THE PROPHETS NEVER STRIVED FOR POWER
Lilit Poghosyan

Hayots Ashkharh
Dec 13 2007
Armenia

In response to the questions of "Hayots Ashkharh", political scientist
SOUREN ZOLYAN expresses his opinion on the internal political
developments

"I don’t see new developments in the logic of the pre-election
campaign; this is rather the continuation of the old processes. But as
they say, every cloud has a silver lining. L. Ter-Petorsyan’s return
to active politics made the public and the political forces refer
back to the issue whether it was right that no political assessment
was made on the activities of the former authorities in 1998.

That time, the Political Council under the President adopted some
non-specific statement that neither implied political responsibility
nor sketched the issue of legal responsibility. There were only three
parties that insisted on it, and at their demand, the real assessment
of the former authorities was presented as a special opinion attached
to the document.

The approach was that it wasn’t worth raking up the past, i.e. dividing
society into one’s own people and aliens. What is done cannot be
undone. We must now think about the future, and present the history
of the third Republic of Armenia not as a chain of crimes but as a
sequence of events. This opinion became prevalent in 1998, and the
past somehow fell into oblivion. Moreover, a kind of taboo seemed to
have been imposed on all this, and later, even if the events of the
past were referred to, this was done very on a very superficial level.

But this is not the way things should happen. If we do not recall
the past, the past reminds about itself, and L. Ter-Petrosyan is a
fair example of that. All the statements that remain half-finished
at present fully and definitely testify to the fact that there were
serious speculations in connection with the disaster zone and a
great number of crimes that were never assessed in legal terms. Time
showed that the ‘generous’ treatment towards the former authorities
was improper.

And now that Ter-Petrosyan himself insists that a political assessment
be made on his tenure period, based on facts and documents vs. pretty
word combinations, it is necessary to make such assessments, even
though with delay."

"You say responsibility, political assessment… Whereas it is the
ex-President that makes political assessments and ‘strictly’ condemns
his legal successors who, some way or another, managed to cope with
the ruins of the economy which had been ‘demolished and dismantled’
by him."

"As the people say, it serves them right. Because, I repeat, passing
round the trespassers was not the way of manifesting generosity;
it should have been done by way of making a legal assessment and
exempting them from punishment. I have profound respect for human
rights, but there are also moral norms, after all.

If, from the point of view of civil rights, anyone is free to express
his/her opinion, there is, nonetheless, some moral obstacle that
mustn’t be crossed. If, for instance, a thief speaks about honesty
and accuses another person of robbery, we don’t say that this person
exercises his/her right to freedom of speech. Because, together with
freedom of speech, there are criteria that are obviously violated.

L. Ter-Petrosyan has a command of rhetorical art. He has appeared
like a prophet from the desert and accuses the authorities of all
the possible and impossible sins. This, in general, is within the
frameworks of the genre. But prophets, as a rule, were limited to
making criticism; they didn’t interfere in ‘secular affairs’ and
especially, didn’t strive for power. Therefore, it is the rules of the
‘genre’ that are being violated in this case.

Rational logic is impotent at this point. The logic of political
confrontation and the tactics of black-and-white collision are being
applied. Unfortunately, these elections are from the outset doomed to
becoming the hostage of the flawed logic of crushing and annihilating
one another."

"Do you think Mr. Ter-Petrosyan has an intention to rely on colored
revolutions?"

"L. Ter-Petrosyan doesn’t seem to speak about it for the time
being, but Aram Karapetyan declared that the second stage of the
elections will be held on February 20. That is, he is going to bring
his proponents to the street, dispute the election results and,
disregarding the distribution of the votes, impose his ‘truth’ on
the majority that won’t realize that truth.

Such logic demands playing tricks on the voters’ emotions, and L.

Ter-Petrosyan’s oratory is totally within that scenario. Together with
you, we were trying to analyze from the point of view of rational
thinking whether or not Armenia is a ‘state of chieftains’, whether
L. Ter-Petrosyan has the right to act from the positions of a judge,
blame and criticize the authorities. And the ex-President acts in
the irrational domain; by saying that this is a state of chieftains,
he actually blames himself. If we admit that Armenia is a state of
‘chieftains’, then it is he that brought the chieftains to power. Or,
he conceded power to the chieftains.