Basketball & chess
Former president Robert Kocharyan’s announcement concerning the parliament’s voting to take former foreign affairs minister and incumbent MP Vartan Oskanyan’s personal immunity right answered to a number of questions and meanwhile generated new questions. The first message in the announcement says that Kocharyan consider Oskanyan as his teammate more than his party leader Gagik Tsarukyan does. In fact Tsarukyan has not made any public announcements about the processes happening to the second person in his party and is not in Armenia now.
This letter also contains a message saying that he does not consider himself being the addressee of the pressure against Vartan Oskanyan. This announcement was more moral than actual support to Oskanyan. Every word in the announcement had been chosen scrupulously; there was no word such as “political” before the word “pressure” in the text. This calculation and generally the letter with Kocharyan’s wording may have several reasons. It may show that Kocharyan has only moral liability, and also even if the pressure may be intended for him, he does not compromise to the provocations. Rumors from the government say that Serzh Sargsyan wants to find out the real intention of Kocharyan concerning the presidential election as soon as possible. In other words, they want to see if Kocharyan wants to run for president during the upcoming elections in order to be able to have an adequate strategy based on the political situation.
If this is the case, Kocharyan’s announcement can be viewed as a strategic action to delay time for discovering his real intentions. Even the politicians from the government agree with this possibility. Even Galust Sahakyan announced that the author of that announcement was not Kocharyan because it was not his wording. This means that the government is expecting an answer with a strict wording and actions to follow. So far the only party involved in this tension is Vartan Oskanyan, and in the future we will see whether the PA will back him or will leave him alone. These processes will result in changes not only in the relations between the RPA and PA, but within the PA as well. In consideration of this precedent it is not excluded that in the future, during more important processes in politics Gagik Tsarukyan may be out of the country again.
