Yesterday adviser to the president, chairman of National Security party Garnik Isagulyan announced that the idea of forming a public council in Armenia was proposed for the first time two years ago during the discussions of the national security strategy in Armenia.
He says that the reason why he has announced this is the fact that recently a number of politicians have discussed who the mentioned suggestion was initially proposed by. Even though many people are trying to connect the fact of establishing such public council with the inner political situation in Armenia, Garnik Isagulyan assures that it is an outstanding issue and the issue of establishing a public council would be discussed regardless of the political situation in the country. “However, the current political situation may make us understand that it is necessary to involve such people in the public council who don’t have other places to express themselves,” he said. In Isagulyan’s words, many people may think that such institutions exist only in post-soviet countries, but there are such institutions in developed countries as well such as France and Germany. He says that till now they have received 359 recommendations concerning the public council from different organizations and people. Mr. Isagulyan says that he is in charge of recruiting different powers in the mentioned council. “I have called all political powers personally, which have participated in the recent parliamentary elections but haven’t overcome the barrier of five percent and haven’t been elected in the parliament. Also I called the presidential candidates and non-governmental organizations, which are supporting the opposition. We have received an official refusal letter only from Ter-Petrosyan’s office,” said Isagulyan and added that Ter-Petrosyan’s representative Levon Zurabyan explained their refusal by the fact that since Armenia has not fulfilled the requirements of the PACE resolution they cannot participate in any events. “I told them that we are also a member of the UN, which has adopted a resolution on Karabakh. Why don’t you accept this fact as stimulus for a dialog with the authorities? If you are really interested in fulfilling the requirements of the documents adopted by the Euro Union or any other institutions, it would be better to start a dialog over the issues of those resolutions. I think that they are using the PACE resolution for their purposes,” he said. According to Garnik Isagulyan, it would be better if Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s supporters were included in the public council. Even he says that he was asked whether it was possible that Ter-Petrosyan might be the chairman of that council and he replied that it could be and there are no problems for that. “There were concerns that this council might be an imitation of institution, which would serve for the interests of some people. We clearly said that the mechanism, which we will work out together, will exclude such possibility. It is wrong to say that it is done for the purpose of starting a dialog with someone. The creation of such public council was an outstanding issue and it had to be done,” he said and informed that former presidential candidates Aram Harutyunyan and Artashes Geghamyan had agreed to participate in the work of the mentioned public council. By the way, Isagulyan assures that journalists will be included in the works of this public council as well. Definitely this public council will be formed in September of this year.
Answering to a question whether it is not surprising that three ARF member ministers resigned at one time recently he said that the ARF had not resigned from the coalition yet. “Those three ministers were elected members of their bureau and thus they dropped their portfolios in order to be included in the bureau. The ARF will nominate new candidates instead of those three ministers, which is not strange at all. The members of the ARF bureau have certain responsibilities. I think that they have found it difficult to do two jobs at one time and thus decided to resign from their state positions,” he said.