THE RADICALS BECOME ACTIVE BY THE DIRECTION OF THEIR MASTERS
Armen Tsaturyan

Hayots Ashkharh Daily
16 Dec 2008
Armenia

The end of the political passiveness of the Armenian National Congress
is conditioned by the "signals" received from the West.

During the last two months the representatives of the organizations,
member to the congress, who were disapproved of L. Ter-Petrosyan’s
indifference toward the issue of the settlement of Karabakh conflict,
hinted, in their private conversations, that the reason of the
passiveness manifested by the leader of the radicals is far not
Karabakh issue, he is waiting for "signals" from overseas. The reason
of this very tough expectation is very understandable: after March
1 neither the West nor Russia did support the political camp headed
by the first president.

The fact that during their visits to Armenia in summer and autumn
the European and American officials were not very anxious about the
tempo and the contents of the investigation of March 1 events, and
that the situation has changed during the recent times couldn’t have
been overlooked by Ter-Petrosyan and his supporters.

The visit of the Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Tomas
Hammarberg to Armenia on November 20-22 during which he gave very
harsh assessments to the investigation, served as good reason for
the before mentioned.

Moreover it came clear after the warning s of the European high
ranking official that they can be repeated in the report to be made
by Tomas Hammarberg during the monitoring session of Council of Europe
Parliamentary Assembly, to take place on December 17, in Paris.

Because hardly had the European official left Armenia, when on December
3 the congress submitted a claim about allocating a session hall for
the conference previewed on December 3, threatening that otherwise
they will hold the conference in Georgia.

It is also noteworthy that the date of the conference of Armenian
National Congress matches with the end of PACE monitoring session in
Paris, which means they have calculated that they will be the first
to inform our people about the "historical decisions" of the session,
representing it as the "evident success of the consistent struggle
of the congress".

And finally we shouldn’t overlook the fact that OSCE American
Co-Chairman Mathew Braze has also joined the before mentioned. He
recently made an epochal "announcement" saying: "We are seriously
anxious about the detained in Armenia. There are still 67 detained
pro-oppositional activists."

Mathew Braze’s brains have become so bright that he has shifted his
controversial announcements regarding the Armenian and Azerbaijani
lands into the sphere of opposition-ruling power relations in Armenia’s
internal political domain: "People call political20prisoners those
who are detained on political charges. What we believe is that no
one should be detained for their political motivations."

A question arises here: "What is the reason of this much attention
of the American Co-Chairman towards the so-called political prisoners
in our country?"

Is it really a manifestation of true anxiety? That is why he states
that: "There should be no political prisoners in Armenia, for the sake
of Armenia." In that case why does he shift the issue into the PACE
monitoring committee on the one hand and to the agenda of the council
of directors of the corporation "Millennium Challenges" on the other,
meanwhile friendly and sincerely informs us about it.

After all if the problem is in the investigation of March 1
developments then we must underscore that this process is not new
and is not yet over. So what does Mathew Braze mean?

Moreover, the radical opposition, extremely enthusiastic about the
political and economic pressure on Armenia, not only doesn’t have
any intentions to give an answer to what they did on March 1, but
also intend to aggravate the situation.

So why are they so nervous both "outside" and "inside", when in
reality it is not yet clear what will the "case of the 7" and all
the other cases end with.

If we examine the before mentioned cause-effect relation we can
conclude that we deal with the western scenario of putting a "total
influence" on Armenia by means of making the opposition active. Which
makes the internal lever of the "total influence" break his promise
of not hindering the settlement of Karabakh issue, and the external
lever – to forget about their traditional policy of maneuvering
between the ruling power and the opposition of Armenia.

And because the participants of this performance are short of memory,
in the created situation the moment of truth has approached for
Armenia, thus there are only two options, either to refresh the
memories of some people by demonstrating the foreign levers used for
the organization of March 1 developments or based on the most powerful
"diplomatic interests" to announce general amnesty even for those
who evidently planned and used violence.