CROSSING THE RED LIGHT
Hakob Badalyan

hos16905.html
11:16:23 – 22/02/2010

Nadezhda Sargsyan who is protesting that the national selection for
Eurovision 2010 was rigged and as a result her daughter Emmy will
not leave for Oslo, states that the head of the Public TV Aleksan
Harutyunyan had promised her that Emmy and Mihran duet would represent
Armenia at Eurovision. Aleksan Harutyunyan stated that he had never
promised such a thing to Nadezhda Sargsyan. The point is not this.

The point is that complaining of injustice and fraud Nadezhda Sargsyan
uses as an argument the fact that she was promised that her daughter
would be sent to the competition. Have she thought for one second
to say that she would be happy but she prefers the one who would
justly win to go to Eurovision? Or maybe the promise to send Emmy to
Eurovision dimmed Nadezhda Sargsyan’s sense of justice and the notion
of choice?

Probably not. Everything is much simpler, and should be considered in
the plane of the Armenian perception of "fairness". For most Armenians
injustice is not acceptable only if it applies to them personally
or to their immediate environment, otherwise everything is fair
and lawful. Well, if injustice serves for them and their relatives,
so this is already the highest degree of "fairness".

That is why when someone from the "privileged" crosses a red light, the
other drivers are complaining not because it is unjust, but because
such a privilege is unavailable to them. In other words, most of
the drivers of Armenia do not require equality under the red light,
but "equality to cross the red light". And so is in every field of
life. Armenians are outraged when they are cheated and right after,
they begin to look for someone to cheat.

Nadezhda Sargsyan had better to apply to the court not because
the elections were rigged, but because she was cheated. And it has
nothing to do with justice because justice has nothing to do with
the Armenian environment, represented by all of us, including those
involved in Eurovision.

Therefore the main task is to transform the perception of justice of
the society for the latter not to accept the injustice regardless of
the person to whom it applies. In the end, the society is to blame
for this perception because the ruling elites in our country for
many years created the conditions under which people were forced to
rely on injustice and privilege to achieve well-being. Therefore,
the transformation of perception of justice is a primarily task for
the elite. And it is sufficient to ensure the conditions under which
a citizen would have hoped for the fairest way to achieve prosperity.

But the reluctance of elites to create such conditions is quite
understandable. ‘The Armenian perception" of fairness is preferable
for the so-called elite, because in these circumstances, injustice
has a legitimate status, and the society does not complain of the
dominance of injustice, but the lack of personal access to the
privileged injustice, though paradoxical it may seem.