram Z. Sargsyan and “New Times” political party Aram Karapetyan. “New Times” has appealed to the Central Election Commission so that the campaign television airtime given to the political parties by law starts at 7:00 p.m. primetime instead of 5:15 p.m. The “Impeachment” alliance joined “New Times” with that initiative.
During the meeting, Norik Norikyan from the alliance announced that a certain part of society has the misinterpretation that “Impeachment” is criticizing the opposition.
“We say no and a thousand times no. We don’t have problems with the real opposition and are ready for the sake of our victory not only to cooperate, but also to become allies. Let that be clear. For those political parties who think that it is possible to change these authorities through means of elections, who are going to reject the idea of impeachment, who are going to create obstacles for the implementation of the opposition’s plan to unite, we announce that those parties are not the opposition and can not even be the opposition,” said Norikyan.
Representative of “Impeachment” and editor-in-chief of “Armenian Times” daily Nikol Pashinyan announced that “impeachment must put an end to oligarchy.” He asked why the opposition is not united.
“The opposition is not united now, but it will be tomorrow. We have not competed and will not compete,” announced Pashinyan. The meeting ended with a march towards the building of the National Academy of Sciences-the place where exactly three years ago, on the night of April 12, policemen attacked peaceful demonstrators with water-spraying machines, bludgeons and electric shock machines from the National Assembly area. The demonstrators that had come out to the street on Friday had empty plastic bottles with the words “Impeachment” and “Let’s get rid of them together” written on them, symbolizing the protest of the demonstrators. Let us recall that one of the demonstrators of that night in 2004 was sentenced to three years in prison for attacking an armed policeman with an empty plastic bottle with the purpose of self-defense. There were no serious incidents during the meeting/demonstration on Friday.