What has Ter-Petrosyan discussed with US Ambassador?

On April 2 US Ambassador to Armenia John Haffern condemned those people who have opposition points of view and do not believe in promises by the Armenian authorities about fair elections. J. Haffern made the announcement during the press-conference in Yerevan.

He even noted the announcement made some people who consider that the elections on may will be falsified and call on to hold protest action just on the next day of the elections. Instead of it John Haffern considers that people must do their part of the work, create institutional networks and make their voice sounding and work out measures to prevent the falsifications. “Creation of such institutes claims hard working. We warmly welcome those courageous and devoted citizens among the authorities and out of it who try to create them”, US Ambassador said.

According to many experts and journalists the US diplomat directed his announcement to the opposition alliance Armenian National Congress (ANC). Their intention is not baseless especially when we take into consideration the “cold war” which exists between the ANC and the US Embassy in Armenia since 2008. The whole image of the relations between the ANC and the US Embassy was known due to the discoveries of the well-known scandalous Wikileaks.

There was no lack of offensive expressions: liars, drug-men….

 ANC tries to connect the bad relations with the US Embassy with Washington’s active participation in Armenian-Turkish relations’ normalization on 2008.

On October 17, 2008 leader of the ANC Levon Ter-Petrosyan presented a situation during the meeting as if Armenian nation is endangered to lose Artsakh because of the US actions. That day he announced that he stops the meetings with six months terms and explained his step: he “assisted” Serzh Sargsyan to strengthen positions in the negotiations. Of course, no one believed in these words four years ago. Even his supporters did not believe in him: they knew the real reasons of Ter-Petrosyan’s actions perfectly. The reasons there obvious: people did not believe in him and he did not have foreign support. In this condition ANC just had to take a break and work out a new strategy.   

The next period of time seems to make no changes in the relations between the ANC and US Embassy. It is right that US new Ambassador to Armenia John Haffern had some meetings with Ter-Petrosyan but there is no practical fact of the normalization of their relations. And the press-conference by the Ambassador on April 2 underlined once more the negative attitude which the Embassy has towards the ANC activities.

ANC now has also problems with the loss of voters. Team of Ter-Petrosyan realizes perfectly that the inner dissatisfactions and disagreements may convert coming Parliamentarian elections to the last political action where ANC participates with the current staff and format.

And that is why the opposition activists decided to normalize relations with the diplomatic representatives of the Western countries and especially with the USA.

As Armenian media inform ANC leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan met US Ambassador to Armenia John Haffern. According to the official information some issues concerning the legal process of the coming elections were discussed during the meeting. Besides this, some other issues of Armenian inner politics, social-political situation were on agenda.  

As it was expected no other details of the meeting was published. But as we can judge by the announcements by Haffern on the previous day “unpleasant details” have also been discussed during this meeting.  

Will Ter-Petrosyan manage to normalize relations with the US diplomats? The time will give answer to this question. Now we can only say that relations with the US Embassy are nit the only problem for the ANC. Just a month has remained till the Parliamentarian elections in Armenia but the disagreements in ANC are just deepening. This will cause the necessity to take the “second break”. ANC may not return from this break.

Hrant MELIK-SHAHNAZARYAN