KOCHARIAN AGAIN RESPONDS TO PREDECESSOR’S ATTACKS

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Tuesday, 17 November 2009 00:37

In a speech last Wednesday, Ter-Petrosian said that Kocharian’s
decade-long policies on Turkey and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
proved disastrous and that President Serzh Sarkisian should not be
held primarily responsible for them. The opposition leader claimed in
particular that it was Kocharian who renounced Armenian territorial
claims to Turkey and paved the way for the establishment of a
Turkish-Armenian commission of historians.

"The accusations addressed to me are so absurd that there is no point
in dwelling on their content because of the complete absence thereof,"
Kocharian said in a rare statement sent to the Mediamax news agency.

"Apparently I somehow inspire Ter-Petrosian seeing as he remembers
me frequently," sneered Armenia’s second president. He compared
Ter-Petrosian to a scared man whom he said he encountered during a
recent, hitherto unpublicized, safari to Africa. He said the "European"
hunter had been "quite smashed" by a bear several years ago and now
flinches at every mention of the animal.

It was not clear if Kocharian alluded to the bloody suppression of
Ter-Petrosian’s massive anti-government demonstrations held in the
final weeks of his decade-long presidency early last year. Nor did
he specify his attitude towards the recently signed Turkish-Armenian
agreements, the main theme of Ter-Petrosian’s speech.