Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has ordered Armenian security services to “deal with” some of his harsh critics, saying that their statements made during the ongoing parliamentary election campaign border on high treason.
Campaigning in the southeastern Syunik province at the weekend, Pashinian complained that some “representatives of political forces” accuse his government of plotting a “conspiracy against Nagorno-Karabakh.” He also cited “false” opposition allegations that Russian arms supplies to Armenia stopped after he came to power in May.
“Acknowledging their imminent political death, those people have decided to become, through provocative political statements, treacherous warmongers in the hope of provoking a treacherous war and solving their parochial interests,” he charged at a campaign rally held in the provincial town of Goris.
“The National Security Service (NSS) and military counterintelligence must now deal with my theory and those statements because some people are confidently moving towards high treason,” he said. “I’m not afraid of making such statements. And I want to say that Armenia’s current government and people have enough levers to root out some forces attempting to take subversive actions in our army’s rear.”
“If anyone tries to suspect the people’s revolution, namely the popularly elected government, of any anti-national or anti-state conspiracy, we will reserve ourselves the right to suspect those people of being agents of foreign influence at the least,” he said.
Pashinian made similar statements when he took his campaign to the southern Ararat province on Monday. “Those people must go and give explanations to relevant [state] bodies,” he said of his detractors.
Although the prime minister again named no names, he most probably referred to senior representatives of former President Serzh Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenian (HHK). They have condemned his allegations last week that senior Karabakh officials are meddling in the Armenian parliamentary race.
The HHK did not immediately react to Pashinian’s order issued to the NSS.Earlier last week, it accused him of resorting to anti-HHK “hate speech” on the campaign trail.
On Saturday, the former ruling party’s deputy chairman, Armen Ashotian, pledged to sue a close Pashinian associate, First Deputy Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, who branded the Republicans as a “gang of criminals.”
Ashotian and other HHK figures claim that Pashinian is targeting their party during the election campaign in order to deflect public attention from what they describe as his failure to deliver on his far-reaching promises made to Armenians.
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