“Aravot” calls a “terrible gaffe” Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian’s remark that his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov probably knows more about efforts to resolve the Karabakh conflict than he does. Oskanian, the paper says, thereby “disclosed Russia’s real role in the Karabakh and perhaps other regional disputes.”
According to “Iravunk,” Russian support is critical for President Robert Kocharian’s and his entourage’s efforts to hold on to power. “But Moscow has to reckon with new geopolitical and Armenian and Russian realities.” The paper also notes that in his latest extensive interviews with “Yerkir” and “Hayots Ashkhar,” Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisian made statements that are “at least comparable to Levon Ter-Petrosian’s famous news conference held on September 26, 1997.” “Many of his approaches are basically not different from views expressed in Ter-Petrosian’s ‘War or Peace: Time to Become Serious’ article.”
“We are neighbors. You can’t change your neighbors,” Sarkisian says in the second part of his “Hayots Ashkhar” interview. He stresses that he has never said that the Armenians won the war with Azerbaijan. “In Armenia, the number of those who consider themselves winners is probably smaller than the number of those in Azerbaijan who consider themselves losers,” he says. Sarkisian also points out that the implementation of any Karabakh peace accord would be “very painful” for both the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides. That is why, he says, the deployment of international peace-keeping forces around Karabakh will be indispensable.
“Yerkir” makes a case for “public tolerance and unity” which it says is necessary for coping with challenges facing in Armenia. But, the paper says, that is hardly possible without “the establishment of justice in the country.”
This view is echoed by “Haykakan Zhamanak.” “If the state is unable to ensure a universally accepted scale of justice, it dooms itself to ruin,” writes the paper. “And the fact that there are fewer and fewer dictatorships left on earth is the most vivid evidence of that. For dictatorship is nothing but a substitution of justice with the will of a small group of people and sometimes a single person … The way to ensure real stability in the country is not to beat up those who gather in [Yerevan’s] Baghramian Avenue but to cause people to have no motives for converging on Baghramian Avenue.”
(Vache Sarkisian)
According to “Iravunk,” Russian support is critical for President Robert Kocharian’s and his entourage’s efforts to hold on to power. “But Moscow has to reckon with new geopolitical and Armenian and Russian realities.” The paper also notes that in his latest extensive interviews with “Yerkir” and “Hayots Ashkhar,” Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisian made statements that are “at least comparable to Levon Ter-Petrosian’s famous news conference held on September 26, 1997.” “Many of his approaches are basically not different from views expressed in Ter-Petrosian’s ‘War or Peace: Time to Become Serious’ article.”
“We are neighbors. You can’t change your neighbors,” Sarkisian says in the second part of his “Hayots Ashkhar” interview. He stresses that he has never said that the Armenians won the war with Azerbaijan. “In Armenia, the number of those who consider themselves winners is probably smaller than the number of those in Azerbaijan who consider themselves losers,” he says. Sarkisian also points out that the implementation of any Karabakh peace accord would be “very painful” for both the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides. That is why, he says, the deployment of international peace-keeping forces around Karabakh will be indispensable.
“Yerkir” makes a case for “public tolerance and unity” which it says is necessary for coping with challenges facing in Armenia. But, the paper says, that is hardly possible without “the establishment of justice in the country.”
This view is echoed by “Haykakan Zhamanak.” “If the state is unable to ensure a universally accepted scale of justice, it dooms itself to ruin,” writes the paper. “And the fact that there are fewer and fewer dictatorships left on earth is the most vivid evidence of that. For dictatorship is nothing but a substitution of justice with the will of a small group of people and sometimes a single person … The way to ensure real stability in the country is not to beat up those who gather in [Yerevan’s] Baghramian Avenue but to cause people to have no motives for converging on Baghramian Avenue.”
(Vache Sarkisian)