LEVON FROM ALEPPO WAGES A LIBERATION STRUGGLE

Levon Ter-Petrosyan has recently enriched his arsenal with the idea of waging a “liberation” or “national-liberation” struggle against the authorities in power.
Since, after coming to power in 1990-1991, Mr. Ter-Petrosyan and the Armenian pan-National Movement once announced to us that the liberation struggle in the lives of the Armenian people was over and the era of building a new statehood had begun, we wonder why they are resuming the use of the “political terminology” which, in their own words, is “characteristic of the 19th century”. Or, why do they herald the beginning of the “new stage of the national-liberation movement”? What “national-liberation movement” has been waged in Armenia?
In a speech delivered recently in front of the people of Aparan, the ex-President substantiated his strange appeal of waging a liberation struggle by the fact that, “these authorities are not Armenian authorities; these are alien authorities, and they are not familiar with our concerns, our culture and our thousand years’ history.”
This is an “interesting” opinion in that the Opposition was using exactly the same words to characterize him in 1990-1991. “These authorities are not Armenian authorities; these are alien authorities, and they are not familiar with our concerns, our culture and our thousand years’ history.”
It turns out that in the period of his being in power Mr. Ter-Petrosyan was accused of exactly the same sins, for which he now blames the present-day authorities. Therefore, there’s something wrong here, because the liberation or national-liberation struggle of any people has always been waged and is being waged against the rule of strangers. In our case, for instance, this struggle was waged against the Azerbaijani leadership, which had seized Nagorno Karabakh. And that struggle was waged both in the period of the Turkish yoke and the tsarist rule, as well as in the Soviet times.
But when a nation definitely decides to be together and unite in a single state (something which, as we know, was recorded in our newest history in 1989) and sacrifices anything in support of such decision, the representatives of its different layers cease to be looked upon as “alien authorities”. Moreover, the appeals to split the nation into different groups and wage a liberation struggle against one another are viewed as attempts of breaking the unity.
If Ter-Petrrosyan currently appeals to the citizens of our country to wage a liberation struggle against the “alien authorities”, (just like his opponents who used to call on the people to throw down the government headed by “Levon from Aleppo” as it was alien to the people of Armenia), he, in this way, deliberately pushes the current electoral campaign to the artificial and fake platform of arousing controversies between Armenia and Karabakh.
The reason is obvious:
a) the appeal for a liberation struggle presupposes the existence of the fundamental goal of throwing down the “alien authorities” and forming one’s own “national government”;
b) the appeal for a liberation struggle also presupposes not to discriminate the methods towards achieving the goal, resorting even to the most violent actions.
The deliberate deformation of the political goal of acceding to power in Armenia through appeals for a liberation struggle implies a new splitting of the Armenian nation and a return to the situation that existed before the Karabakh Movement. Or, at best, the establishment of different states for peoples, belonging to two unknown nationalities: “the people of Armenia” and “the people of Karabakh”.
Let’s remind you that in 1997-1998 the same philosophy lied upon the basis of L. Ter-Petrosyan’s speeches and publications devoted to the solution of the Karabakh conflict. His well-known attitudes towards the solution of he Karabakh conflict were the “political representation” of the same philosophy, and had they become a reality, they would have inevitably led to the return of the liberated territories and the clarification of the NKR status within the frameworks of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity.
It turns out that by transferring the current presidential campaign to the platform of the liberation struggle against the “alien authorities”, RA presidential candidate L. Ter-Petrosyan wants to solve a problem which RA President L. Ter-Petrosyan was unable to solve in his time, i.e. to create a state of Armenians or, as he is wont to characterize, “a normal state”, and leave our compatriots of Karabakh to the mercy of fate.
Identifying their desire for achieving a power shift with the liberation or national-liberation movement against the “alien authorities”, Mr. Ter-Petrosyan, as well as the propaganda tools substantiating his political goals, reveal the revanchist ambitions of reviving their well-known political programs, which were a failure in 1997-1998.
ARMEN TSATOURYAN

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