Employees of Armenia's Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Diaspora have started a labor strike this morning. They are protesting the republic's acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s intention to dissolve these two ministries.
As a result of reorganization of the Armenian government structure, the number of ministries is expected to be reduced from 17 to 12.
The demonstrators noted that if there are too many ministries in Armenia, let them study and try to resolve this problem, but this has nothing to do with the main functions of the Ministry of Culture.
Employees of the Ministry of Diaspora noted that the dissolution of their ministry was a wrong decision, and that the respective view of the Armenian diaspora was not considered when making this decision.
Employees of the ministries, who were demonstrating outside their ministries’ building for an hour, marched to the government building to hand over a letter addressed to acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to a government representative.
"We ask that a response be given by Monday morning. We demand a meeting with the Prime Minister. If our request is not considered, we are ready to go on labor strike; we’ll do a sit-in, too," News,am cited the letter as saying.
The writer, journalist, Vesti FM radio station host Armen Gasparyan, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that liquidation of Mindiaspora has political reasons. "Not all representatives of the diaspora in the world supported the events, which took place in Armenia in April-June. Most likely, Pashinyan understands that there is a very serious political danger: much depends on the diaspora's views on events in the republic, and from this point he simply doesn’t need the Ministry of Diaspora. One can expect that there will be a structure subordinated to him personally or through the government apparatus, which will be engaged in building the necessary ties and disposing of possible negative statements. There is tough situation for Pashinyan: he was striving to power with the slogan of the political monopoly elimination, but eventually created his own monopoly, which caused unpleasant questions from the Diaspora," he explained.
The unification of the Ministry of Culture with the Ministry of Sport and the Ministry of Education and Science can be explained only by an attempt to save money. “I don’t see any advantages here, because these are three completely different spheres. In this case, Pashinyan turns out to be a hostage of the promises he made – that it is necessary to lower the number of bureaucrats. Obviously, it’s much easier to unite culture, sport and education, rather than the ministries of economy, defense and internal affairs, But still it’s difficult to understand what this will lead to. Pashinyan received absolute power, so let's see how his election statements will be implemented. Being an opposition is one thing, but leading the republic in a very difficult foreign policy situation is quite another," Armen Gasparyan stressed.