Armenian Reporter:

Armen Rustamian: “I believe that there should not be any political prisoners in my country”

Mistakes by both sides ended in tragedy, Foreign Relations Committee chair says

Published: Saturday January 17, 2009

Armen Rustamian, one of the four members of Armenia’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, chairs the Armenian parliament’s Standing Committee on Foreign Relations and is the head of the Supreme Council of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Tatul Hakobyan for the Armenian Reporter

We spoke this week with Armen Rustamian, one of the four members of the Armenian delegation. Mr. Rustamian chairs the Armenian parliament's Standing Committee on Foreign Relations and is the head of the Supreme Council of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which is part of Armenia's coalition government.

Armenian Reporter: When Armenia became a member of the Council of Europe in January 2001, it was seen as a foreign policy success for Armenian authorities. There is a high probability that at the end of this month, PACE will deny Armenia's voting rights. Who bears responsibility for this: the authorities or the opposition?

Armen Rustamian: When something takes place within the country, the state and authorities are always blamed. Only later do discussions begin: How did we get to this state and what were the reasons? But for the "outside eye," this is not so important because we represent the whole country. It doesn't interest anyone whether it was the opposition or the authorities who were responsible for the sins and crimes committed. External politics don't recognize these kinds of divisions. Whatever happens with the country, positive or negative, whether we take steps forward or steps back will be seen from the prism of an independent Armenia.

Armenian Reporter: The Speaker of the parliament has announced that Armenia has fulfilled its responsibilities with regard to PACE Resolutions 1609 and 1620; the leader of the ruling party in parliament said that the demands have been met and asks, What else do they want? Does the ARF, a member of the ruling coalition, also have the same position: that Armenia has fulfilled the requirements of the two resolutions but they want to unjustly punish us? What do you think?

Armen Rustamian: Two criteria must be clarified on the question of whether or not we have fulfilled our responsibilities. We have accepted a host of demands. Have those demands or issues been totally carried out and completed? Has it come to its logical conclusion? This is one criterion. The second criterion, which is very important, is if we haven't done these things, what has been the reason? Here it is very important to give this its appraisal: Have they not been fulfilled because of an absence of political will? Do the authorities not want to fulfill these responsibilities? Or are there other reasons; say, they were not able to do it in the allotted time frame?

I do not agree with the position that the Armenian authorities do not have the political will [to resolve issues surrounding March 1]. The position of PACE's Monitoring Committee was very severe and not a correlating or adequate position. I said this to my European colleagues during the session of the Monitoring Committee.

I told them that it is not possible to say that there is an absence of political will in the country during the process that has been going on. Why? It is possible to separate resolutions 1609 and 1620 into two blocks. One block is the general improvements, which were very important to help speed up the process of democratization. The second block has to do with resolving issues which arose following the presidential elections in the country.

Very serious steps were taken in the first block. That signifies that there is the political will. A special parliamentary committee was set up to investigate the events of March 1-2, although there were some concerns in the Council of Europe with regard to the make-up and activity of the committee. Nonetheless, the committee was created, it is working, the opposition was given the chance to take part in the activity of the committee; even powers outside of parliament were invited. Thomas Hammarberg, the human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe, suggested setting up a fact-finding group and we complied with that as well. The third issue deals with the prisoners.

Armenian Reporter: Do you consider those people prisoners or people incarcerated due to political motivation?

Armen Rustamian: That people are prisoners is a fact. They [the Council of Europe] placed before us criteria which they said we had to fulfill very quickly: determine the number of people who were directly involved with the violence - organizers, agitators, those who carried out these events. They were very specific about the categories. They told us to determine who they were and said they had no issues with that process. But for those for whom there was no direct allegation, we should let those people go, regardless of whether these people were involved in the process and could indirectly have had a connection with this process. It was here that the issue became aggravated. They told us to make the differentiation [between these two groups] as quickly and justly as possible in accordance with international and European criteria.

Armenia decided that the differentiation would have to be made by appropriate authorities, which included judicial bodies who would have to investigate and based on that investigation make those decisions. At the same time, the Council of Europe was demanding that, independent of that investigation, we should apply three fundamental recommendations, which basically had a political context. The first of those recommendations was the legal: in general, if there is not sufficient evidence then withdraw allegations and do not go looking for additional evidence. If you haven't found enough evidence then don't let it even get to trial.

Send to a friend

Printer-Friendly Single Page

[1] 2 3 4 Next

Rhode Island State House. Wikimedia

Rhode Island House supports NKR recognition

On May 17, RI state representatives passed a resolution calling on the U.S. Government to formally recognize the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, the NKR Office in the United States reported.