THE PARTIES DO NOT “TRUST” THEIR ARCHIVES
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[12:41 pm] 13 April, 2006
Most of the Armenian parties and public organizations may lose their
historical background. If anybody attempts to revive today’s political
and public life with the help of archive material in a few decades
he may do nothing but merely enumerate only a few parties and public
organizations.
Out of two hundred parties existing in the country today only
the Republican Party of Armenia gave its archives to the RA
National Archives. The two other Coalition parties, the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) and the Country of Law
(Orinats Yerkir) alongside with other Parliamentary parties having
a more or less influential position in the political sphere (with
the exception of Democratic Fraction) keep their documents and
papers with themselves. The Armenian National Movement and the
Union for National Self – Determination and a number of patriotic
unions trusted their archives to the Public – Political Documents
Department of the Archives. On this score the Communist Party is an
exception as the Party Archives has been its Department for 68 years,
and all the Party substructures were to give their documents to the
above-mentioned archives; the latter includes more than 100 000 papers.
Today no one can make the parties give their archives.
According to the RA law “on parties” those papers are the property
of the parties and it is within their right to decide what to do with
them. A question arises on this score; how is the Archives Department
replenished? “To put it in a simple way, if you are acquainted with
the chairman of the party or have some deals with him he willingly
gives their archives. But the chairmen of certain parties do not view
the matter with comprehensive approach and do not realize the value of
the documents. They don’t understand that the place of those papers
is the archives. Finally it is a state institution and not a private
one and while keeping their papers in the archives they have a chance
to pass them to the following generations,” says the Vice-director
of the National Archives Avag Haroutyunyan. He also mentions that
they cannot always persuade the parties to give their archives;
in such case the last word is after the Party Chairman.
“Each document of the republic must be given to the Archives if you
don’t want it to get lost and want to pass it to the next generations,”
claims Avag Haroutyunyan. He states that there are multiple cases when
the important documents of a certain party got lost. By the way, “in
the period of Soviet Union many anti-communist papers were kept in the
Archives which testify to the fact that it is a non-party institution.”
By the way, in contrast with the Soviet years, when mainly the
communists could get acquainted with the contents of the papers
kept in the Archives, nowadays everybody has such a right lest the
documents contains “military, state secrets.”