Interfax – Kazakhstan General Newswire
November 9, 2018 Friday 3:45 PM MSK
Pashinyan’s political opponents accuse him of weakening Armenia’s positions at CSTO
YEREVAN. Nov 9
It is a failure that an Armenian representative was not appointed to the post of secretary general of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), said Eduard Sharmazanov, the deputy speaker of the Armenian parliament and the press secretary for ex-president Serzh Sargsyan’s Republican Party.
“November 8 has passed, and Armenia does not have a secretary general in the CSTO. One thing is clear: Armenia has been consistently giving up its security positions under the rule of Nikol Pashinyan. Moreover, it has already been announced that Belarus will take over this position. This is yet another obvious failure of Pashinyan’s government,” Sharmazanov said on Friday.
Pashinyan will proceed to a new stage in the fight against corruption to conceal his failure, he said.
“Mr. Prime Minister, one needs to fight corruption and lawlessness, but not at the expense of the security of Armenia and Artsakh [the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic]. And yes, what’s more, [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev has again started talking about the return of some territories, about how Armenia should make concessions, how Artsakh belongs to Azerbaijan. I was waiting for a response from you but got silence instead of strong words,” Sharmazanov said.
The strengthening of security and a resolution of the Karabakh issue favorable for the Armenian side remain the challenges Armenia needs to tackle, he said.
On Thursday, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said at the CSTO summit that under the organization’s charter, the next secretary general should be elected from Belarus.
The position became vacant when Armenia recalled his representative Yury Khachaturov, who held the post for a year and a half out of the three envisaged in the charter. Russian representative Valery Semerikov, Khachaturov’s deputy, was appointed acting secretary general.
In July, a first-instance court in Yerevan ruled to arrest Khachaturov on charges of overthrowing the country’s constitutional order in 2008 and subsequently agreed to release him on bail.
On Thursday, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said that no decision regarding the position had been made at the CSTO summit in Astana and that Semerikov would retain this post.
“They will decide a little later,” Patrushev told journalists on Thursday.
Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists, “A significant amount of time was devoted to the issue of selecting a candidate for CSTO secretary general. The heads of state and government agreed to make the relevant final decision in St. Petersburg on December 6.”
The CSTO member states are Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.