Friday, September 17, 2021
Kocharian Not Allowed To Visit Russia
September 17, 2021
• Naira Bulghadarian
• Astghik Bedevian
Armenia - Former President Robert Kocharian holds a post-election news
conference in Yerevan, June 22, 2021.
An Armenian court has refused to allow Robert Kocharian, a former president
leading the main opposition Hayastan alliance, to visit Moscow at the invitation
of Russia’s ruling party.
Kocharian’s office revealed the invitation last week, saying that the leadership
of the United Russia party wants to deepen “partnership” with Hayastan,
Armenia’s second largest parliamentary force. The trip was due to start at the
end of Russian parliamentary elections slated for September 17-19.
Kocharian needs a court permission to leave Armenia because of standing trial on
corruption charges rejected by him as politically motivated. Anna Danibekian,
the judge presiding over the trial, repeatedly allowed him to visit Moscow
earlier this year and last fall. She also cleared him of other, more serious
charges in April.
Hayastan said on Friday that Danibekian has refused to give such permission this
time around without any “legal reason.” “We are forced to cancel the visit,” the
opposition bloc said in a statement.
The statement charged that the judge made the decision under strong government
pressure. It said the move is aimed at “restricting Hayastan’s political
activities” and undermining Russian-Armenian relations.
RUSSIA - A truck drives past a campaign poster of the United Russia political
party ahead of the Russian parliamentary and regional election outside Ulan-Ude,
Buryatia republic, September 16, 2021.
Kocharian, who ruled Armenia from 1998-2008, is thought to enjoy a warm rapport
with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter has repeatedly made a point of
congratulating the ex-president on his birthday anniversaries and praising his
legacy ever since Armenian law-enforcement authorities first indicted him three
years ago.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has described Kocharian as a “big friend of
Russia” and said the two men “talk to each other quite often.” But he insisted
in March that the Kremlin is not supporting or guiding Kocharian’s political
activities in any way.
Kocharian’s bloc was the main opposition challenger of Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinian and his party in snap parliamentary elections held June. It finished
second in the polls.
Kocharian told senior members of the bloc to intensify its activities and public
outreach efforts at a meeting held on Tuesday. According to a Hayastan statement
on the meeting, they assured him that they remain committed to ousting the
“government wrecking Armenia and leading it to destruction.”
“Very soon you will also witness street actions,” Ishkhan Saghatelian, a senior
Hayastan figure, told reporters earlier on Friday. He did not go into details.
Asked whether this means the alliance is planning to hold anti-government
rallies, Saghatelian said: “We never gave up rallies in the first place.”
Armenian Opposition Lawmakers Spurn Holiday Bonuses
September 17, 2021
• Robert Zargarian
Armenia - Senor lawmakers from the opposition Hayastan and Pativ Unem alliances
talk during a parliament session in Yerevan, August 24, 2021.
Opposition lawmakers said on Friday that they will not accept hefty holiday
bonuses allocated to all members and staffers of Armenia’s parliament by speaker
Alen Simonian.
Simonian decided to reward them on the occasion of the country’s Independence
Day that will be marked on September 21. The one-off payments will be equivalent
to 75 percent of the parliament deputies’ monthly wages, meaning that each of
them will get at least 380,000 drams ($770).
Both opposition alliances represented in the National Assembly criticized the
decision as profligate and unethical, saying that the Armenian authorities are
continuing to neglect the country’s socioeconomic problems aggravated by last
year’s war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“At a time when the country has severe socioeconomic problems and more than
10,000 wounded and disabled persons, public officials, including National
Assembly deputies, are continuing to get bonuses,” said Ishkhan Saghatelian, a
deputy parliament speaker and senior member of the opposition Hayastan bloc.
“In line with our campaign platform and statements, we will not benefit from
these sums,” Saghatelian told reporters. “We will either return them to the
state budget or use them for implementing a [charity] project in of Armenia’s
border regions.”
The opposition Pativ Unem bloc likewise said that all of its seven
parliamentarians will donate their bonuses to victims of the Karabakh war and
their families. In a statement, it said accepting the money means “living a
normal life as if nothing happened” to Armenia and Karabakh.
Armenia - Deputies from the ruling Civil Contract party attend a parliament
session,, September 13, 2021.
The parliamentary group of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party
did not officially react to the opposition criticism.
One of its members, Hovik Aghazarian, praised his opposition colleagues for
planning to use their bonuses for charitable purposes. But Aghazarian made clear
that he himself will take the extra cash.
