Month: June 2005

Competition, not confrontation
Yerkir/Arm
June 17, 2005

At a news conference in the National Press Club on June 16 Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Bureau representative Hrant Margarian
shared his opinions on the current stage of the Karabakh conflict
settlement, ARF’s participation in the parliamentary election in
Karabakh as well as Armenia’s domestic and foreign policy.
What is Armenia’s position in the negotiation process? Are Armenia’s
policies regarding the Karabakh settlement process weak? Commenting on
these questions, Hrant Margarian noted that Karabakh remains on the
top of Armenia’s policy agenda. `I believe that Karabakh should have
much better conditions to develop and flourish.
I believe that our people should be much closer to the government and
this is why the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Party will be
actively participating in the coming elections in Karabakh,’ Margarian
said at the same time expressing his concern with the corrupt
practices that can be witnessed today in Karabakh such as misuse of
administrative resources and voter bribing in some case. Margarian has
visited Karabakh and met with the president of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic Arkady Ghukasian. He has voiced his concerns regarding the
above-mentioned issues.
`I hope these phenomena can be eliminated.’ Arkady Ghukasian has
assured Margarian that the elections will be held without
violations. `Either he will prevent the violations and prove that he
can keep his promise or he will fail to prevent them and will prove
the contrary.’ Commenting on the question why ARF is in the opposition
camp in Karabakh, Margarian noted that the government had moved ARF to
the opposition camp.
`We never see Karabakh as a place where we can struggle for
power. However, we were dissatisfied with certain issues connected
with socio-economic governance. We had a different position on those
issues.
Several months ago we tried to solve some of those problems while
being in the government. After we were forced into the opposition camp
we are now trying to do the same as an opposition force. But even now
we know our limits and we will never go beyond them. Stability is very
important in Karabakh and our opposition to the current government
should not lead us to a confrontation. Today we are in a situation of
competition rather than confrontation as an end in itself’.
Commenting on the current stage of the Karabakh conflict negotiations
process Hrant Margarian said that it is wrong to create a defeatist
environment in Armenia.
Margarian Margarian said his impression is that on the one hand the
international forces pressure Azerbaijan to accept that Karabakh (and
probably Lachin, too) should be joined to Armenia, and on the other
hand they pressure Armenia to accept that the liberated territories
should be returned to Azerbaijan.
“I don’t believe there is an Armenian who wants the liberated
territories to be reutnred,” Margarian mentioned. “But I admit that
the issue can be touched upon during the talks process for tactical
reasons, but when Azerbaijan refuses at all to consider the issue of
ceding Karabakh to Armenia de jure — on the contrary, militant
rhetoric prevails in Azerbaijan — then I don’t understand why are we
creating a seemingly defeatist mood among our people?
This is unwise, to say the least. Our people have paid a big price for
the liberation of Karabakh and will not let anyone surrender
territories.” He added that concessions should not include such issues
as Karabakh’s sovereignty, national identity and today’s factual
borders.
Margarian believes one should speak publicly about things around which
no compromise can be accepted while issues around which compromise can
be achieved should be discussed at a negotiation table. He says the
borders of any country are defined based on certain considerations.
The borders of the administrative unit that was called
Nagorno-Karabakh and was part of the Soviet Azerbaijan should not be
considered as a starting point while defining the borders of
Karabakh. Historic realities and security issues should be considered
as the basis for defining the borders of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic. This is what matters when defining the borders of any state.
`Karabakh was a bit late in this respect since it has not yet declared
control over the liberated territories. In this respect our activities
in Karabakh become political struggle’, Margarian noted. What will
ARF’s position be if Azerbaijan agrees to give up Karabakh including
Lachin?
Margarian will be glad for that since such an act will constitute 50%
of Armenia’s victory after which he will be waiting for the other 50%
– the liberated territories joining Armenia as well. `Those
territories were the guarantor of peace in the past years,’ Margarian
said noting that any agreement reached through negotiations should be
approved by the people.
Margarian commented on the issue of eliminating the ban on dual
citizenship from the Armenian Constitution. `The opinion that after
adoption of dual citizenship an uncontrolled situation will be created
is wrong. The law on dual citizenship will allow the Armenian
government to grant citizenship at the same time defining the new
citizens’ rights and obligations.
