DEMOCRACY in Armenia is making little progress, a leading political advisory body has claimed.
Sabine Freizer, Europe director with the influential International Crisis Group (ICG), said that since its damning report on Armenia in April 2008, scant improvements to the country’s nascent democracy have been noted.
“There are still political prisoners in Armenia, there are still trials going on, so no, the situation has not improved significantly,” she told Metro Éireann last Friday.
The study, Picking up the Pieces, was released by the ICG last April and referred to the country’s “flawed presidential election” in February 2008, and subsequent “lethal crackdown against a peaceful protest rally” organised by supporters of unsuccessful presidential candidate Levon Ter-Petross-ian.
The report called for a more independent judiciary and stringent tackling of corruption and cronyism within government. In 2008, Transparency International ranked Armenia in 109th place out of 180 countries in a corruption survey.
According to Freizer: “The government has now solidified its position in the country but there are still the problems of political prisoners, of lack of dialogue between the opposition and the government. This keeps the political situation quite tense and strange.”
Freizer said that resistance to dialogue exists on both sides, but that a “thorough examination” of incidents that took place last March, when demonstrators and police clashed in Yerevan after the disputed elections, would be a “very important” factor in restoring dialogue.
“And really a prosecution of some of the police officers who were involved, who used excessive force during those demonstrations,” she added.
She also suggested that Armenia is much less adept at implementing reform measures than publishing them.
“Armenia is facing a series of challenges,” continued Freizer. “As of right now, one of the biggest is the economic challenge of the global crisis which is having a serious effect because Armenia has a large population that works abroad – mainly in Russia – and since Russia has been hit very badly by this crisis, the workers who had been sending their salaries to families in Armenia have not been able to do that, as a lot have lost their jobs.”
Freizer also noted that international disputes such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan continue to affect Armenia socially and financially.
“Due to this conflict, Armenia has to spend a large percentage of its budget on the military, and basically remains very much in war mode. Also, Armenia’s border with Turkey has been closed since the mid-1990s and it is forced to depend largely on Russia, both for financial assistance and investment, and general economic trade and cooperation.”
Freizer believes that the international community hasn’t taken enough high-level interest in assisting Armenia towards the resolution of outstanding issues, including the Nagorno-Karabakh situation.
“There was a ceasefire signed in 1994,” she commented, “but in the past 15 years there has not been any other document signed except for a very short document last autumn [the so-called Moscow Declaration]. This was facilitated directly by Russian President Medvedev. And that shows that if high-level officials do get involved, the chances of some degrees of compromise are higher.
“Instead, what we’ve had for the past six years is the OSCE Minsk process, with three diplomat co-chairs [Russia, France, US] who are regularly working on it, trying to negotiate between the sides.”
However, she criticised the absence of a designated EU co-chair in this diplomatic process, and the EU’s general approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh situation.
“Now what generally happens is that Brussels works directly with Armenia but doesn’t in any way touch the Nagorno-Karabakh [issue] in any of its projects or proposals or programmes. It’s the same with [the EU approach to] Azerbaijan. So Nagorno-Karabakh is kind of left as an empty zone, which is very unusual in the middle of Europe, to have such a situation as you do today in Karabakh.”
She continued: “There needs to be much greater political involvement in the talks. We are actually at a moment where there is optimism that there might be an agreement on basic principles sometime this year, but this optimism has kind of been in the air since 2005, so this process is extremely slow. Now is really the time for more international involvement.”
Meanwhile, Freizer said that government-to-government funding to Armenia should not proceed without tangible evidence of reform.
“It’s always very difficult to determine whether or not imposing sanctions is actually going to hurt the right people. The problem with making limits on aid is that sometimes the most vulnerable are going to lose out on the humanitarian assistance.”
She concluded: “We were focusing more on the kind of assistance that goes to Armenian institutions. There’s really no point in throwing money at institutions that refuse to reform. There needs to be pressure put on Armenia to ensure that they actually implement their reforms and not just talk about it in terms of rhetoric.”
What is the Armenian govt's view?
The 1 March protest was an attempted coup by the opposition, according to the Armenian government.
President Sargsyan, just before he officially took his oath of office, informed EU special envoy to the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, that his government is “ready to co-operate with all those who want Armenia to develop”, and that “those who incited recent riots had committed a crime and should be punished”.
On the issue of corruption, the Armenian government has initiated an Anti-Corruption Council – headed by the prime minister – and the Anti-Corruption Strategy Monitoring Commission.
In relation to dialogue with the opposition, Armenia’s Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian is reported to have informed his Czech counterpart last week that the Armenian government is ready for talks with the opposition, but that it has so far failed to display a readiness to talk.
Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg had told Nalbandian in Prague that such a dialogue is essential for Armenia’s inclusion in the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme, which offers six former Soviet republics much closer ties with the bloc in return for political and economic reforms.
