LIFE WILL ARRANGE EVERYTHING, TIGRAN TOROSYAN SAYS
Lilit Poghosyan

Hayots Ashkharh Daily, Armenia
Oct 3 2007

Yesterday the Parliament continued the discussion of the issues
included in the agenda of the regular four-day session. During the
intervals, NA Speaker TIGRAN TOROSYAN answered the questions of the
journalists. Considering that the meeting between the ARFD and the
Armenian pan-National Movement had stirred excitement on the political
arena, the first question was naturally devoted to that meeting.

"It was a meeting between two parties; to my mind nothing extraordinary
has happened. I don’t think that when any party has a meeting with
another party, it is done against a third party. The fuss around the
meeting unfortunately testifies to the fact that political issues are
mostly discussed very superficially. What I mean is the responses made
with regard to the meeting between Dashnaktsutyun and the Armenian
pan-National Movement, and not the meeting itself."

"Don’t you think the presidential elections are important?"

"The presidential elections are important, but they are inferior to
those issues. No election, whether presidential or parliamentary,
can be an end in itself."

"Following the 1998 shift of power, the public and many political
factions have been demanding a legal and political assessment of the
activity of the Armenian pan-National Movement. That wasn’t done, and
now Levon Ter-Petrosyan has come and made a political assessment of
‘these authorities’ for creating system of mafia representatives from
top to bottom and reducing Armenia to the level of the third-world
countries. How do you estimate the ex-President’s speech in this
regards?"

"The assessment of the ruling authorities’ activities was not the most
important part of the RA first President’s speech. In that respect,
it was no different from the assessments made so far, and, frankly
speaking, it aroused no interest in that sense. Levon Ter-Petrosyan
said that all the problems faced by Armenia are related to the
Karabakh conflict, but he also made it clear that he couldn’t propose
any solution in that regard. That’s to say, he actually reiterated
what he had said in 1998 or in the autumn of 1997. To my mind, this
was the most important episode in the first President’s speech. I
find this the most important statement of question in terms of the
problems faced by Armenia."

"Mr. Ter-Petrosyan also said that the greatest fault of the ruling
Government is the policy conducted with regard to the Karabakh issue.

Do you agree to such estimation?"

"When the first President says that he cannot propose any solution
with regard to Karabakh, I don’t think it is correct to speak about
the settlement of the Karabakh issue after that.

Nonetheless, I want to emphasize one factor in connection with
the issue. The ominous predictions of 1997 (that Armenia would find
itself in a blockade in a couple of years, the economy would collapse,
we would lose Karabakh etc.) did not come true. Moreover, we have a
qualitative change in connection with the Karabakh issue.

That is, the international community and the Co-Chairs of the
Minsk Group have stated many times that the issue will be settled
not only within the scope of territorial integrity but also – the
self-determination of the nations.