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Press Review


“Hayots Ashkhar” says Azerbaijan is increasing military spending and refusing to withdraw snipers from the frontline in an effort to step up pressure on Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh and clinch more concessions from them and the mediators. “The latter now have to make a choice not between the good and the better but between the bad and the worse. And in order to avoid the worst -- namely, war -- they have adopted a joint strategy of maintaining peace after the OSCE summit in Astana,” writes the paper. “Faced with such an insurmountable hurdle, Azerbaijan is forced to continue for the moment negotiations which it threatened to stop in case of the failure of the Astana summit.”

“The danger of the resumption of hostilities hangs over the two nations as a Damocles swords,” Rauf Rajabov, an Azerbaijani political analyst, tells “Zhamanak.” “There will be no such danger only when the two armies return to their barracks, the seven districts belonging to Azerbaijan … are given back, and Karabakh’s population decides its future by means of a referendum.”

“Hetq” says the passive stance of the Armenian opposition allows the main pro-government forces to redraw the domestic political landscape more than one year before the next parliamentary elections. “At present, the political agenda is set by relations between the Republican and Prosperous Armenia parties, and that has effectively left all other players, including the radical HAK and the two parliamentary opposition parties, on the sidelines.” The paper says the ruling HHK and the BHK regard the three opposition groups as “reserve forces” which they could use against one another. “The HHK sees no danger from the camp because it sees there no potential rival of its leader’s caliber,” it says. “Even spontaneous social protests that have started lately are not taken seriously by the ruling party.” In effect, Gagik Tsarukian’s BHK is the HHK’s only serious rival, concludes “Hetq.”

“Yerkir” reports that Armenia’s National Competitiveness Foundation did not deny on Wednesday that its Armenian-American director, Pegor Papazian, earns a 6.2 million drams ($17,000), a month. “Yesterday, we received a phone call from a foundation employee,” says the paper. “He did not deny that. He just very much wanted to know where we got that information from. Who told us that? Someone from within [the state-funded organization] and another source? He wanted a name. We are not against people getting high wages. Quite the opposite. But not so disproportionately high.”

(Tigran Avetisian)
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