This is what they do in all the countries. The issue of dual
citizenship should be considered in this context. It is wrong to think
that millions of people will come to Armenia and others will be
deciding the country’s future. The opinion that thousands of Diaspora
Armenians will come to Armenia is exaggerated as well. I wish it could
be so. That would be a great potential and strength for Armenia’.
The relations between Armenia and Turkey and the process of Genocide
recognition. Margarian first expressed his doubt whether there are any
relations to speak about. `Any such relations were suspended on the
day when Turkey closed the border and put forward preconditions for
relations with Armenia.
Those preconditions are unacceptable. If we overlook them and speak
about relations with Turkey we put ourselves into a humiliated
position. Turkey is the one who closed the border and put forward
preconditions and says that it will open the border only if its
preconditions are satisfied,’ Margarian said noting that some people
tend to forget about this as if Armenia is the one who has closed the
border with Turkey.
`I can’t understand this. Relations with Turkey were severed because
of this country’s hostile policies towards Armenia. Of course, we need
relations with Turkey but such relations should be based on the
dignity of the two nations. Recognition of the Genocide is what the
Turkish nation needs itself so that it can free itself of the complex
of a genocide perpetrator,’ Margarian said.
How realistic are the rumors regarding the possibility of organizing a
revolution in Armenia? What is ARF’s position in this respect ` is it
pro-Russian or pro-Western?
These questions become urgent against the background of the statements
made by various opposition leaders regarding their political
orientation. `I would prefer all of our political forces, whether
pro-governmental or opposition, to derive from the interests of our
nation, to have an Armenian orientation. We are pro-Armenian and I
think the reason why some of our political forces turn to external
forces is their weakness,’ Margarian said adding jokingly that some of
our political leaders have started learning English.
Margarian advised the organizers of revolutions not to assume that a
revolution is like a theater performance that starts and ends at a
certain time. `If there is a revolution one cannot go on a vacation,
neither can one have any other interests. A revolutionary person is A
fighter. This is not what we have now when the opposition leaders go
to Spain for their vacation after the opposition demonstrations fail
to have a rest before coming back and starting a new revolution.
Revolutionaries have a hard life, they often have to work
underground. They are taken to prisons; they work with the people and
not go to vacations abroad. And if we see revolution as an attempt to
improve our lives ` well, then this is exactly what ARF is doing,’
Margarian said. Commenting on the activities of the political
coalition and the responsibilities of the member parties, Margarian
said all of the parties are responsible. He believes the coalition is
functioning only formally.
This is why ARF is doing its best to restore the Coalition Council
meetings. `If we are responsible for something we have to be truly
responsible. No one should try to cheat the others. We have to face
the reality. We are doing our best and I think we have succeeded in
achieving our goal. I hope we will be able to come to a situation when
we will be able to be truly responsible for the work of the
Coalition. I think this was a temporary difficulty and we will be able
to overcome it in the near future,’ Margarian said.
Commenting on the struggle against corruption, Margarian noted that
publicizing names will not change anything. The coming presidential
elections were also discussed at the meeting in the Press Club ` will
ARF support Robert Kocharian if he is nominated for the third time?
`ARF will have its own candidate in the coming presidential
elections. There is no point in speaking about a third term for
president Kocharian since he himself has excluded this possibility,’
Margarian concluded.
By Karine Mangassarian
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Famous librarian makes a donation to the national library
Yerkir/Arm
June 17, 2005

By Armine Ghazarian
`This country does not need commiseration. Rather, it needs action,
diligent work and unification’ President of the American Carnegie
Foundation, ex-director of New York Public Library and famous sponsor
of various library support programs Vardan Grigorian said during his
visit to the National Library in 2002.
And he backed his works with actions. Grigorian has started a
cooperation project with the National Library donating 10,000 dollars
to Armenia’s number 1 library. With this unique donation a copy center
was opened in the National Library which is now called Vernatun.
Today the Vernatun Center hosts various events, exhibitions, book
presentations and meetings with writers and intellectuals. The
presentation of the American Armenian historian Vardan Grigorian’s
book titled `On the Way Home: My Life and Time’ was also held at
Vernatun Center.
`This book is the Odyssey of a great individual and a great
patriot. It is full of descriptions of many historical events. We are
planning to translate it into Armenian,’ director of the National
Library David Sargsian said at the presentation ceremony. The
historian’s colleagues and friends spoke about his work and life.
