WE DON’T NEED GOOD KINGS AND BENEFACTOR OLIGARCHS
Siranuysh Papyan
11:37 20/12/2012
Story from Lragir.am News:
Interview with Armen Hovhannisyan, blogger
Armen, you said soon the process of dividing money and power from
the system will start. Explain you point please.
There will be such a desire for a simple reason. When you are in
government and you have money, you do not need it but you will not be
there after 2018, and it is not clear what you will be so you need to
separate the money and power in order to ensure your security. This
strategy was developed in 2007 by the government which continues to
gain wealth.
Recently unpleasant and primitive political developments have taken
place. I have never supported Tsarukyan or his camp but a lot of
people believed him, and the oligarchy again indicated that it will
sacrifice people who believe in it. I think they will be able to
keep their property by surrendering or ceding but this is absolutely
groundless. They will not keep anything, deprivation of property will
proceed very fast. I hope those people who believe in the good king
or benefactor oligarchs will understand that this game is absolutely
hopeless.
Is there a division between the government and the oligarchy?
The oligarchy is the government, they are the oligarchs. A group says
they will humiliate people more easily with the help of modern tools
while the other group thinks that there must be a dozen of families
which will take an area or a sphere each and will make sure that
people are brought to their knee in that particular area. These are
matters of technique which should not interest a citizen. We have
opposite interests and there may be far-sighted people who will
understand that it is pointless to fight for millions and will make
a compromise with the society but I have not met such people yet.
How should hopelessness be overcome? Elections will not change
anything. What role will a citizen have? We are discussing an
alternative but it is not there yet.
Unfortunately, an alternative is influenced by tools used by
the government. The tools are modern ones, based on intellect and
technology. This intellectual and technological basis is used against
the alternative. An alternative cannot develop in a vacuum, and it
may lose some battles and win others. Most importantly, there must
be people who will resist at the beginning. There must be people who
say let’s make the government live in accordance with the laws they
adopt but people will be ready to force them to live in accordance
with our laws. This is another level of radicalism. We constantly
refer to their Constitution, their laws which they violate every
morning when they get up. Sometimes we succeed. But principled people
must say they are tired of this situation and they will create a new
order, new laws and you will obey these laws. People can see that the
so-called reformist forces lose at best because losing is not a shame,
but they often retreat. They will follow another type of forces.
We can see that some texts are written, the problems we raise are
defined but there is no social consolidation.
Among the the purest and most open people pessimism is fashionable,
they say people will not change. If this is so, then let’s go and
lie down in the cemetery and wait until death comes, the end of the
Armenian world and state comes. I believe that even such infertile,
humiliated, small people as us can stand up and change the situation
for their benefit of their next generation. I do not believe that
there is an Armenian who drinks water from the puddle does not wish
their children to drink water from a clear spring. The instinct and
natural wish that lives in anyone must be woken up, and we will need
only such leaders who will indicate that they are not one of those
“negotiators” and the mutual agreement is not self-serving.
However, in the result of social pressure the Compatriots program
has been discontinued.
In fact, they encouraged it, they thought they exported people and
one or two people from each family would leave to work abroad and
send remittances to their family. Then the government would get
a significant part of this money through different economic and
financial levers, such as the exchange rate. However, they saw that
more people leave while remittances don’t grow. In fact, we were
had by Russia. Unfortunately, thousands of people have left Armenia
forever. This is a business for them, they sell people, now they see
remittances have not grown and said “they’d better die here”.
Serzh Sargsyan again read out a text of modernization that the civil
society creates a peculiar mechanism of balance. Does the civil
society feel it has such a role?
This might be importance for pressure on competitive oligarchs, for
misleading the West, for distracting the society from the idea of
establishment of a nation state. This does not mean that the civil
society is such. A knife is something to a cook and another thing to
a bandit.