ARMENIAN PAPER SEES REGIONAL RAILWAY AS BLOW TO NATIONAL SECURITY
Haykakan Zhamanak, Yerevan
9 Feb 07
Excerpt from report by Hayk Gevorkyan in Armenian newspaper Haykakan
Zhamanak on 9 February headlined "It would not be the other way round"
As the saying goes, there are no coincidences in big politics. On
7 February, in Tbilisi the presidents of Georgia and Azerbaijan,
[Mikheil] Saakashvili and [Ilham] Aliyev, and Turkey’s Prime Minister
[Recep Tayyip] Erdogan signed a contract on the Kars-Akhalkalak
[Akhalkalaki]-Tbilisi-Baku railway. On the same day, Armenian President
Robert Kocharyan signed a decree on national security strategy. Is
that a coincidence? This is in fact a regular occasion.
Moreover, it would not be the other way round.
The point is that the Kars-Akhalkalak-Tbilisi-Baku railway is an open
blow to national security of Armenia, and the Armenian authorities
are not seemingly disproving this. What was an action of the Armenian
authorities when the project was being prepared? They were building
the state headed by Kocharyan, attacking ballot stations and voting
"for" the constitutional reforms, developing our economy by means of
tiger jumps, celebrating our regular diplomatic victories etc.
Over this period of time Kocharyan has used to meet students and
tell them
that the railway does not have economic prospects and, for this
reason, it will not be constructed. Defence Minister Serzh Sargsyan
has been drafting our national security strategy. In other words,
when Turkey and Azerbaijan have been taking serious steps for the
railway construction, our authorities have been writing fairy tales
and telling society about them. This is absolutely normal that the
contract on the railway construction and the decree on national
security strategy were signed on the same day, i.e. 7 February.
When two parties are at war, victory of one of them unavoidably means
defeat of another one. In the modern world, a war does not only mean
attacking each other with tanks. We have lost the aforementioned war
without reservation. Incidentally, we lost not because the enemy is
strong but because we turned to be very weak. We are weak because
until today Kocharyan and [Foreign Minister Vardan] Oskanyan have
been trying to persuade people that only "the return of Karabakh"
may hinder the construction of the railway, that nothing in the region
depends on Armenia, that time works in favour of Armenia etc.
[Passage omitted: the railway is commercially viable]