NATIONAL INTERESTS SHOULD PREVAIL OVER PRIVATE ONES – ARMENIAN ACTOR
10:36 * 19.08.14
In an interview with Tert.am, the merited Armenian cinema and
theater actor and stage producer Yervand Manartyan addressed
the recent escaltions along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and
the Nagorno-Karabakh Contact Line, highlighting the importance of
pan-national consolidation and the ability of distinguishing between
national and private interests.
What are your concerns in terms of the foreign threats linked to the
situation in Armenia over the recent period?
Those are just routine political developments, so I do not see
anything strange. We are simply people educated in the Soviet years,
so whenever we hear anyone express his or her opinion, it seems to
us that something unusual has taken place. Such is life; nothing out
of the ordinary.
With the situation being quite tense along the border, many freedom
fighters [veterans of the Nagorno-Karabakh war] decided to go to the
frontline. Do you see any hazard about all that?
That hazard has been with us for several years now; it has to do with
our geopolitical location. Our situation is something very usual in
such a neighborhood. So what neighborhood is this? No nation around
the globe is facing a situation like this, surrounded exclusively by
[countries pursuing] contrary religious beliefs. We are a Christian
state, the south being Muslim, and the east being Muslim, and the
west being Muslim too. I cannot, of course, say anything about the
Persians, but they too pursue a different belief.
As early as at the beginning of this year, you took part in the
demonstrations of freedom fighters calling for a government change,
but they too, recently forgot about their demand. Do you think they
felt the threat to the country?
They would initially make ardent calls, but I think they sometime
lost something somewhere. There was an instant they could have been
more consistent and benefited more, but they missed the moment. Such
things happen. That’s a regular process of state building.
As for the freedom fighters, their problem is completely unrelated
to the [demand for] a government change. We very much want to get a
finalized reply, but that’s not what history proves. We want to see
problems immediately resolved, but things never go that way. Every
Armenian has his or her own problems.
The right thing is the situation we are in now. We must be able
to single out the problems which are purely national to dedicate
ourselves to their solution before switching over to private ones.
Serious problems are never solved at one blow.
What’s the national problem which you think must be distinguished
from all other problems to be properly considered?
We must be able to become a country as we are building a state. We
did not have a state for many years, and that’s the source of all
our problems. Fortune has given has a chance to create a statehood,
but that’s a problem the generations have to solve. No nation around
the globe has this kind of fate, so this is a very complicated issue.
Another problem we have is that we are very much scattered around
the world. We all the time say, ‘We are Armenian’, but an Armenian in
the United States has interests different from the Armenian in Armenia.
What is your understanding of national and private interest today?
A private interest is something all nations have. That’s the result
of everyday activity. We cannot say, for instance, that people in
Artsakh [Nagorno-Karabakh] share the same interests as those in the
Lori region are the . For me, a prevalent national interest today is
our ability to build a state. We are in that span, as we’ve never had
that to date. It is a very complicated process which goes on rather
well today. We need several generations for that. Do you want those
problems to be resolved in a matter of 20 years? That isn’t the way
things happen.
My belief is that whatever is happening today is the absolutely the
right thing; we simply have too many expectations and desires.
http://www.tert.am/en/news/2014/08/19/manaryan1/