VOTE TO REFERENDUM WITH MONEY

Lragir.am
04 April 06

Shushi Foundation, established in 2001 initiated a new all-Armenian
referendum, and offered the citizens of Armenia, as well as the
Armenians of the Diaspora to vote to it, stated the director of the
foundation Bakur Karapetyan on April 4. The referendum will be on a
single question: would you like Shushi to become the cultural capital
of all Armenians? Those who agree must pay at least a dollar. It is
a mixture of referendum and marathon.

Hence Bakur Karapetyan wants to launch the project of revival of
Shushi, worked out by the foundation. The revival is cultural. The
foundation has already measured 220 monuments. Bakur Karapetyan
wants to reconstruct the appearance of Shushi of the 19th and 20th
centuries. The director of Shushi Foundation thinks that the future
of the city is to become a cultural center to develop tourism for
the city to live on. Bakur Karapetyan believes that Shushi has a
great cultural potential. In addition, Bakur Karapetyan thinks this
potential is acceptable for the nation. “A city is a living being,
it breathes. Today Shushi is a ghost town, we need to revive it. We
need to save it,” says Bakur Karapetyan.

According to him, Shushi has about 2.5 thousand inhabitants. Bakur
Karapetyan thinks an environment should be created in Shushi to
enable it to sustain itself. Judging by the program of all-Armenian
vote-donations, others are going to create this environment, but they
are not quite optimistic now. At least, Bakur Karapetyan says so far
24 thousand dollars have been donated by the Catholic community of
Beirut. According to the director of the foundation, this money was
spent on measuring. “Specialists were amazed how we did so much work on
this money. We did work of about 240 thousand dollars on 24 thousand
dollars,” says Bakur Karapetyan. He does not know how much money is
needed to turn Shushi into a cultural center. Maybe this is the reason
why there are no donations. They might not know how much to donate.

In future we will publish details on Shushi Foundation.