“Zhoghovurd” criticizes Armenia’s Office of the Prosecutor-General for considering opening a criminal case in connection with media allegations targeting Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian’s wife, Ruzanna Khachatrian. Ohanian requested such a move in a recent letter to the law-enforcement agency. “We want to believe that the reason for [Prosecutor-General] Gevorg Kostanian’s diligence is not the fact that the applicant is the defense minister and the defendant a media organization but the prosecutor-general’s integrity,” comments the paper. It notes that Kostanian’s office did not display such diligence in response to recent violence and threats of violence by some government loyalists.
“Chorrord Ishkhanutyun” comments on Deputy Prime Minister Vache Gabrielian’s Wednesday remark that the magnitude of poverty and other socioeconomic problems facing Armenia is often exaggerated by the Armenian government’s critics. “Strangely enough, in a sense Vache Gabrielian has a point,” writes the paper. “Armenia is in a better state than it should have been.”
The pro-opposition paperargues that Armenia is a resource-poor and landlocked country which is blockaded by two of its neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, is in a state of war with one of them, Azerbaijan, has an economy mostly controlled by foreign firms or “a handful of local clans, and has long been suffering from very high unemployment. “Just list these facts and any foreign expert would say that such a country should be pretty much as troubled as Somalia,” concludes “Chorrord Ishkhanutyun.”
“Haykakan Zhamanak” quotes Armen Rustamian, a leader of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) and a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), as expressing serious concern at “anti-Armenian” decisions made by PACE bodies. Rustamian says that Azerbaijan will use them to try to influence the course and outcome of the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process.
“Hayots Ashkhar” deplores bitter recriminations that were traded by parliament deputies from Dashnaktsutyun and other opposition parties during this week’s debates in the National Assembly on controversial amendments to an Armenian law on referendums. The paper complains that the debates did not center on the essence of those proposals.
(Hovannes Shoghikian)