The “Impeachment” alliance, “Republic” and “New Times” parties held their subsequent public meeting at Freedom Square on May 13, with nearly 3-4,000 participants.
The public meeting took place in rainy weather. This time, the People’s Party of Armenia representatives and the leader of the party Stepan Demirchyan joined the opposition party trio. The Social-Democrat Hnchakyan Party also joined with its leader Lyudmila Sargsyan. During the public meeting, representative of “Impeachment” Nikol Pashinyan argued:
“The May 12 parliamentary elections were falsified and they were falsified in an ugly way.”
He presented the new perfected mechanism of falsification in detail. According to Pashinyan, a totally new method had been applied.
“All trusted people and observers saw that there were a huge number of citizens with new passports. They applied the following mechanism. Let’s say the authorities issued 400,000 new passports during the past couple of months for people who were out of the country or are deceased. There were real names and last names in those passports, but the photographs of other people,” he explained. Recalling that they used to collect passports from people, he added:
“They gathered the people and they had groups. Each of the people of those groups had nearly 10 passports. Those people voted with their passports and then went to the Armenian Republican Party headquarters. There they turned in their passports and received new ones with the photograph and a totally different name, last name and address. I personally saw some electoral lists at the ARP headquarters which consisted of names of people who were either deceased or out of the country.”
During the meeting, other cases of electoral falsifications were mentioned as well. It was announced that there should be cases brought up for the violations printed in the presses. Pashinyan finds that two people must be punished for falsifying the elections of May 12 – Serge Sargsyan and Robert Kocharyan.
“They had to know about it. Serge Sargsyan and Robert Kocharyan personally planned that mechanism and were at the peak of that criminal pyramid. This was a scandalous crime. What happened on May 12 was not an election, rather a state revolution (government hand-over to the prime minister, etc.), which was headed by Robert Kocharyan and Serge Sargsyan, as well as their puppets,” he continued.
In order to punish the falsifiers, Pashinyan proposed setting up a corresponding commission which would give opposition parties the chance to get to know the facts. Oppositionists demand a recount of the National Assembly election votes, taking into consideration the fact that nearly 800,000 Armenian citizens living abroad were deprived of the right to vote on May 12 because on May 12, for the first time, no polling stations were opened abroad, with even the Armenian embassy workers of foreign countries unable able to vote.
Aram Z. Sargsyan, Aram Karapetyan, Stepan Demirchyan and others gave their speeches during the rally as well. The rally ended without a march. The next rally will take place on Friday at 7 p.m. at Freedom Square. Nikol Pashinyan called on those present not to be afraid.
“We must not escape. Today we escape from them, while in the past we escaped from the Turks. It is necessary to stand up. We have to be ready for sacrifices; nobody should come here for the sake of his own victory. We must come here to serve, suffer, get beaten, get humiliated, and the people must come to power,” he said.