A court in Yerevan has frozen the assets of an Armenian newspaper and one of its journalists who has accused a leading political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of illicit enrichment.

In a video report posted on the 168 Zham newspaper’s website this month, the journalist, Davit Sargsian, described Yerevan’s Deputy Mayor Tigran Avinian as a “nouveau riche” whose family has been “steadily getting richer” ever since Pashinian came to power in 2018. It detailed the family’s allegedly extensive business interests developed in the last five years.

The reported claimed, in particular, that Avinian’s mother bought an expensive apartment in central Yerevan before becoming recently a co-owner of two firms and a 9-hectare plot of land in southern Armavir province.

Avinian, who will be the ruling Civil Contract’s candidate in upcoming mayoral elections in the Armenian capital, took the newspaper to court. He is seeking an unprecedentedly hefty compensation for the “slanderous” report which he claims damaged his “business reputation.”

Acting on Avinian’s demand, the court decided earlier this week to freeze 18 million drams ($46,000) worth of assets belonging to 168 Zham and Sargsian personally pending its verdict in the case. The sum is huge by Armenian media standards.

Avinian, who also served as Armenia’s deputy prime minister from 2018-2021, defended the legal action when he spoke to reporters on Thursday.

“I can only advise media outlets to bear in mind before slandering anyone, lying about anyone that they can face such proceedings,” he said. “But I am otherwise not an enemy of the media.”

The 34-year-old politician did not specify which parts of the 5-minute video authored by Sargsian and posted on 168.am are untrue.

“Avinian’s real aim is to inflict significant material damage on me and thereby silence me,” Sargsian countered in a Facebook post.

The journalist, who is highly critical of the Armenian government, insisted that he simply shared with viewers credible information that was earlier reported by other media outlets and not refuted by Avinian.

Press freedom groups also criticized the lawsuit, saying that no Armenian media outlets or journalists have risked such heavy fines before.

“We are seeing a typical case of an official trying to muzzle and punish a media outlet,” said Shushan Doydoyan of the Yerevan-based Center for Freedom of Information. She noted that Avinian did not demand that the paper retract its corruption claims before he filed the lawsuit.

Pro-opposition and independent publications increasingly accuse members of Pashinian’s entourage of enriching themselves or their cronies and breaking their anti-corruption promises given during the 2018 “velvet revolution.”

Last month, hackers hijacked the YouTube channel of another newspaper, Aravot, as it was about to publish a video report detailing expensive property acquisitions by several senior government officials and pro-government lawmakers.

Earlier this year, Pashinian blamed such reports for a drop in Armenia’s position in an annual corruption survey conducted by Transparency International. He publicly urged senior officials to sue media outlets “falsely” accusing them of illicit enrichment.

In 2021, the Armenian parliament controlled by Pashinian’s party tripled maximum legal fines set for defamation.

Source: https://www.azatutyun.am/a/32409384.html

By Michael Rubin

The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War upended the decades-long Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process. The hot take at the time was that Russia and Turkey were the victors. Both the United States and France, co-chairs with Russia in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group, were caught off guard. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, had initiated the ceasefire and crafted it to insert 2,000 Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. Turkey also inserted troops as monitors in Azerbaijan.

Russian peacekeepers have shown themselves to be impotent as Azerbaijan flagrantly violates the ceasefire. While there are many parallel diplomatic processes—Russia’s, the OSCE’s, and the United States’—regional diplomats say that increasingly only Washington’s matters. Perhaps diplomacy is back.

How the White House and State Department craft diplomacy, however, is important. While the Biden administration seeks to promote a wide-ranging peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan, by conflating three different conflicts into one, they may condemn themselves to failure.

There are actually three different conflicts: Turkey-Armenia, Armenia-Azerbaijan, and Azerbaijan-Artsakh (the self-declared ethnic Armenian republic in Nagorno-Karabakh).

Turkey has blockaded Armenia since its re-independence in 1991, based not on any land dispute but rather on Turkey’s ethnic hatred toward Armenia. Ending this blockade should be an American interest, as it forces Armenia to use Iran as its economic outlook. Just last week, Turkey closed its airspace to Armenian passenger flights. The Turkey-Armenia diplomatic process should also address ending Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide. After all, if Germany’s official policy were to deny the Holocaust, no one in Washington would consider it an indispensable ally.

