“Zhoghovurd” says President Serzh Sarkisian should react to Tuesday’s violent incident that marred a session of Yerevan’s municipal assembly. The paper says that Yerevan Mayor Taron Markarian, who is a senior member of Sarkisian’s Republican Party (HHK), is primarily responsible for the violence. It condemns Markarian for telling Yerevan council members affiliated with the HHK to stop two opposition colleagues from handing him containers filled with sewage.
“This incident has both legal and moral aspects,” writes “Haykakan Zhamanak.” “For example, did the [opposition] women have a right to bring sewage to the council session and disrupt the work of the council? From the moral standpoint, it’s certainly wrong to bring sewage samples to the municipality. But as soon as a dozen male HHK-affiliated members of the council and municipality staffers started cornering the woman, hit her and pulled her hair with great pleasure, and then grabbed and threw her out the fact of bringing a sewage container to the council became slightly insignificant, a minor detail not worthy of public attention.” The paper is sure that none of those men will be held accountable.
“Zhamanak” comments on the latest report by the U.S. director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, which warned, among other things, of a risk of “large-scale” fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh. “It is totally natural that the Armenian society is very sensitive to this kind of forecasts and alerts, especially when they come from a source like … U.S. intelligence,” writes the paper. “The thing is, however, that this forecast is not new or extraordinary. It was also contained in last year’s [U.S. intelligence] report … That is to say that U.S. intelligence simply noted the current situation and concluded that it is fraught with a risk of war.”
In an interview with “168 Zham,” a Russian defense analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer,comments on rumors that the United States has threatened to impose sanctions on Armenia if it continues to do business with Russian defense companies blacklisted by Washington. He claims that not only Armenia but also Azerbaijan, which buys large quantities of Russian weapons, could face “light sanctions.”
(Tigran Avetisian)
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