Keghart
By Viken L. Attarian, Mount Royal,Quebec, 4 September 2008
Kudos to Avedis Kevorkian who is right on the money. Pun intended.
Nurturing corruption makes us all complicit in destroying our fledgling country.
By Viken L. Attarian, Mount Royal,Quebec, 4 September 2008
Kudos to Avedis Kevorkian who is right on the money. Pun intended.
Nurturing corruption makes us all complicit in destroying our fledgling country.
I would however like to point out that he has left out (or at least left them unmentioned) the corrupt princes of the Armenian Church, whether in Armenia or the Diaspora.
The truth is that Armenians in the Diaspora proper have come to expect their institutions to be corrupt. Therefore, the corruption of the state machinery of Armenia is not a foreign construct for them, and in fact they literally drown you with an apologetic attitude.
"It is a third world country after all", "The Communists only taught them stealing, what do you expect?", "they have to eat, don’t they?", "It is better to have some of the crumbs trickle down to the population than nothing at all" etc.
Little do they realize that state level corrupt officials, while being morally as reprehensible as any small time khatchakogh running a parish, will do damage several orders of magnitude bigger than any of the corrupt parish councilors encouraged by the church hierarchy and their accomplices.
Stories of such small minded derders and srpazants-es abound in our daily experience as well as pepper our literature from Baronian to Odian and all the way to our modern times.
One would be well-advised to read the writings of Hagop Angaladian on the pages of this forum. Hagop, being an international expert on public procurement and government processes as well as IMF and World Bank consultant has a lot to say on this matter.
You can also listen to his presentation on the topic during the Policy Forum that took place last June in Montreal. Yet, all it takes is to spend some time in our institutions in the DIASPORA, as he has done, and one will quickly realize how corrupt they are here.
Hagop is also right on the money too. We better learn to clean up our act here as well, and even more urgently.
In the end, as the Armenian saying goes, Mart intch anee, iran ganee. Whatever one does, one does to oneself. Let’s see what else we have in store for ourselves?
Viken L. Attarian, Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada
Keghart
