Vardan Oskanyan has made an announcement concerning dismissing several Ambassadors and foreign affairs ministry employees from their positions and said those people have been “honored” dismissal, who have been in very serious relations with the former authorities. The law on Diplomatic service does not allow our diplomats to express a political stance openly. Some of our employees have decided to violate that law and the logical results was their dismissal,” Oskanyan said. “These people who did such thing will be the last ones, frankly, if I go through the list of the ministry, they will be the last ones since we know their political stance from the very beginning. They are either relatives of former high rank officials or they used to have such positions before,” the minister said. “You can ask them and they will say that there has not been any intimidation on them during the past ten years. For that reason it is really a pity that those people did it. Good specialists are not easy to have; it is very difficult to prepare such diplomats for the ministry. It was hard for me to sign their dismissal orders, but I had to do it. I believe it was hard for the president to sign it as well. How can you imagine that an Ambassador, who is to represent the president, is appointed by the president, joins a movement, a political power, which has called this state a cleptocracy when the head of that state system is the president? How can that Ambassador work if he agrees with that definition?” Answering to the announcement of the opposition that the fact that diplomats are joining them means that the governmental structure is collapsing the FM said, “The opposition has been and is trying to do that, but it will not work. The fact that the opposition is trying to recruit diplomats from the lower instances of the ministry shows that their model has failed”. A number of diplomats have been dismissed from their duties by president Kocharyan due to the above mentioned reasons.