Grigorian was born in Tebriz. He studied in Iran and Lebanon. In
1956-58 he studied at the department of history and social sciences at
Stanford University. In 1964 he received his PhD from Stanford
University. He has lectured in several universities, including
University of Pennsylvania where he was teaching history of South
Asia. Later he became rector of the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1981-89 Grigorian was the director of the world’s third largest
library, New York Public Library. Then he was the rector of Brown
University for 7 years.
Since 1997 he is the XII president of the Carnegie Foundation. In 1998
Grigorian was awarded a national medal for social sciences
research. In 2004 president George Bush awarded Grigorian with the
highest civil award ` Liberty Presidential Medal. Grigorian is the
author of `The Birth of Modern Afghanistan: Reform Policies and
Modernization’, `Islam: a Non-Monolith Mosaic’ and other books.
Having worked in the library system for many years Grigorian perfectly
understands the indispensable function of books and sees his mission
as serving the books and libraries. `We as librarians have a great
mission to spread the word and not to allow anyone to control, oppress
or manage human will and democratic institutions,’ Grigorian says.
Grigorian addressed the Armenian businessmen on the occasion of his
donation to the National Library, `Let’s not be `honorable beggars’ as
Abisoghom Agha taking pictures with the donations we are making and
announcing everywhere that we have donated one dollar to our
country. Let’s be reasonable, let’s unite and concentrate our
efforts¦’

Sailing through turbulence
TDN
Monday, June 20, 2005
OPINIONS
Opinion by DoÄŸu ERGÄ°L
DoÄŸu ERGÄ°L
There was lot of talk about Turkey’s slackening of preparations for
the start of EU membership talks. There were times when the political
actors seemed to turn to internal politics under the spell of a common
disillusionment with European demands that were found to be unfair and
unwarranted. Hardships to be experienced during the accession
negotiations, a difficulty in adapting to the degree of recognition
and the disheartening resistance of many European peoples and elites
to Turkey’s membership all added up to the making of this sour feeling
and attitude. The passive but continuous resistance of Turkish
nationalists and state worshippers acting out of fear of losing their
privileges and relative unaccountability in a system that is neither
responsive to popular demands nor fully transparent must also be
mentioned.
All of a sudden the dominant actors on the Turkish political scene,
such as the civilian bureaucracy and the military together with a
section of the mainstream media, which has backed up the government’s
European vocation in the recent past, have began to escalate their
criticism of the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP)
government. The president of the republic lent weight and clout to
this bunch with his latest demarches.
President Sezer recently issued a public declaration in which he
announced the number of government proposals to assign officials to
various official posts in the bureaucracy and with reasons he blocked
them when they were submitted for his approval. Mr. Sezer has turned
down 251 formal government appeals. This is a substantial number,
indicating a major schism between the AKP government, or the main
political actor, and the presidency, which represents the state, the
body of the unelected, the power of which is no less than the
popularly elected branch of government. This is a form of castration,
or trimming down, of the powers of the government, and here is the
president’s justification: 58 of the officials proposed for
bureaucratic posts did not have the necessary experience. Thirteen of
them had legal obstructions. Seventeen did not possess the legal
qualifications to hold the proposed position. What about the remaining
163 who were vetoed by the president? There is no mention of their
presidential rejection. The obvious reason, then, is ideological
resistance to the spawning of the AKP government, which is still
suspected by the `state’ of a `hidden agenda’ to undermine the present
structure of the secular nation-state. You may read this as a
top-heavy bureaucratic system where the state has primacy over the
nation and the bureaucracy controls social change, the judicial
process, security issues and internal and international affairs to a
great extent.
Such friction between the state and government is indicative of a
serious gap between the political process shaped by rule of law and a
bureaucratic centralism that borders on arbitrariness guided by
ideology (a blend of nationalism, centralism and statism). That
ideological framework emanates from the supremacy of the state and its
privileged position in shaping the nation (considered as an
undifferentiated, solidaristic, monolithic body) and its
deeds. Politics that emanate from popular demands and popular
preferences are secondary to this kind of statecraft and the political
cultural it is based on. This relationship, or reality, becomes more
obvious as the government, the elected part of the executive, loses
its grip in and over the system.
