“Zhamanak” assumes that the latest Armenian-Azerbaijani summits, including the talks of Presidents Serzh Sarkisian and Ilham Aliyev in Paris, France, on Monday, are mainly aimed at maintaining the ceasefire regime in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone. “If such meetings contribute to the preservation of peace, their organization should be welcomed. But, on the other hand, the meetings themselves cannot be just for maintaining peace, while having no other political goals and calculations. In this respect, however, we are unlikely to see results in the near future,” the daily predicts.
“Hayots Ashkhar” notes that no usual increase in “Azerbaijani propaganda efforts” and “bloody provocations” in the conflict zone were observed before the Paris summit – something that normally happened ahead of high-level talks before. The Armenian paper puts it down to “the low-level combat preparedness of the Azerbaijani army” purportedly demonstrated during the summer clashes around Nagorno-Karabakh. “This was perhaps the most important reality that was revealed in the run up to the Paris meeting,” it concludes.
“168 Zham” sees the budget debate that opens in the Armenian parliament on Tuesday as a major test for the minority factions that managed to achieve consolidation on the grounds of their opposition to the government of the previous prime minister, Tigran Sarkisian: “He [the ex-premier] eventually resigned and the minority faction took his resignation as their victory. And now the government of Sarkisian’s successor, Hovik Abrahamian, who was appointed as a result of that ‘victory’, has submitted a draft budget for next year. If the non-governing factions criticize the government for its draft budget and vote against it, it will turn out that the change of government that was presented by them as a victory was not so much of a victory. If they don’t criticize it and stop short of voting against the draft budget, will turn out that they are not so ‘non-governing’”.
“Chorrord Ishkhanutyun” insists that after Armenia joins the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union next year its government should decide whether the country will be developing as an independent entity or as “a province of some boundless economic space”. “This is a very important matter, because no union can be eternal. Even the Soviet Union wasn’t eternal and the Eurasian Union will also break up one day. Therefore, already beginning today we should start doing everything to ensure something is still left in Armenia when that day comes. In other words, we should integrate so as to avoid what happened after the disintegration of the USSR when it turned out that Armenia had hundreds of factories and plants but virtually none of them turned out finished products,” the paper writes.
(Tigran Avetisian)