BESEECHING WILL NOT BE HELPFUL, IT WILL EVEN DESTROY THOSE WHO BESEECH
Hakob Badalyan
Lragir, Armenia
July 18 2007
No doubt the Armenian people will never beseech Levon Ter-Petrosyan
to return. Although our society has a lot of faults and mistakes,
it is wise enough to prevent dangerous precedents. What if on seeing
how the Armenian society begs Levon Ter-Petrosyan to return suddenly
Robert Kocharyan decided to resign before it is too late and made an
address that the party of war is about to come to power in the face
of the notorious forces, and he leaves until the nation implores him
to return. Robert Kocharyan leaves, no essential change takes place
in the country, Serge Sargsyan rules for about ten years, prepares
to pass on power to his heir, such as Hovik Abrahamyan, for instance,
and suddenly ideas are instilled in the society that the only figure
who has potential to be the equal opponent of Hovik Abrahamyan is
Robert Kocharyan. In the case of Kocharyan the propaganda will be
more effective because the circumstance of cold years of blackout
is absent although the circumstance of hard truncheons. Although it
is highly disputable whether beating in light is better than caress
in cold. At any rate, one thing is bad that the society will have
the presidents get used to resignations. In this case, the society
gets used to the presidents. They leave and then impose the idea of
begging on the society because they know whom they will pass on their
post and therefore they are confident that the nation will not stand
and will beg. And when the nation stands and does not beg, instead
of admiring its resistance they condemn its shortsightedness.
Meanwhile, the reason for the suggested "shortsightedness" is the
backward glance. In the direct and figurative meaning of the word.
For so far, for about ten years since his resignation Levon
Ter-Petrosyan has never spelled out his vision of development of
the future, the development of the country. If this vision is the
same as in 1997, in this case it appears that over the past 10 years
nothing has changed in the country compared with 1997. If something
got worse compared with the years of office of Levon Ter-Petrosyan,
Ter-Petrosyan’s approaches towards change of situation should have
changed as well. If they are the same, it means the government simply
carried on Ter-Petrosyan’s policy and reached the haven where the first
president would eventually reach if he remained president. In this case
it becomes moot to replace this government with Levon Ter-Petrosyan
if in the long run there is no difference in the result of governance.
It would be ingenuous to say there is no difference at all. There
is difference, and there is a rather big difference, a profound, a
fundamental difference. The point is that unlike Levon Ter-Petrosyan
and his team, this government, Robert Kocharyan and his team did
not come to politics from academic-scientific work. Unlike Levon
Ter-Petrosyan and Vano Siradeghyan, Robert Kocharyan and Serge
Sargsyan were party officials in their pre-revolution lives without
a shade of irony, because the situation is highly serious and it
is not time for irony. It is time to realize that government is
not an abstract notion or fiction. Government is a concrete system,
and Robert Kocharyan and Serge Sargsyan built it much successfully
because they knew what government is before the revolution, before
1988-1990. They knew it from the inside because they were part of the
Communist hierarchy. Although they were in the lower ranks of this
hierarchy, they knew well what they needed to do to climb up. And if
the Soviet Union still existed, no doubt Robert Kocharyan and Serge
Sargsyan would be in power, even if not at the top, whereas Levon
Ter-Petrosyan and say Vano Siradeghyan would have no power.
In the soviet years Robert Kocharyan’s and Serge Sargsyan’s
intentions supposed a thorough study of the system of government
to be able to solve the problem of climbing it up. Meanwhile, the
first government of independent Armenia Ter-Petrosyan and say Vano
Siradeghyan not only did not try to study the system of government
thoroughly in the Soviet years but also their approach to government
is demolition. Consequently, the difference of their ideas of the
notion of government should lead to difference of their success while
in power, and the first post-Soviet government of Armenia should be
less successful than the second if we make a conventional division.
And the fact that an authoritarian government based on the Soviet
model has formed in Yerevan is because Robert Kocharyan and Serge
Sargsyan have studied the Soviet government, and therefore they
understood that they should not run a risk, they should build what
they know better and not what they have no idea about. Therefore,
they are able to hold on to power longer than the first president.
The problem is the genetic compatibility with the notion of
government. If it is absent, the nation’s begging will not be
helpful. Moreover, it will destroy those who beseech as well, and
only the government will remain whole.