Armenia’s dispute with Azerbaijan should also be easily resolved. The two countries might appoint a third party—perhaps from a neutral Scandinavian country—to demarcate their borders. If Baku is sincere, it would drop its reference to fraudulent or extremist maps that show Armenia does not exist. Armenia, after all, could point to many maps from the pre-Soviet period that show a greater Armenia and no Azerbaijan. The 1975 Soviet General Staff map of the South Caucasus appears the most accurate map and can be the basis for peace. Azerbaijan, too, would have to end its blockade.

The Azerbaijan-Artsakh dispute will be the most difficult to resolve. Throughout the dispute, Armenia refrained from recognizing Artsakh’s independence so as not to undermine diplomacy. For Azerbaijan to negotiate with Armenia directly belies Azerbaijan’s insistence Armenia should have no role. Precedent is also against Armenia negotiating the fate of Artsakh. After all, Serbia and the United States did not insist Albania negotiate on behalf of Kosovo against the backdrop of that country’s fight for freedom against Serbia.

While Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev says the Nagorno-Karabakh is Azerbaijan’s based on Joseph Stalin’s gerrymandering, the region’s Armenian population has reason to be worried based on Azerbaijan’s war crimes, bulldozing of cultural heritage and, most recently, efforts to starve the Armenian population. Residents are right to be concerned that if they visit Armenia, Aliyev simply would not allow them back, a slow motion ethnic cleansing. Residents are also concerned that Aliyev’s serial violation of the 2020 ceasefire and the failure of Washington to hold him to account will only encourage future violations.

President Joe Biden’s team deserves credit for turning its attention to a long-neglected region, but not all diplomacy is the same. How Biden’s team frames the issue matters. It will be far easier to achieve lasting peace if the White House recognizes that what they assume to be one conflict is actually three. Two of these conflicts will be easy to resolve if leaders have good faith. If Turkey and Azerbaijan show they do not, then diplomacy is premature absent a push through sanctions and other coercive measures to make both Ankara and Baku offers they cannot refuse.

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Kirill Krivosheev,

Relations with Russia will have to be overhauled, since the main subject of discussion—Karabakh—will disappear. For most Armenians, the Kremlin will be seen as an unreliable ally that abandoned them in their hour of need.

A turning point has been reached in the long-running conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Last week, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that Armenia could only achieve peace on one condition: that it limit its territorial ambitions to the borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. In other words, it must relinquish its claim to Nagorno-Karabakh, having fought multiple wars with Azerbaijan for control of the mountainous region. 

A few days later, on April 23, Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint in the Lachin Corridor, the so-called “road of life” between Armenia and the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. It seems that Yerevan is ready to decisively surrender Karabakh.

Pashinyan’s announcement was widely publicized and stunned many with its bluntness, though in essence there was nothing new in it. For several years, beginning with defeat in the 2020 war, the Armenian government has tried to find a formula for Karabakh’s future that would satisfy Baku and wouldn’t result in widespread dissatisfaction in Armenia.

As early as April of last year, Pashinyan spoke of a change in priorities. The key issue for Yerevan was not Karabakh’s status, but “security and rights guarantees” for those living there. In other words, Karabakh would be a part of Azerbaijan, but there would be tough negotiations on specific issues such as the status of the Armenian language. The prime minister also tried to avoid responsibility by saying that Yerevan’s decision had been made at the request of international partners “near and far.”

In September, Pashinyan announced that he was ready to sign a peace deal with Baku: and yes, many Armenians would regard him as a traitor, but the main thing was “long-term peace and security for Armenia, with a territory of 29,800 square kilometers”—i.e., the borders of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, without Karabakh. 

Against the backdrop of these statements, Baku has been gradually expanding the area it controls in Karabakh. Yerevan’s international partners didn’t get involved, and the Armenian government decided not to respond, as it would have inevitably angered not only Baku but also international mediators.

Azerbaijan didn’t even face any consequences when it blockaded the Lachin Corridor linking Armenia and Karabakh in December 2022 (Baku maintained that there was no blockade on its part). Armenia’s response was limited to using an alternative route that had opened up in the spring: a dirt track that even off-road vehicles could barely navigate. Even that was soon off limits, however, with the Azerbaijanis shooting at Armenian police using this route and later setting up a checkpoint.

