It is significant that the revanchists began silently packing up their innermost tents themselves, although Prime Minister Pashinyan expressed no dissatisfaction with their presence in the city centre and sent no law enforcement officials to clean them up. Everything happened as if by itself. So has the new “revolution”, this newly-made Armenian Maidan, disappeared, or has everything just quieted down to flare up again?
It’s hard not to poke fun at the passions that have been running high in Yerevan’s France Square for a while now. It is amusing, for example, how Ishkhan Saghatelyan, the loudest shouting leader of the Armenian opposition, justified the process of dismantling the tents. “The tent city has done its job … it’s time to use the potential of these people in more important places. From now on, France Square belongs to the Resistance Movement, regardless of whether there are tents or not,” he said.
Well, well, well! It’s hard not to admire such pathetic – in fact, it sounds like a kind of philosophy of the feline tribe: “We have marked this territory, and now it’s ours.”
As for citizens’ fears that the struggle might weaken, Ishkhan Saghatelyan promised they would be convinced otherwise.
“You will see that the effectiveness of the struggle is not due to the tents,” the leader of the revanchists stressed.
Meanwhile, in reality, of course, everything looks miserable. One thing can be stated: if they liquidated the main symbol of the Armenian revolution, which, according to the philosophy of the “Orange protests”, were the tents and catering facilities feeding them, it means that the revolution has kicked the bucket. Goodbye, everything is clear and there is no need to waste time.
Well, the Armenian opposition has reached a truly shameful retreat from its loudly declared positions and literally ran away from the centre of Yerevan. This is something the Armenian media themselves are ironic about. That is, everything is quite transparent and obvious. The revanchists simply could not cope with the task in the term given to them by Moscow. Kremlin is not an unexpendable money bag either, at some point, when it became clear that all the methods had been worked out and people were not flocking to the rallies, an order to “pack up” was given from Russia. Moreover, everything fits together very well – both the “hand of Moscow” and its consistent actions can be traced quite clearly.
The Armenian revanchists did not meet the date that the sponsors from Moscow had set as the deadline. And then events began in Yerevan that were more important to the Kremlin than the pointless and already ineffective opposition marches, which blocked the city centre, creating chaos and disorder. All this was absolutely useless when there was a whole series of events within the framework of the CSTO bloc, including the arrival of important people from Moscow in Yerevan.
Meanwhile, the exchange of amenities between Pashinyan and the opposition continues. The well-known Ishkhan Saghatelyan twisted President Ilham Aliyev’s words about the verbal agreements with Yerevan and once again accused Pashinyan of a behind-the-scenes surrender of Karabakh, and in collusion with Baku. In general, everything is usual. And the Prime Minister’s remarks are still as powerful as before, outvoicing the revanchist nonsense.
Pashinyan recalled that during the whole history of the negotiation process, Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, and the political parties have recognized Karabakh as an integral part of Azerbaijan and have never proclaimed the principle “Karabakh will never be part of Azerbaijan”.
“On November 25, 1998, the Armenian authorities led by Robert Kocharyan agreed to accept as a basis for negotiations the proposal put forward by the co-chairs for a so-called common state, by which Nagorno-Karabakh was recognized as a republican-type state-territorial entity and together with Azerbaijan was to form a common state within its internationally recognized borders,” Pashinyan said. The Prime Minister read another excerpt which noted that “Karabakh citizens must have Azerbaijani passports with a special note on Nagorno-Karabakh as their identity card.”
A very simple and illustrative argument, by the way, which makes it unlikely that any of the residents of Yerevan would even consider going to the rallies of the opposition, which has proven incapable of gathering the popular masses needed for a real revolution.
Vadim Mansurov
