Yesterday RA president Robert Kocharyan spoke about Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s speech during the recent rally in the Republic square, in which the former president slammed the existing regime.
“It is a pity that Levon Ter-Petrosyan wants to return to politics being full of anger. This anger was what collapsed the ANM,” said Robert Kocharyan to journalists after participating in the presentation and opening of a youth shooting club in Yerevan. According to R. Kocharyan, the meaning of the rally was that “it was better before than now”. “I think that people remember the quality of the life in different times very well. However, I think that there is a very good method how the work can be evaluated; you can just compare the situation at the beginning of the tenure and at the end of it, you can compare the inherited situation with that being at the end of the tenure. It concerns both farmers, directors of factories, the president and the governmental party. The ANM got the power in August 1990. In that period Armenia was one of the most developed Soviet Union states with good production and had rather developed agriculture. Armenia became one of the poorest countries of the world within three-four hours. Certainly, it is clear that there were losses due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. I estimate that the capacity of such losses during the first two-three years could not be more than 15-20%. In the future those losses had to be recovered due to new programs, new investments and adopting new investment policies. This is how it happened in Baltic countries, Belarus, Ukraine. During several years the production of Armenia was just ruined,” said the president without speaking about the war and victory and the thousands of refugees. “Now we can surely say that I inherited a country with collapsed economy in 1998 – a country, which, as I said, was classified as one of the poorest countries of the world by the international institutions. Now we should compare the situation in 1997 and now, when the existing budget is almost the same and a bit bigger than the gross domestic product of those times. I think that those people should speak about the economy, who at least understand anything in it,” said president Robert Kocharyan.