After that, it was only a matter of time before Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint on the main road to Stepanakert, the capital of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. That happened on April 23. Russian peacekeepers didn’t get involved, even though according to the tripartite agreements of 2020, the Lachin Corridor was supposed to be under their control. 

The checkpoint poses numerous new and difficult problems for the Armenians. What documents will Azeri border guards demand? Can they detain Armenians for simply looking suspicious? Will they only allow entry into Armenia, but maintain that there are no grounds to return to Karabakh?

The answers to these questions largely depend on whether the Armenians will accept this new reality. Right now, it seems they already have. Yerevan has realized that, ultimately, neither mass protests nor international partners who do nothing except “express concern” can make a difference to the fate of Karabakh. 

Last summer, the Karabakh Armenians agreed to direct talks with Baku. Officially, the aim of the negotiations is merely to provide electricity and gas to the unrecognized republic, but it’s clear that the talks are covering more than that. Yerevan agrees that the Karabakh Armenians have to make their own deals: this is a concession to Baku that also allows Yerevan to avoid responsibility. 

So what lies ahead for Karabakh? There are no grounds to expect the ethnic cleansing that has been spoken of in Yerevan or the partisan war that Baku could fear. Judging by the comments of the Azerbaijani authorities, they intend to treat the Karabakh Armenians as they do other national minorities, such as the Lezgins, the Talysh, and the Tats. There will be no special autonomous areas or adaptation programs. Still, it won’t be easy for the remaining Armenians in Karabakh to get an Azerbaijani passport. Confronted with the new, brutal reality, they may decide after all to move to Armenia. 

That will give rise to another question: whether ethnic Armenians will be able to sell their property in Karabakh, or whether it will be appropriated. The Azerbaijani authorities will likely take different approaches to the region’s native inhabitants and settlers from Armenia.

Given these circumstances, the most realistic outcome appears to be the mass emigration of Karabakh Armenians. Only elderly residents with strong attachments to their homes will remain. They don’t take part in political life or create problems for the authorities. 

All of this will no doubt anger Armenian society. It’s not just a matter of national pride, but also of material difficulties: it won’t be easy to house around 100,000 immigrants in a country of under 3 million. But these problems are nothing compared with the threat of a permanent, low-level war along the entire length of its border. 

A recent event in the village of Tegh in the Armenian border region of Syunik was a sobering reminder of the reality of that threat. The Azerbaijanis took offense to the fact that the Armenians were building a new guard post there. There was a shootout, and soldiers on both sides—seven in total—were killed. 

The Armenian authorities now know that the EU observation mission that they invited in for the next two years won’t miraculously save them. When the shooting began, the European observers weren’t on site. Their report merely noted that “in the absence of a demarcated border, the border of 1991 should be observed and the forces of both parties should move back to a safe distance from that line.” Yerevan was so disappointed that Pashinyan again spoke of a readiness to place a competing mission from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization on the border. 

There are fears in Yerevan that tensions on the border could continue even after the conclusion of the Karabakh conflict. There is also, for example, the issue of the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhichevan, which according to the 2020 tripartite agreement should be linked by road to the rest of Azerbaijan. Disputes on its status risk new escalations. 

The Armenians have already been through the denial and anger stages of grief, and now they are in the process of bargaining. Before they can reach the final stage of acceptance, they will have to go through depression, which will be softened by talk in Yerevan of peaceful development through, for example, the opening of a land border with Turkey and revitalizing economic ties with it. Statements on the widening of cooperation with the United States and EU further the same ends. 

Relations with Russia, meanwhile, will have to be overhauled, since the main subject of discussion—Karabakh—will disappear. For the majority of Armenians, the Kremlin will be seen as an unreliable ally that abandoned them in their hour of need. Only a few opposition figures from the old elites will maintain that this is all Pashinyan’s fault and that if he had only recognized Crimea as Russian territory, everything would have been different. In all other respects, Moscow’s influence will be on par with that of Ankara, Brussels, and Washington.

