Leading opposition members of Parliament usually don't even bother to attend sessions. Armenia may be more open and accessible than Azerbaijan, the oil-producing neighbor that Armenia has been fighting since the Soviet Union started to crumble. But people here do not want to be compared with their neighbors. They want to be compared with the West. Somebody has to speak to the opposition rather than blaming them for everything that is wrong with Armenia.
Somebody has to say that the press is truly free and then stand by to guarantee it.
Somebody has to make it clear that we will not just tolerate dissent, we will welcome it. They are noble words, and by all accounts he means them. But only one man rules Armenia today and while he insists in speeches and statements that democracy is sacred to him, Ter-Petrossian does not act as if it is. The president's turn away from democracy began in 1994, when he banned a major opposition party and imposed restrictions on the press. Even now, with many of those restrictions lifted, there is a combined daily press run of only 31,000 copies for all newspapers in the country, which has a population of 3 million.