ArmInfo. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan did not carry out lustration in Armenia, the consequences of which are obvious today. Head of the Analytical Centre on Globalization and Regional Cooperation (ACGRC) Stepan Grigoryan expressed such an opinion to ArmInfo.
"A certain number of people today are voicing a variety of statements from various platforms: rostrums, squares, streets: Are you convinced that all these people are citizens of Armenia? Are you convinced that they are guided exclusively by disinterested love for their homeland? Unfortunately, not convinced. And it is precisely to prevent the occurrence of such situations that lustration is carried out, "he stressed.
According to the political scientist, there is a mistaken perception of lustration in Armenia, as the latter is considered a process of persecution and purge of citizens. In reality, lustration is aimed at the identifying an official's inclination, for example, corruption and voicing a warning about the impossibility of this person's work in parliament, government or other state bodies.
According to Grigoryan, against this background, Armenia continues to live in the partial realities of the Soviet past. And the same Armenian army practically does not differ in its body from the Soviet one. Meanwhile, most of the critics of the current government, people who accuse Pashinyan of the most terrible crimes, are people of the old formation. Many of them are not to blame for the fact that they were formed as individuals under different conditions, under different rules of the game.
"Let's not forget that when we talk about lustration, we don't need to reinvent the wheel for this. The experience of the Baltic States is before our eyes. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are more or less independent today and are developing much more dynamically than we do. I will say more, and from Estonia is developing the fastest of all, where the most severe lustration was carried out. State bodies are completely cleared of intelligence agents, the former communist elite. All these people live peacefully and are engaged in anything, both science and business, except for managing the country, "the political scientist concluded.