Source: https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/89635

In order to once again expose Nikol’s lie and forgery and present it to the public, I decided to respond paragraph by paragraph to the Facebook post of Nikol Pashinyan, who is clinging to the position of Prime Minister of Armenia. It is dedicated to the so-called citizen’s day. And in order not to post the latter’s post in this text, I am giving its link .

Response to the first paragraph. The people of Armenia cannot be Nikol’s favorite, because in order to hand over Artsakh to the enemy, as was revealed in the autumn of 2019 during the Lapshin-Hokhikyan conversation, Nikol would not go for its implementation at the cost of sacrificing several thousand victims. That’s one thing, and secondly, RA citizens can’t even theoretically be proud today, because Supreme Commander Nikol, who suffered a shameful defeat in the war, nullified the pride that really existed before. As for the so-called democratic nature of our country, that same people or, as Nikol puts it, the collective of citizens could theoretically be the only source and bearer of power, if in fact the three branches of power: parliamentary, executive and judicial, the entire system was not centralized by Nikol. in his hand.

Response to the second paragraph. what the so-called popular, non-violent, velvet revolution of 2018 was like is known to everyone who is more or less familiar with the Armenian reality, has more or less literacy and the ability to analyze what he has read, seen and heard. As for not falsifying national or local level elections, the falsifications of the June 20, 2021 vote were submitted to the RA Constitutional Court. But since the electoral fraud committed many times in Armenia was never officially accepted under the previous ones, it was not accepted in the case of Nikol’s prime ministership either. Regarding the local elections, I should say that they are not manifestations of the free will of the voters, but a disgrace in the truest sense of the word. Exactly as presented by H. K. In Andersen’s fairy tale “The King’s New Clothes”. But, unlike the child in the fairy tale, there was not the only brave person in the corridors of the Ukrainian government who would report the election scandal, shouting “Nikol is lying”. I do not give examples, because the readers of “Hraparak” must be familiar with them.

Response to the third paragraph. in the previous paragraph, it was stated that if the free expression of the voters was “one of the primary and key goals” of the 2018 change of government, then we can record that it was completely defeated. As for the absence of political prisoners in Armenia, there were none during the previous era either. And he himself was not a political prisoner, but a criminal. Another issue is that after the change of power in 2018, the legal formulation was changed in terms of him and others. In terms of today’s political prisoners who are behind bars as criminals, the same will naturally happen after he is removed from power. As for the expression of thoughts and ideas and the freedom of information in general, everyone can assess its real state. Who would ever devote a day to watching Public Television programs? A structure that is fed by money paid from taxpayers’ pockets and should theoretically represent the entire society.
Response to the fourth paragraph. Another attempt to blame the “disastrous failures of the 44-day war and its aftermath” on the opponents is false, like all his activities. If these disasters had happened, as he says, “because of the lack of democracy, legality, free civil debate and the existence of taboos and stereotypes”, then in the four days preceding the 44-day war only 4 years ago, we would not have forced Ilham to ask Moscow for a cease-fire. So, the greatest failure of our people was not not overcoming taboos and stereotypes, but bringing them to power through a street movement just 2 years after the victorious four-day event. It was our mistake that was worse than the crime, as the French jurist Antoine Boule de la Mert said back in the early 19th century. And if we hadn’t made the biggest mistake in a while, then today we would have what existed in the days of the former. And it wouldn’t have been what we “got” thanks to Nicole’s administration.

H. C. I will not comment on the last two paragraphs, because they contain, first, the repetition of what has already been said. for example, the “justification” of pride that doesn’t really exist. And then, an effort to appear smarter than you really are.

Vakhtang Siradeghyan

Almost a year after the beginning of the resistance movement, the opposition is once again preparing to start the process of removing Pashinyan from power.

Although the previous two attempts failed, the demand for a change of power is gaining more and more public support. It is expected that in the coming days the opposition will announce about initiating a new movement aimed at the change of power and starting actions.

The first attempt at the change of power was the movement to save the Motherland. In December 2020, 17 opposition parties announced the initiation of a movement to save the Motherland, the goal of which was declared to be “constitutionally getting rid of the disastrous administration of Armenia by creating a transitional, anti-crisis government.” On the one hand, little time had passed since Pashinyan’s capitulation, signed on November 9, and a large mass of society did not accept the idea of ​​defeat and national humiliation, demanding the removal of the government responsible for it. On the other hand, the defeat, the grief of thousands of victims, the search for the missing and the captured caused a feeling of fear and uncertainty about the resumption of the war in the society.