Viewing it from this perspective, the eruption of a barrage of
criticism and pseudo internal frictions based on the headscarf issue,
government initiatives to assign personnel to official posts, Abdullah
Ocalan’s retrial as recommended by the European Court of Human Rights
and a forced debate by some European circles on Turkey as to what
happened to the Armenians at the time of the demise of the Ottoman
Empire (early 20th century) must have been no coincidence. If it is no
coincidence, what is the rationale behind such a tactical move?
One strong or determining reason must be the upcoming presidential
elections in 2007. With its two-thirds domination in the parliamentary
arithmetic, the AKP will be able to select a president from among its
ranks. (Presidents are elected within Parliament in the Turkish
political system. Initially, candidates for parliamentary seats were
hand picked by the ruling party to guarantee a monolithic political
process that was disrupted after the inception of multi-party politics
in 1950). The obvious candidate for the next Turkish president is
Mr. R.T. Erdogan, the incumbent prime minister. His religious
background, which surfaced during his insistence on penalizing
extramarital relationships at a very critical juncture of EU-Turkish
relations that could have been as make or break for the process of
granting Turkey a starting date for accession talks, his unpredictable
initiatives in international relations, his cocky mannerisms in
internal politics and his parochialism, reflected in the attire of his
family’s women, fall short of the republican elite’s worldly and
predictable leadership style, which does not lose elbow contact with
the state, are sufficient reasons to keep him away from the seat of
Ataturk, who still sets the standards of statesmanship in Turkey. The
STATE does not want Mr. ErdoÄŸan or another AKP member to be the
next president of Turkey.
The abundance of controversy on this issue these days emanates from
this fact, and it is very likely that there will be no end to it any
time in the near future.
What will happen then? Mr. Erdogan’s realization that he is losing the
support of the United States, without which he cannot keep the economy
in shape and be effective on either the European front or in the
Middle East, forced his hand to repair damaged relations with the
United States. He saw this as necessary because he has increasingly
realized that the way to Europe is long and arduous. At the same time
he has realized that slackening relations with Europe were detrimental
to the only sound political platform that his party/government shared
with other, mostly adverse, groups in the country. That is why the
delayed appointment of the chief negotiator with the EU has lately
been realized in a jiffy. Now he is faced with the challenge of early
elections, which the adversaries of an AKP government will push him
into. These adversaries are aware that the next AKP group in
Parliament will be smaller than of today, although the party will
emerge victorious from the elections in the absence of any other
viable alternative. A smaller AKP parliamentary group will run into
difficulties in naming the next Turkish president, especially if it
faces problems of legitimacy and representation. (Even today the AKP
dominance in Parliament is based on one-third of the electorate’s
support due to the vagaries of an electoral system that favors the
winner.)
There are rough times ahead in Turkish politics, not all of which will
be that rational or savory. Let us wait and see.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Azerbaijan’s breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh enclave holds parliamentary
elections
Monday, June 20, 2005
FOREIGN
ANKARA – TDN with wire dispatches
The Armenian-controlled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh held parliamentary
elections on Sunday, with the main pro-government party and an
opposition group expected to win the majority of seats.
Candidates and parties are contesting all 33 seats in the legislature
of the region, which has been in the hands of ethnic Armenians since a
six-year war against Azerbaijani forces ended with a 1994
cease-fire. The war killed some 30,000 people and drove a million from
their homes.
No political settlement has been reached despite international efforts
to nudge the governments of Armenia and Azerbaijan toward a resolution
and the threat of a new armed conflict between the former Soviet
republics in the Caucasus Mountains persists.
Observers believe the Democratic Party of Artsakh, which supports the
government of President Arkady Gukasian, and the
Dashnaktsutyun-Movement 88 bloc have the best chances of gaining seats
in the in the election. Artsakh is the Armenian name for
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Pro-presidential forces currently hold about half the parliamentary
seats and have usually been able to push their initiatives through
with support from independent lawmakers. Dashnaktsutyun holds about a
dozen seats in the current Parliament.
The opposition bloc says Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership is not tough
enough in asserting its self-proclaimed independence and claims it is
too willing to consider ceding Azerbaijani territory it controls
outside the borders of the enclave.
Dashnaktsutyun says the leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh must not
consider ceding control of any territory unless Azerbaijan recognizes
the enclave’s independence, something Azerbaijan has said it will not
do.
Of the 33 seats in Parliament, 22 are to go to the winners of races in
individual electoral districts. The other 11 are to be filled through
voting by party, with parties allocating seats in proportion to the
number of votes they receive.
