ARMENIAN OPPOSITIONIST SLAMS PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT ON KARABAKH
Haykakan Zhamanak
March 24 2010
Armenia
A senior member of the opposition Armenian National Congress (ANC),
Vladimir Karapetyan, has criticised President Serzh Sargsyan’s
statement on the possibility of withdrawal from some of the Azerbaijani
territory captured in the early 1990s.
The statement was "evidence of Sargsyan’s defeatist policy, because
Armenia had never been in such a weakened position and no Armenian
official had ever made such a hopeless statement", Karapetyan said. He
added that Sargsyan’s current position on Karabakh is a step back
from his election manifesto, which said Armenia should not only have
a corridor with Nagornyy Karabakh but also a common border.
It was first time in the past 10 years that an Armenian official openly
spoke about returning the territory to Azerbaijan, the pro-opposition
Haykakan Zhamanak said.
The author of the report, Lusine Barseghyan, says she was unable to
contact the spokesman of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA),
Eduard Sharmazanov, on 23 March for comment on Sargsyan’s statement.
Rafik Petrosyan, a member of parliament from the RPA, said he did
not believe that Sargsyan might have made such a statement.
That the coalition Prosperous Armenia faction has not reacted to
Sargsyan’s statement either. Barseghyan says it is noteworthy that
former Armenian President Robert Kocharyan has appeared "all of a
sudden" after President Sargsyan’s statement and gave an interview to
the Mediamax news agency and criticized the economic policy of the
current government. The author of the report says that Kocharyan is
trying to return to power in Armenia but has been refused the post
of prime minister by Sargsyan and the Russian authorities. Barseghyan
believes that recent discord between the ruling RPA and the coalition
Prosperous Armenia party are linked to attempts by Kocharyan’s team
to come to power, and that President Sargsyan is currently making
rearrangements in the government to thwart these attempts.