POLITICAL SUICIDE
Armen Tsaturyan

Hayots Ashkhar Daily
22 Oct 2008
Armenia

The speech delivered by Levon Ter-Petrosyan during the October 17
meeting upset even his own supporters.

Thus his announcements to clarify the tactics of the congress and even
to make "sensational revelations" regarding Karabakh turned into an
average level and extremely tendentious geopolitical analysis.

We were facing a person who was offended by the West, which he
used to glorify for 20 years, a furious, upset individual who was
trying to basically change his own standpoint regarding the regional
developments, thus fishing in troubled waters, around Armenia.

It was for the realization of this task that Ter-Petrosyan was trying
to prove the correctness of the two fictions invented by himself,
to those, by the way far not ignorant participants of the meeting.

The first fiction was about breaching the principles of our balanced
foreign policy by President Serge Sargsyan, adopting pro-western
policy and "being disloyal" to our strategic ally Russia.

The second fiction was about the expected withdrawal of Russia and
France from the forthcoming negotiations, the false alarm about
signing a new "Dayton Agreement" by the mediation of the USA and
Turkey, which was voiced during the visit of RF President D. Medvedev.

We are sure even he himself doesn’t believe in what he said. Simply
the botched20"internal political" agenda faced by the opposition
headed by Ter-Petrosyan is based on two strongholds.

The first one is the "political capital" maintained after February 19
Presidential elections and particularly after March 1-2 tragic events,
which is based upon the "illegitimacy of the incumbent President.

The second is the conviction that the ruling power, like them in 1998,
can leave the political arena only and only in case of the coercion
of the anti-Armenian settlement of Karabakh conflict.

And because the before mentioned two "convictions" cannot be
linked with each other, because the latter’s statement regarding
the "legitimacy" completely lacks in Russia’s regional policy, the
only thing left to do for Ter-Petrosyan is to completely change his
standpoints regarding the developments taking place around Armenia
and invent the ridiculous version according to which President Serge
Sargsyan has surrendered himself to the USA and is planning to give
Karabakh’s keys to the USA and Turkey, to solve the issue of his
"legitimacy".

A question arises here, if this is really true, if an unprecedented
plot is hatched against Armenia’s national-state interests, a real
treachery, so why did Ter-Petrosyan make up his mind to stop the
demonstrations up to July and in addition to that he gives primitive
pieces of advice regarding the regulations of the clarification
of the Madrid principles. At the end he announced: "…frankly,
supporting both the settlement of Karabakh conflict and the swift
improvement of Armenian-Turkish relations, we don’t want to prevent
Armenian authorities from solving those issues.

So what! It turns out on the one hand Ter-Petrosyan accuses the ruling
power of hatching a plot against the country and on the other hand,
for unknown reasons, gives pieces of advice announcing that he doesn’t
have any intentions to hinder their activity that’s why he temporarily
steps aside.

At the end we would like to quote the only sentence from
Ter-Petrosyan’s speech, which radically contradicts the logic of his
whole lecture, including a certain malicious and conspiratorial but
still sincere element.

"If he (meaning Serge Sargsyan) thinks that by pleasing the West
and by displaying readiness for serious concessions he can gain time
and over again avoid the settlement of Karabakh conflict and later
somehow to find common language with Russia, this means he is quite
ignorant of politics."

Because after the visit of the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to
Russia it comes clear for everyone that there is no problem in terms
of "finding common language with Russia", so when the delay in the
settlement of Karabakh conflict becomes evident, we will only ask
one question: "Who is quite ignorant of20politics?"