DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF ARMENIA MOURNS FOR MILOSEVIC
YEREVAN, MARCH 18. ARMINFO. “We had serious cooperation with Yugoslavia
and President Milosevic and it could bring fruits were it not for
the bloody final of the Yugoslavian state,” says the leader of the
opposition Democratic Party Aram Sargsyan.
In 1986 “representatives of one Armenian organization” attempted the
last vengeance against Turkish diplomats that ended in their arrest.
In 1989 when Milosevic was elected Yugoslavian President, he met with
an Armenian delegation who told him about the conflict and demanded
that the Armenians be set free. Milosevic showed them the door saying
that one can’t tell a president what he should do. But a week later
he ordered to set the prisoners free.
Sargsyan learned this story from Milosevic himself during a Belgrade
meeting of the Eurasian Socialist Congress, an organization set up
by the Socialist Party of Russia and uniting the Socialist parties
of Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Yugoslavia and the Democratic
party of Armenia and later Socialist parties from a number of Eastern
European countries and Spain. In 1997 Milosevic was elected to lead
the congress.
The very fact that he understood the problem shows what a person,
what a patriot he was, says Sargsyan. He witnessed a lot of injustice
against his people. The NATO operation against Yugoslavia claimed more
lives than all the previous conflicts in the Yugoslavian territory
did. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Bosnia and Kosovo became
refugees.
We were opponents of Levon Ter-Petrossyan, now we are in opposition
to Robert Kocharyan, but we must never act like Zoran Djindjic and
Vaislav Kostunica who handed over Milosevic to a foreign court,
says Sargsyan. Only people can decide if their leader is hero or tyrant