Turkey denounces polls in Nagorno-Karabakh:
Turkey said Friday that upcoming parliamentary polls in
Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway enclave claimed both by its close ally
Azerbaijan and its arch-foe Armenia, were illegitimate and contrary to
international peace efforts in the region.
“Turkey believes that such unilateral initiatives … will not help
efforts for a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem and
considers these elections to be illegitimate,” Foreign Ministry
spokesman Namık Tan said in a statement.
Armenia is the only country to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as an
independent state.
Turkey is one of Azerbaijan’s staunchest allies, with which it also
has close ethnic bonds. It has refused to establish formal diplomatic
ties with Armenia out of solidarity with Azerbaijan in the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict but also because of Armenia’s campaign to
have the World War I-era killings of Armenians under Ottoman Empire
rule internationally recognized as genocide.

Physics Web, UK
June 20 2005
Strange turn for protons
20 June 2005
Nuclear physicists have found further evidence that strange quarks
can contribute to the structure of the proton. The latest data from
the G-Zero experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator
Facility (JLAB) in the US lend further support to recent results from
the HAPPEx experiment, also at JLAB, and other experiments in the US
and Germany. The results could shed more light on the strong
interaction that holds quarks together in protons, neutrons and other
particles (Phys. Rev. Lett. to be published).
Quarks come in six different flavours — up, down, strange, charm,
bottom and top. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark
that are held together by gluons, but occasionally these gluons can
fluctuate into quark-antiquark pairs. Although these virtual quarks
only exist for very short times, they can affect the properties of
the proton, such as its magnetic moment. Since the strange quark is
the next-lightest quark after the up and down quarks, it is the most
likely to have a measurable effect.
One way to observe the influence of strange quarks on the proton is
to compare measurements that probe the weak interaction with those
that probe the electromagnetic force. In the G-Zero experiment, a
high-energy beam of electrons was fired at a hydrogen target. The
beam was polarised so that the spins of the electrons either pointed
in the same direction as the beam or in the opposite direction. The
team then measured the rate at which these electrons scattered off
protons in the target.
The difference for the two beam polarizations was about 10 parts per
million. This asymmetry occurs because the electromagnetic force
conserves “parity” (that is, it does not change when all three
directions in space are reversed), while the weak force does not.
According to the G-zero team — which includes physicists from
Armenia, Canada, France and the US — this difference implies that
strange quarks must be contributing to magnetic moment and charge
distribution of the proton. The results agree with those recently
reported by the HAPPEx experiment, the SAMPLE experiment at the
MIT-Bates Lab in the US and the A4 experiment at Mainz in Germany.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Karabakh leader doubts OSCE mediators have settlement plan
Mediamax news agency
20 Jun 05
YEREVAN
The president of the Nagornyy Karabakh Republic [NKR], Arkadiy
Gukasyan, doubts that during their next visit to the region the OSCE
Minsk Group co-chairmen will put forward “the complete scheme of the
final settlement of the conflict”, the NKR president told journalists
at a polling station on 19 June.
“We may guess what the mediators will come up with, but it will hardly
be the complete scheme of the final settlement of the conflict,”
Arkadiy Gukasyan said.
Commenting on Baku’s proposal on the need to establish dialogue
between the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of Nagornyy Karabakh,
Arkadiy Gukasyan said: “It would not be bad if the Azerbaijani
community establishes dialogue with the Greek, Russian, Ukrainian and
other communities of Nagornyy Karabakh in the first place.”
The NKR president said that Baku’s continuos attempts to present
Nagornyy Karabakh as not a conflicting side but a mere community are
the evidence of Azerbaijan’s frivolous approach to the conflict
settlement. Arkadiy Gukasyan believes that “Baku’s unwillingness to
conduct direct dialogue with Stepanakert hampers the settlement, which
worries the Azerbaijani people”.

Pro-government party wins majority in Karabakh parliament –
preliminary results
Mediamax news agency
20 Jun 05
YEREVAN
The Central Electoral Commission (CEC) of the Nagornyy Karabakh
Republic [NKR] has summed up preliminary results of the parliamentary
elections under the proportional representation system.
MPs elected from party lists will gain a third of the 33 seats in the
NKR National Assembly. The remaining 22 mandates will go to those
elected under the first-past-the-post system.
