Azernews.Az

By Rashid Shirinov

The French singer of Armenian descent Charles Aznavour, who likes occasionally to point to the failures of the Armenian government, has made new revelatory statements against the country’s authorities.

“While one is being imprisoned for stealing two eggs, those who stole millions go unpunished,” Aznavour, who is, for the record, Armenia’s Ambassador to Switzerland and UNESCO, told the French publication Nouvelles d’Armenie.

He warned that if this keeps up, Armenia may one day disappear, and the leaders of the country will be responsible for this.

Aznavour has repeatedly criticized the Armenian government and the ruling regime for its political and economic failures. In his earlier interview, he was noting that Armenia is becoming more and more empty every day, and in the near future the country will turn into an empty shell.

“Who benefits from this? Only three rich hooligans? Three mobsters?” Aznavour inquired.

It is commendable that the singer is not afraid of speaking the truth about his distant homeland and revealing the failures and fraud of the ruling regime in Armenia.

The country indeed loses population with each passing day, but the government does nothing to stop this. The permanent population of Armenia is currently under 3 million, while non-official figures suggest that the figure is hardly close to 2 million. Since the proclamation of independence in 1991, the Armenian population has decreased by approximately 700,000 people.

Poverty is among the main reasons for Armenians’ exodus from the country. The latest official statistics say that the current poverty rate in Armenia is around 30 percent. The total number of poor people in the country amounts to some 900,000, and 310,000 of them are very poor, while 60,000 people are recorded as extremely poor.

The poor economy and terrible unemployment, which is the highest in the CIS area, are another reason why Armenians leave the country. Armenia’s state debt, increasing by hundreds of million dollars every month, exceeded $6.4 billion in November. However, the situation in the country and its economy has not tangibly improved, and this is another proof that the Armenian authorities spend the borrowed funds not on the well-being of the population but on the ruling regime’s own needs.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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