Citing its 2015 budgetary report submitted to the parliament, “Zhamanak” reports that the Armenian government spent last year a “hefty sum” on more than two dozen visits abroad carried out by President Serzh Sarkisian. The paper sees very few tangible results for Armenia achieved by Sarkisian. “What are the results of Serzh Sarkisian’s foreign trips? A difficult economic situation and hostilities [in Nagorno-Karabakh] testified to their being fruitless,” it claims.
Haykak Arshamian, a civic activist, tells “Aravot” that the “four-day war” in Karabakh resulted in a “very interesting transformation” in Armenia. “I am convinced that most of the society and the authorities did not think that the war would generate such a public mobilization,” he says. “That mobilization was quite wide-ranging … The public also formulated a number of demands and addressed them to the authorities. The public also realized that there are two parallel realities existing in the country: the society lives on its own and the authorities live on their own. This gap was very visible during the war. That made the society quickly organize itself.”
“Zhoghovurd” reports that the governor of Armenia’s southern Armavir province, Ashot Ghahramanian, on Tuesday declined to comment on the problem of government corruption in the country and ways of tackling it. Ghahramanian told the paper to submit its question in writing. The paper mocks the former police officer.
(Tigran Avetisian)