Of course the visit of the RA president Robert Kocharyan to Brussels was one of the main events of this week. By saying “main” I mean its political importance in the international community, because there are no facts proving that this visit was important for Armenia yet. Instead, we know that the president discussed the relations of Turkey and the EU and in his interview given to “Euro news” TV channel he asked Europeans to pay attention to the fact that Turkey didn’t want to bring up the Genocide issue.
In other words these announcements made Turkey worry and were welcomed by those members, which wanted to have extra facts preventing Turkey from joining the EU. Turkey didn’t like this. Europe did. But what about Armenia? This question has no answer because it is not clear yet whether the membership of Turkey in the EU is in the interest of Armenia or not. According to Mr. Kocharyan Armenia “doesn’t like this idea”. But we shouldn’t base on whether we like ideas or not, we must clarify our approach and define our goals.
As for the political life of our country, the most important event was the open-air public meeting of “Republic” political party. At the same time this event was important because of the fact that it was an open-air meeting. If the government would provide them a hall for their meeting this political event would not be discussed so much. The problem is that during this open-air meeting the opposition parties were given a chance to argue in favor of their approach. By the way some people say that RP didn’t provide them with a meeting hall on purpose so that they organize their meeting outside and speed up. By the way, Aram Karapetyan also agreed with this idea by saying: “There are some people in the government too, who say go and do what you have to do in the streets. Go do that and save both yourselves and ourselves”. We will see whether the opposition can “do its job” till the end in November, but in fact a lot of things depend on the referendum developments.
There is an interesting thing: the oppositionists have a tendency of joining the opposition powers, and the ruling powers tend to weaken. In fact the problem is based on which power Robert Kocharyan is going to rely in connection with the referendum: on political powers or state powers and their technologies. On the one hand “Nig Aparan” patriotic alliance announces about conducting the referendum as a national festival, on the other hand “Armenian Revolutionary Federation” announces that it doesn’t like the idea of making festivals and tries to ideologically prove that people should vote “for” the constitution. Though this is really a principal issue, but these two approaches are alike. As a citizen of the USA (who was originally from Italy) said: “kind words and guns are more effective than only kind words”.
Recently, there was a change in the economy of Armenia: the CB president suggested to consider the exchange rate of USD as 420 dram in the budget of 2006. His explanation was very strange: the growth of Armenian economy is faster than the growth of the economies of developed countries. They made these kinds of announcements if they had explained the decrease of USD exchange mark as a result of money transfers from abroad (i.e. the reason for this wasn’t the development of Armenia, but for instance the development of Russia).
Does the economy of Armenia develop rapidly? For example according to the taxation lists, the companies, which produce cement have not “developed”. Meanwhile, according to official information, the capacity of construction works in Armenia was increased by 50% in 2005. There is only one conclusion: either the marks of development are false or the corruption mark is as high as the economy development mark is. In both cases it is clear that the stabilization of AMD exchange mark for USD cannot have any logical explanation and this is just fake.
So, let’s wait for the referendum.