During yesterday’s press conference, NA Speaker Tigran Torosyan said that the bills that were virtually directed against Radio Liberty would not be submitted to the National Assembly for discussion by the government. He meant the bills “On Television and Radio” and “State Duties, which the government considered urgent for discussion, and for that reason the NA had summoned an extraordinary session. If we take into account the fact that these bills still remain urgent for the government, we may assume that the government is going to look for other ways of solving this problem for them. So the solution could be the following: the state board on public radio may not give its agreement on prolonging the contract with Radio Liberty. This means that Liberty will be shut down not by the package, but by the stage-by-stage version. In the first stage, the dates of the contract will be expired, and in the second one they will pretend that they are negotiating, and in the third the state board will simply decide to terminate the contract with Liberty. By the way, Torosyan said yesterday that he’s going to spend his vacation in Armenia. Perhaps he will also take a rest from Radio Liberty.
There was no unusual reason for the postponement of the Republican Party’s extraordinary session foreseen for July 4. This is what deputy leader of the Republican Party and NA chairman, Tigran Torosyan, told “Regnum” Friday.
He mentioned that the Republican Party had to nominate its presidential candidate during its assembly in the fall, the time for the regular assembly was drawing near, there were issues that needed to be clarified once more, and in the end it was decided to postpone the extraordinary assembly of the Republican Party and hold the regular assembly in the fall. To those who explained the postponement of the Republican Party’s assembly using “out of the ordinary” reasons, the NA speaker recalled the famous Chinese proverb regarding black cats and dark rooms. But the connection between the Chinese and Torosyan’s press conference doesn’t end there. It turns out that the NA speaker knows Chinese sayings rather well (or he recently finished reading Chinese sayings). In any case, he made another reference to a Chinese proverb in response to a question The second story Torosyan told had to do with the “Liberty” radio station. In your opinion, what is the connection between the failed bills to limit the activity of “Liberty” radio in Armenia and one of the masterpieces of Chinese sayings? It turns out that there is a connection. In response to the question as to how he evaluates the fact that the coalition parties of the Republican Party – “Prosperous Armenia” and the ARF – didn’t have active participation in the voting of the bills on the laws on “Television and Radio” and “State Dues”, something which became the reason for the failure of the bills, Torosyan told another Chinese story. The story was about twelve close friends who decide to separate for a certain amount of time so that each time they gather, each of them will bring one cup of rice vodka, pour it in a barrel, and tell about what they did on their own while drinking the rice vodka. When they all gather, they talk about what they had done and start to drink the vodka, but discover that the barrel is full of water. That is when the secret is revealed – everybody had thought that he could have taken water instead of vodka and poured it in the barrel, and that it wouldn’t have appeared in the other eleven glasses of vodka, but that is how each of the 12 friends had thought, and in the end all there was, was water. What does the fable tell us? We shouldn’t rely on anyone, and if there have been coalitional cooperation memoranda signed, then we should respect those agreements (I am referring to the ARF and “Prosperous Armenia). However, as to how justified it is at the intellectual level for National Assembly deputies to try to make you understand something by using Chinese fables, Torosyan couldn’t say. But he did mention that the government would not bring the above-mentioned failed bills to parliament again. Why won’t it? (After all, the issue was considered urgent and that is why the National Assembly convened an extraordinary session). The NA speaker proposed to ask the government. With regards to the presidential elections to take place in Artsakh, the NA speaker said that it is understandable that the international organizations don’t recognize the Nagorno-Karabakh presidential elections, and make announcements about that, however, he also said that he considers them as regular announcements that are heard during the elections of unrecognized states, mentioning that the representatives of the organizations making those announcements, in any case, meet with the authorities formed by those elections. Torosyan notes that in that case a question comes up: if they don’t recognize the Karabakh elections, then why do they meet with the authorities formed by the peoples’ vote?
On Friday, Torosyan defended PACE Secretary General Terri Davis, whose latest announcements on Artsakh are not so pleasing for Armenians to hear. The NA speaker called on not making curse-laden announcements against such announcements, and added that when Davis was the PACE speaker on the Karabakh issue, there were propositions in his resolutions that are not stated in any document on the Karabakh issue. One of those propositions is that Nagorno-Karabakh can become independent through means of a public referendum, and the other is that a Council of Europe member country can’t include a non-member country in its territory. Torosyan considers these propositions very important. He also finds that the work of the Armenian delegations in the European organizations is more productive than the work of Azerbaijan. These are the organizations that are in the parliamentary field. As far as the non-parliamentary fields are concerned, the NA speaker fired at the RA Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Torosyan said Friday that if the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was able to convince the Council of Europe and the Committee of Ministers that it is not worth having a negative position towards the Nagorno-Karabakh elections, then those organizations probably wouldn’t make such undesirable announcements. Parallel to all of this, Torosyan said that in practice that is an unrealistic goal; in other words, the NA speaker blames the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for not being able to do this, yet adds that it is unrealistic to do that. I wonder if the Chinese have a nice proverb for that.
P.S. Tigran Torosyan refused to answer to the question as to whether or not he considers first RA president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a serious opponent for Serge Sargsyan during the upcoming presidential elections. According to “A1plus”, Torosyan said that if Ter-Petrosyan announces that he is going to run, that is when a new meaning will be given to the interpretations. “When something is unclear, what kind of interpretation can there be?” said Torosyan.