JOKES ABOUT THE OUTPOST

The President of Azerbaijan suspected yesterday in the self-dependent policy Armenia carries out. "The speaker of RF State Duma who has been in Armenia lately has said that Armenia is the outpost of Russia in the Southern Caucasus. But we always thought Armenia was a state. In reality it was found out it was an outpost and we don't know now who negotiate with: with that outpost or its master?" suspected Ilham Aliev. Reply to it the Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamlet Gasparian advised Azerbaijan to negotiate with Nagorni Karabakh.

THERE IS SOMETHING
TO SPEAK ABOUT

Nobody suspected from the beginning of the initiation that Hmayak Hovhannisian would succeed in collecting the necessary number of signatures for discussing in the NA special sitting the issue on returning the deposits to the people. Certainly the whole deputy corps realizes very well the Government hasn't got any opportunity to return the deposits in 2005 and the special sitting is only the Sisyphean toil. But let the Government to take care of it or rather the part of the coalition government the Republicans who declared a long time ago there weren't any resources in the budget and won't be. Nothing will prevent the deputies from "thinking about people" once more.
The Dashnaktsakans decided "to think much more" than the Rule of Law Party /Orinats Erkir/ which raised the issue in the preliminary stage. They have often mentioned they don't make any claim on returning the deposits the reason of their dissatisfaction is the formulation "30 dollars instead of 1000 rubles". In Dashnaktsakan's opinion it is too little. The ARF members prove themselves in this way showing they are for returning the deposits to the poor depositors. What about the Republicans they don't want to accept the return of deposits at all as the rise of teachers' salaries and other such kind of problems won't be solved. It is possible the Republicans consider their presence in the special sitting as a waste of time for which they will be criticized both by the opposition and the coalition.
In short we'll see an interesting show. Hmayak has an obvious mission to show RLP they don't do anything but promised in past. The RLP itself can't reject the promises but as a member of coalition is responsible for the budget. ARF has a nice argument for preventing from it: it will declare it wants to correspond one ruble to one dollar. The Republicans can't take part in those games as the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance are Republicans. As a result the deposits won't be returned the deputies will beat the air and morally satisfied. And the press will have anything to write in the last working week of this year.