The War Was Thrown into Our Pockets and They Flew Away: Alen Simonyan

He said, 'You are wasting the money for roads, you are repairing the same road multiple times.' The minister replied, 'Dear Sir, the state does not allocate funds for roads that are not built well and need repairs.' In other words, the state does not accept poorly constructed roads; the same applies to kindergartens and schools.

Regarding ANIF, Simonyan asked reporters, 'Where did you find out about ANIF? How did the media learn about it?' He added, 'Do you want me to give an example of a closed country so that they don't know about ANIFs and the rest? You know that since 2018, there have been institutions that had factories that we have discovered. We found a factory, say, an entity X, I don't know, the ministry, the city hall of city X, had an asphalt plant, and your media didn't know or write about it at all. So how did you find out about it?'

Simonyan added that it is said that the case (ANIF) was closed, left, and nothing will come of it. 'That problem is ours. Just like the rest of our team members went and sat down, those people who represented our team and did such things, or who did not represent our team, are going to jail. Why are they taking my close relatives to prison, and others as well? If there is suspicion on someone, and the law enforcement is taking action, we are not letting that happen. Understand, the reality is different; that old reality with its mentality and thoughts does not exist anymore, it is over,' he emphasized.

Simonyan noted that during Robert Kocharian's era, property was given to other countries in exchange for debt. 'He went to Iran, and now you all come and say, 'What about our gas pipeline, what about our dependency, what about the prices?' Go and bring gas from Iran, he made a disputable pipeline of smaller size. Then that was given by Serzh Sargsyan to 'Hayrusgazart,' and in the end, it was given completely to another country. This is their shame,' Simonyan stated.

When asked what the shame of their government is, Simonyan said, 'The shame of our government is primarily that these people do not allow an opposition to form in the political arena; they are not even in jail yet. That is our political shame. Our political shame is that when we came to power in 2018, we were living and thinking within the same logic regarding Artsakh. We believed and trusted the same logic that existed for 30 years—calling the Russian to stop the war.'

He noted that our political shame was that we continued to think in the same way—we can do nothing for Artsakh. 'Our generals can go around in luxury and we can do nothing, we will call the Russians; the Russians will hold that war—this is our political shame. Because we thought, well, if that system has worked, let's not disrupt that system, but they threw the war into our pockets and fled. Yes, it is shameful that we allowed the war, that deception, that lie to be thrown into our pockets while they fled,' emphasized the Speaker of the National Assembly.

He then recalled an episode related to the third president. 'Do you know what I remember? In January 2020, they were taking Serzh Sargsyan to trial, and he takes the megaphone and says, 'Artsakh will never be part of Azerbaijan.' But what Artsakh? I said, 'What are they talking about? What are they discussing?' They were taking him away because he was being tried regarding the Artsakh issue; they knew everything during the April war. And that is our political shame—that we were new and could not imagine to what extent hostility could be directed towards Armenia and the Armenian people,' he noted.