In the “Pressing” program Satik Seyranyan the guest Karen Vrtanesyan is a public figure.

The main theses of the interview are below.

• The term “bastion of democracy” in 2019 said Ararat Mirzoyan. In that same speech, he said: we are waging a war. Who were they driving against… Definitely not Azerbaijan. Nikol Pashinyan has been waging a political war inside the country ever since he came to power, and even before that. All their actions are in war logic.

• Anyone with a resource is a problem for Nicole. For this reason, he will also remove people from his side, who, in his opinion, are beginning to accumulate some influence. He does not wait for them to become competitors, but immediately removes them from the game… This is the logic of all revolutions. As Stalin once eliminated and wiped out the old Bolsheviks, Nikol Pashinyan will and is acting in the same way. Many who came with him in the early days or helped him on various occasions, he pushed out long ago. He can go to a person’s child’s wedding and then crush that same person like this. We remember, don’t we, the photos when Nikol Pashinyan and his family were at the wedding of Gagik Tsarukyan’s daughter, they were taking family selfies saying “we are at a wedding”…

To remind: Nikol Pashinyan with his family and veteran CP members, 2019. was present at the wedding ceremony of Anahit, daughter of PAP leader Gagik Tsarukyan, and Albert, son of Khachatur Sukiasyan. And he, and his family members, and the CP members published photos. 

• He doesn’t end the war himself, he ends one operation, starts another… Even during the 44-day war, he was fighting a war within the country, not against the enemy… Anyone with resources is a problem for Nicole. This applies to his neighbors as well. He doesn’t wait for them to become competitors, he solves the issues at once… This is the correct Bolshevik, Stalinist practice.:

• If Alen Simonyan had accumulated some finances, connections, even though he had influence within the system and was solving problems, Nikol Pashinyan does not expect them to gather enough resources to become competitors. He crushes immediately. And what happened to Gagik Tsarukyan or Samvel Karapetyan will happen to all other large and medium-sized businesses as well. Moreover, these people later surprisingly say: “but I was not involved in politics, I supported them, we went to their breakfasts, we gave a million drams or I don’t know how much money, besides, we always gave what they wanted from us, why are they hitting us now?” The problem is that you have a resource. You have a resource that, even theoretically, can be used against him one day, and he will make sure that no one in the country has the resources to go against him.That is his logic. 

• First of all, Nikol serves his own interests, then he serves any interests, except for the interests of Armenia.

• Police use drones to track people. They use all AI tools: face recognition systems, access to the Internet is made by face identification… In Armenia, the global method of building a digital concentration camp and total control is being imitated at a high speed. The entire arsenal of populist dictators applies to us.

• In fact, those people who speak a little disdainfully about the opposition and say “well, we don’t engage in politics”… people who say such things should light a candle every day for these oppositionists, even if they deserve a lot of criticism. Because right now those oppositionists are occupying and resisting Nikol’s repressive apparatus. These oppositionists, who are constantly thrown into prisons (according to the “revolving doors” principle, one gets out, three sit in his place), if they are not there, it will quickly become clear that not engaging in politics is no longer a guarantee of anything. In general, having some material resource, property or money will already become a problem. One day he will say: “And why do you earn so much money?”

• At first, Artsakh residents were deprived of the right to vote… Artsakh residents are RA citizens, they had normal RA passports, not travel passports. Many of the shocked, crushed Artsakh citizens did not pay attention to what was happening. He deprived the citizens of Artsakh of the right to vote, digested them, and now he has forbidden the citizens of Armenia from abroad to vote. This is a violation of the Constitution… A citizen of RA, whether he wants to come from Russia, another country or the Moon, has the right to vote. That is the right of those people. Once we get rid of this power, the right to vote should be automatically restored. This government does not need people who are not dependent on it to vote. Like this if continued, then people will begin to be restricted from voting on other grounds…

• The transport collapse in Yerevan was specially created, I’m sure, because it’s not possible to constantly destroy something, to constantly destroy working systems… Now it’s summer, many people are out of Yerevan, schools are closed, but in the afternoon, at 1:00 pm, there are inhuman traffic jams in Yerevan… Now the question is: why is there no campaign planned by the opposition on this important issue? It seems to me that if these people start using public transport, go through these inhuman humiliations, they will become sympathetic oppositionists.: 

• First of all, the opposition should get down from its high chairs, start communicating directly, get into all that and feel the collapse and looting of the healthcare system on its own skin. What they called “healthcare reform” is actually a program to loot the middle class. Now such shameful and absurd things are happening. they take money from people, even on a fee-based basis, people cannot receive normal medical care on time, they have to queue for months. That system was more or less working (to the extent that the system destroyed by Arsen Torosyan could be called normal), but now that form is gone. This should have been a separate big agenda for the opposition, but only 1-2 individuals are dealing with it, not a coordinated team.

• For the first time among our opposition leaders, I heard a clear formulation of the colonization of Armenia from Samvel Karapetyan. 

• Unfortunately, many of the opposition parties perceive Nikol Pashinyan as a rival, but he perceives them as their enemy:

• There are people in Armenia who have built their careers fighting against violence against women, human rights, etc… I’m not saying that there are no cases of violence in Armenia, but these people are silent when the victim is not a suitable person.

• We need an independent, sovereign, national press. There are very few of them in Armenia. 80% of the field is dominated by what Nikol Pashinyan and Anna Hakobyan have to say, which is very wrong… We also need an independent expert community acting in the interests of Armenia, a national scientific and educational system, which is now crushed to the point that its purpose has become to produce little Nikolics. Another important institution is the national political society. Unfortunately, the political society formed in our country was an agency network, having nothing to do with either Armenia or our national interests. A tremendous amount of work has to be done to build a resistance system:

• The 5 mandates of the opposition were stolen from “Prosperous Armenia” and the topic was closed, they forgot, the 5 mandates of the opposition were not defended… What are the plans? The opposition is being arrested, do you have a Plan B? If a machine, a system, is working against you, you cannot resist it with spontaneous outbursts. A system needs to be formed.

• There must be either internal resistance or external pressure against dictatorships. In our case, there are neither.

• About the opposition taking the mandates and going to the National Assembly. I don’t want to justify them, because there are many reasons to criticize the opposition, but how should we act in this situation? Mandates must be taken. After all, the National Assembly is an important strategic position, the abandonment of which will only give Nikol an additional advantage. It is another matter that only that position cannot be maintained if there is no related support. I don’t want to use the wording “street fight” because it is a very wrong term. The street is only a small part of that struggle. It’s just that we are still under the hypnosis of those two weeks in April 2018.

• For example, Nicole’s team was actively studying until 2018. they went through trainings with Serbs and Americans. And our opposition, in principle, has no love for learning, that’s why it turns out to be a farce every time. The issue will not be resolved just by the National Assembly, by writing letters to the Russian tsar… It is necessary to conduct external work with all countries (no matter how much they support Nikol), work with people on the ground, learn and be ready for mass protests. We have to fight in the National Assembly, in the media field, in the field of collective memory and social norms, where Nikol’s light-handed lying has become a matter of pride, not shame. It is not that they did not lie in politics until 2018, but now it has become a state ideology. Today there is a vacuum in all these directions, and it is clear that success cannot be achieved with only NA mandates (which are important, but only a small position). the rest of the fields should be kept as well.

Details in the video.

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