“To criticize means to suffer spiritually”
Garegin Nzhdeh

At Christmas it was much spoken and written about how people celebrate New Year all over the world. There are unique and beautiful traditions which different people have been preserving for centuries. So, to learn about the heroes and traditions of Armenian New Year celebrations you should visit theInstituteofEthnographyas they are not preserved in everyday life. Nothing has been preserved. And now we do not interest the world with our New Year celebrations.

But do we interest the world in general? Of course, we do. We interest people not for the things that we have lost, but the thing that we have still preserved. Whenever we do not have anything at all, we will interest the world with our New Year rituals.

And what do we have?

We have a country the geographical position of which though problematic but can be beneficial as well. We have rich history where we can find the precedent for any situation of our days to take experience and lesson from it. We have a country for preservation of which there are few questions that require solutions. We have a small cozy country where all the seasons of the year are perfectly manifested. We have creative and talented people of great potential, who, if given a little opportunity, will change the impossible to possible.

According to the specialists’ calculations, taking into consideration the objective opportunity to prosper,Armeniahas the advantage of more than 150 times overTurkmenistan, 20-25 times overRussiaandBelarus(If only we could love our country as much as we love to boast of it). So, what prevents us from using our opportunity? As people states for sure it is the authorities. People are washing their hands and think they are not to blame for the situation in the country. And it means only one thing that there is no democracy in our country. In no case the population ofArmeniatakes part in the discussions of any question or in making decisions concerning people, not by real and objective queries, nor by the members of parliament or by any other means. In addition, the elections are held imitating democracy and people feel themselves completely free from the responsibilities for that situation. The responsibility wholly falls on the authorities.

In reality, only the 10 percent of the tasks that the country faces falls on the state. If the government can find solutions to those few but very important problems, people will by all means realize the other 90 percent of tasks. As result, people will be the factor and not the resources, the responsible and not the demander and finally our people will learn to make decisions; which is very important. If the people of the country are not used to make decisions, one day they will surely make a decision to call the responsible people to account. And this is to avoid such a situation that the government presents the other side of the reality. How everything is perfectly arranged. There is no problem, and there is no need to solve it.

Well, this is how the conditions are now. And what we should do. First of all the questions that the government should discuss need to be defined and put on the agenda. We already have the precedent to put questions of the agenda. I am talking about corruption. It was just enough to define the problem and it became clear that not only we had the problem but also it was difficult to solve it. The case is that the 10 percent of problems mentioned above require complex solutions.

Firstly, the question that should be put on the agenda is to abolish the climate of impunity from the roots. Everybody should be equal before the law, and this approach should not be declarative only. People should not listen it from the authorities or read it in this or that pre-election program, but people should come to this conclusion as the result of some specific efforts and activity of state authorities. Thus, we must really assess the incidents of March 1. The monopoly in manufacturing, importing and exporting should be vanished. The government should finally decide: to be guided by the interest of the 3 million people, or by the interest of the monopolist. The manufacturers who produce and import expired medicine, not nutritious food must be called to answer. The inner genocide should be prevented for people not to hate the state authorities as nothing else can wound the human soul as injustice.

Now, about an important question; I am speaking about patriotic unions.

The Armenians who survived the Genocide moved toArmeniaand called their new dwelling places: villages and towns, boroughs and squares by the names of their lost lands not to be psychologically separated from them and to re-establish their lives in this new land. So, they united in new Ayntap, Malatia and Arabkir. Patriotic unions were created to become a lifebuoy for those who survived the genocide. Due to those unions our compatriots preserved their local culture, dialect, traditions. So, they saved their memories; which means that the bearers of those memories also were saved and their human race was preserved. The patriotic unions had a great problem to solve and in fact they managed to play quite a positive role by performing their duties.

But today many acting patriotic unions cause psychological problems and it is hard to value their work as positive. They are like a hazardous stuff covered with chocolate that cause inner poisoning. Such public unions have been artificially formed in our small country. It is necessary to reconsider the problem of activities of those unions. The necessity of their work should be proved and the analysis of their significance should be provided. Those unions which are intended to openly support this or that political leader in the elections, they imperceptibly split our nation. In reality they do not contribute to the unification of the people living in the same land or to the preservation of their local culture, national elements and history, they just demarcate the habitants of the regions, such as the habitants of Lori, Vayq, Syunik, and so on. The patriotic unions separate our people who have already been divided into thousands of dimensions. The real cause for creating such unions inArmeniais to show excellent progress in the institute formed “to provide votes”. The bigger is the patriotic union, the greater is the political weight of its director as “vote provider”. But the most destructive feature of the patriotic unions is that they are counterbalance for the idea of our national unity. Many other team and religious groupings are added to this “regional divisions”. While thinking over the urgency of getting rid of them, the words of Charents “O, Armenian people, your only salvation is in your collective power” sounds rather prophetically. By the way, the separators, mentioned above, use these words as a motto for their activity.

We also have a strange tendency to open numerous parties created without any real ideological basis. It is necessary to get rid of those small team parties to accomplish the statehood of the country. “The boastful party member is the enemy for his people and the benefactor for the enemy of his people”. The best example of this golden rule by Nzhdeh was bolshevism when the great terror was officially launched and the whole country became a terrorist structure. With political enthusiasm “Comsyug” demanded quotas fromMoscowto condemn the intellectuals of people to failure. In those years the betrayer and fanatic party members gave 50 million innocent victims in theterritoryofSoviet Union, more than fascism did.

Nowadays the “civilized” vote has come to substitute the death quota. Unfortunately, the hands of vote providers also reach the educational institutes to exert pressure on the parents with the help of the directors.

As we remembered Nzhdeh, we should talk about another painful question as well. For many years we tolerate the existence ofSpandaryan Squarenamed after Nzhdeh in our independent country. The great freedom-loving person feels the pressure of communists even in his long-dreamed independent country. To my mind, the presence of the statue of Suren Spandaryan in thesquareofNzhdehshould not be the thing that the communist like. At least they should have undertaken the alienation of the communists’ statue from the square after Nzhdeh. This is not about eliminating the communist past, but about the ideological disorder of our country.

The next question to be put on the agenda is the question of emigration. It should be prevented by not contributing to it. Our state and government should announce loudly and clearly what the future ofArmeniais, what should become of the country and what the citizens should be alike. In my opinion, despite the content of that announcement it will greatly prevent the emigration, as people mostly leaveArmenianot because they do not agree with the position of the country, but because they do not understand the position of this country. To put all these questions on the agenda and to find a complex solution to them is in the interests of the state officials. The problem is not just that they also live in this country, to live well in a bad country is not a proper thing. The problem is simpler, new elections will be held tomorrow and they will apply to people to gain a vote. And one day, of course, the patriotic unions and parties won’t help the authorities who underestimated people.

The part of the efforts that are ineffectively spared can be led to these problems to gain sincere trust and support of people. In this case without any additional interference people will vote for the authorities who can calmly put the 90 percent of the problems of the country on the shoulders of people, and people will bear that burden more easily and with love, than that of earning somehow their daily bread. It will immediately be followed by people’s responsibility for the situation in the country. And this is called democracy.

And only in this case our people will respect their present and will not just boast of their past. Only discontented people can boast of their past. Glad and contented people just recognize their past, history and the experience, traditions, rituals and the symbols of the past. Such people do not imitate the world trying to appropriate the world’s heritage to them.

And only the country of such people can interest the world in a good sense.

Razmik Markosyan