According to the preliminary results of the NKR CEC, the
pro-government Democratic Party of Artsakh will get five seats in the
new parliament (22,393 votes), the bloc of Dashnaktsutyun and
Movement-88 (14,534 votes) and the Free Motherland Movement (15,931
votes) will get three seats each.
The list of the bloc of Dashnaktsutyun and Movement-88 is led by
former Deputy Defence Minister Gen Vitaliy Balasanyan, Mayor of
Stepanakert Eduard Agabekyan and former NKR Minister of
Education and Culture Armen Sarkisyan.
According to the preliminary data, 73.6 per cent of voters took part
in the 19 June parliamentary elections in the NKR.

Azeri minister sees Karabakh talks in Paris as “complicated”
Azadliq, Baku
20 Jun 05
Excerpt from unattributed report by Azerbaijani newspaper Azadliq on
20 June headlined “Mammadyarov-Oskanyan talks have been complicated”
The Paris talks [on 17 June] between the Azerbaijani and Armenian
foreign ministers on the settlement of the Nagornyy Karabakh conflict
were complicated, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov told
the head of the Foreign Ministry’s information department, Tahir
Tagizada, over the phone after the talks.
[Passage omitted: reported details]
Mammadyarov said that the talks were continuing and he would meet the
[OSCE Minsk Group] co-chairmen again.
The minister went on to say that their meeting had focused on seven or
nine elements which involved the liberation of occupied territories,
the return of refugees to their lands, the future status of Nagornyy
Karabakh, the deployment of peacekeeping forces [in Karabakh] and
others.

Turkish Press
June 20 2005
Press Review
MILLIYET
GUL: `GERMANY IS LOOKING FOR A PARTNER IN GUILT’
Speaking to journalists from Turkish daily Zaman, Foreign Minister
Abdullah Gul yesterday criticized the German Parliament’s adoption of
a resolution denouncing a so-called massacre of Armenians during the
Ottoman era. Stating that the German Parliament had taken an
unacceptable decision, Gul said, `The decision is full of mistakes.
It talks about the UN’s determination concerning this issue. However,
international institutions have no determination about it. We want
them to produce evidence, but they can’t. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s letter to Armenian President Robert Kocharian is passed
over in just a few lines, but the speech made by Justice Minister
Cemil Cicek at the Parliament and the postponed conference on the
Armenian issue are there. The most important issue is to ensure the
integration of 3 million Turks [living in Germany]. This decision
opens the door to provoking enmity towards Turkey. The current German
government is opposed to it, in particular German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder.’ He added that the decision was motivated by guilt about
the Nazi Holocaust and that Germans were looking to share this guilt.
/Milliyet/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

Opposition bloc in Karabakh sees polls as undemocratic
Arminfo, Yerevan
20 Jun 05
STEPANAKERT
The Dashnaktsutyun and Movement-88 bloc does not think that the
parliamentary elections held in Nagornyy Karabakh [on 19 June] were
free and transparent, the representatives of the bloc, Gegam
Bagdasaryan (Movement-88) and Armen Sarkisyan (the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun), told a news conference
today.
Bagdasaryan and Sarkisyan said the elections were not free and
transparent, an Arminfo special correspondent reports. The point is
that the incumbent authorities used all administrative resources
available to them both before and during the election campaign.
Bagdasaryan and Sarkisyan said they had sent letters to the Nagornyy
Karabakh president, Arkadiy Gukasyan, and the prime minister,
Anushavan Daniyelyan, but the letters remained unanswered.
Members of the bloc said that despite having won the third place under
the proportional representation system, the bloc failed to gain the
upper hand in any of the polling stations under the
first-past-the-post system, which is rather suspicious.
“We regret that the breakthrough observed in the 2004 local government
elections was not continued,” members of the bloc said, adding that
the time had come to analyse mistakes.
They also said they would remain faithful to their principles in the
interests of stability in the republic.
Asked by Arminfo about the position on the elections of the Armenian
wing of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun, Armen
Sarkisyan said the Karabakh branch of the party was a decentralized
body. However, he added that its position would not contradict that of
the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun.
“We wanted a fair struggle and did not intend to use party resources,”
Sarkisyan said, adding that the bloc would issue a statement
reflecting all the irregularities registered in the elections.
According to preliminary results of the elections, the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun won only three parliamentary
seats, and all of them under the proportional representation system.