Pashinyan offered to express no confidence in him and resolve the power issue through extraordinary parliamentary elections. From the beginning, the Movement for the Salvation of the Fatherland did not intend to follow the Pashinyan scenario, understanding that the government will use the leverage it has to reproduce itself, but some parties included in the movement considered that the elections are also a constitutional opportunity to take the power and accepted the offer to participate in the early elections, as a result of which the Movement split, his declared goal was not realized.

The next attempt at a change of power was the Resistance movement initiated by the opposition in April 2022, which began with the chairman of Hayrenik Party, Artur Vanetsyan, starting a sit-in in Liberty Square demanding a change of power, followed by a message from the representative of the ARF Supreme Body, Ishkhan Saghatelyan, calling for a change of power. “We, with our team, with all our resources, with thousands of our compatriots and supporters, are going out into the street struggle, we are going down to the streets in order to remove these anti-national and nation-destroying authorities,” the message said. The street struggle that lasted almost two months was unsuccessful. the rallies called by the opposition, which were crowded at the beginning, later lost public interest,
Those people who are now actively discussing the issue of starting a new movement aimed at the change of power, claiming that this one will last very short and will be crowned with success, justify that now the situation has changed significantly. First, over the past two and a half years, the government has lost a significant portion of public support. If in the past the government organized rallies to demonstrate its public support, now the government cannot gather even a thousand people without using administrative resources. Almost all of Pashinyan’s “public” contacts, even those that have been pre-screened and instructed, end in scandal and arrest.

After the war, the society believed that by accepting the results of the defeat, it is possible to avoid a new war and new losses. The implementation of the change of power by the opposition was seen as a manifestation of revanchism, especially since Pashinyan had declared himself a supporter of peace, a guarantor of the so-called “peace agenda”. During this time, the public consciousness began to understand that it is not possible to achieve peace with the psychology of a loser and begging for peace. On the contrary, the enemy takes it as a sign of weakness, initiating new attacks, as a result of which we have hundreds of victims and wounded.

The other thesis put forward by Pashinyan – let’s give Artsakh to Azerbaijan, save Armenia – also proved its bankruptcy. Even those citizens of Armenia who believed and supported this thesis began to understand that Azerbaijan’s ambitions do not end only with Artsakh, and the next target may be their city, village or their own home. Tens of thousands of people began to publicly and not so much regret that they believed in Pashinyan and voted for him and his party.

Regarding the danger and inadmissibility of Pashinyan’s further tenure, there is also a consensus among the representatives of big business, because people understand that the government’s willingness to join the anti-Russian sanctions, which is more often talked about as a promise already made to the West, can significantly worsen Armenia’s economic situation, leading to bankruptcy. and destroying tens of hundreds of companies in industry, agriculture, fish industry, trade and service sector. The activity of the Armenian economy is based not only on cheap Russian energy carriers, but also on the Russian market. The Russian response to the decision of the RA authorities to join the Western sanctions can destroy the current economic system of Armenia.

The representatives of the opposition claim that, unlike the previous two attempts, this time they were better prepared, a lot of organizational work was done to make the rallies more massive. They are convinced that strong public pressure will force the government to abandon the use of force and violence, and ultimately they will succeed in forcing Pashinyan to resign. The only danger is that if this one attempt ends in failure, it will give Pashinyan the opportunity to more freely implement his promises and intentions to various parties, using public apathy and lack of resistance.

Avetis Babajanyan

Varsenik Barseghyan started this petition

https://www.change.org/p/armenians-of-the-whole-world-let-s-sign-this-petition-which-refers-to-the-lawsuit-submit?recruiter=false&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook_messenger&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&recruited_by_id=2bfa13e0-d7e7-11ed-8a17-07c3ae5f5f32&fbclid=IwAR3Gyfa9ysnC7l8GUQ1pHYsgZiCUXXnsY1DjNwdxa51zZNmLAoJo9A7IjTk

The actions carried out by Nikol Pashinyan contain features of State treason. Source: