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Press Review


“Aravot” says President Robert Kocharian is right in believing that higher living standards would ease public discontent with his administration and cement his political position. “The president’s mistake lies somewhere else. Robert Kocharian is convinced that it is possible to improve the quality of life by maintaining hostile relations with neighbors, falsifying elections, controlling [TV] air, bullying the opposition and limiting real business competition,” the paper adds. “The problem is that these problems are not being seriously discussed here. The regime does not acknowledge that peace and democracy are not its priorities.”

“Haykakan Zhamanak” finds “sensational” Kocharian’s Tuesday remark that he is not familiar with the U.S State Department’s latest report on human rights abuses in Armenia. “The impression is that Kocharian has found himself in the position of [the late Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev. Leonid Ilyich was told only good news at the height of the Soviet stagnation era.”

“Haykakan Zhamanak” reports that a meeting of pro-establishment intellectuals demanded on Tuesday that the Armenian parliament annul the October 1921 agreement between Turkey and Bolshevik Russia that divided the short-lived first independent republic of Armenia. “The pro-government intelligentsia, mindful of the fact that a policy of openly standing by Robert Kocharian is meaningless and dangerous for their moral authority, has decided to do that by means of nationalist calls and war mongering.”

But “Hayots Ashkhar” defends their actions and attacks a rival group of intellectuals who support regime change in Armenia. The paper quotes one of their leaders, Rafael Ghazarian, as complaining that the Armenian “intellectual elite” has always backed ruling regimes. Ghazarian says that is why his pro-opposition group, called Intellectual Forum, is targeting “the middle class of the intelligentsia.”

“Hayots Ashkhar” admits in a separate commentary that the existence of a “real opposition” is extremely useful for the authorities. “It is extremely necessary for those who wield power to feel the oppositionists’ stings from time to time,” it explains. “Otherwise, they immediately become infected with a special political virus, start to live in a world of illusions, lose the ability to react quickly and their capabilities gradually erode. In this sense our government is in jeopardy because it has no opposition at the moment.”

“Aravot” warns that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who is trying to rein in the autocratic ruler of Ajaria, risks repeating mistakes made by the United States in Iraq. “Saakashvili wants to save the Ajars from a feudal Abashidze,” the paper says. “But such crusades are fraught with the spread and increase of international and local terrorism.”

(Vache Sarkisian)
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