Another pro-government parliamentarian, Heriknaz Tigranian, said there is
nothing wrong with accepting what she described as a “symbolic reward” worth
roughly twice the amount of the average monthly wage in Armenia.
Government officials said that all Armenian civil servants will receive
Independence Day bonuses.
Armenia’s previous parliament also controlled by Pashinian’s party faced similar
criticism earlier this year when it decided to add 250,000 drams to its
deputies’ monthly wages worth at least 473,000 drams. The extra sum was supposed
to cover their job expenses.
Armenia Takes Azerbaijan To International Court
September 17, 2021
• Anush Mkrtchian
NETHERLANDS -- People walk toward the International Court of Justice in the
Hague, August 27, 2018
Armenia has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hold Azerbaijan
responsible for what it called anti-Armenian “racial discrimination,” mass
killings and other grave human rights abuses committed during the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
“For decades, Azerbaijan has subjected Armenians to racial discrimination, with
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev himself leading the way,” reads its lawsuit
announced by the Hague-based UN tribunal on late Thursday.
“As a result of this state-sponsored policy of Armenian hatred, Armenians have
been subjected to systemic discrimination, mass killings, torture and other
abuse,” it says, adding that they “once again came to the fore” during last
year’s Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
It claims that Azerbaijan has continued to kill and torture Armenian prisoners
of war and civilian captives even after the six-week war was stopped by a
Russian-brokered ceasefire last November. Dozens of Armenians are believed to
remain in Azerbaijani captivity.
Yerevan wants the ICJ to find Baku guilty of violating several articles of the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination (CERD). It is also seeking urgent measures to “protect and
preserve Armenia’s rights and the rights of Armenians from further harm.”
Responding to the Armenian move, Azerbaijan said it is poised to file a similar
lawsuit against Armenia in the same court. The Foreign Ministry in Baku said it
has been “carefully documenting and compiling evidence of gross human rights
abuses” for that purpose.
“This includes Armenia’s targeting of Azerbaijanis for expulsion, torture,
murder and serious mistreatment,” it said in a statement reported by the AFP
news agency.
In comments cited by the Interfax news agency, the ministry spokeswoman, Leyla
Abdullayeva, accused Yerevan of hampering the return of Azerbaijani civilians to
districts around Karabakh retaken by the Azerbaijani army during and after the
hostilities. She said the Armenians are refusing to share with Baku all maps of
their landmines laid in those areas.
Ara Ghazarian, a Yerevan-based international law expert, welcomed the Armenian
government’s decision to take Baku to the UN court.
“For Armenia and its people, this lawsuit is a means for legal protection and
also deterrence against Azerbaijan,” Ghazarian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on
Friday.
The ICJ was set up after World War II to rule on disputes between UN member
states. The court usually takes years to hand down rulings on cases brought by
them.
Armenian, Iranian Leaders Discuss Closer Ties Amid Transport Hurdles
September 17, 2021
Tajikistan - Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi (R) and Armenian Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinian meet in Dushanbe, September 17, 2021.
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian
discussed on Friday ways of deepening bilateral commercial ties complicated by
an Azerbaijani checkpoint set up on the main highway connecting the two
neighboring states.
Raisi and Pashinian met on the sidelines of a Collective Security Treaty
Organization summit in Tajikistan as Azerbaijani officers stopped and demanded
hefty payments from Iranian trucks transporting goods to and from Armenia for
the sixth consecutive day.
More than a hundred such trucks were reportedly stranded on Thursday at a
21-kilometer section of the highway which the Armenian government
controversially ceded to Azerbaijan following last year’s war in
Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijani authorities set up the checkpoint there on Sunday
after again accusing Iranian trucks of illegally shipping cargos to
Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Armenian government’s press office said Pashinian and Raisi discussed, among
other things, ways of “organizing unfettered cargo shipments between the two
countries” as well as “processes taking place in the region.” It gave no details.
The official Iranian readout of the talks made no mention of the new obstacle to
Armenian-Iranian trade and wider transport links. It said Raisi “stressed the
need to increase the current level of economic relations between Iran and
Armenia.”
In that regard, the recently elected Iranian president was reported to say that
an Armenian-Iranian intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation should
become “more active.” He proposed that Yerevan and Tehran set up joint
“specialized working groups” that would deal with “obstacles” to the
implementation of their joint economic projects.
According to the statement posted on the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s website,
Pashinian pledged to “instruct relevant ministers” to remove those obstacles.
It was Pashinian’s second meeting with Raisi in less than two months. The two
men held their first face-to-face talks in early August when the Armenian
premier visited Tehran to attend Raisi’s swearing-in ceremony held in the
Iranian parliament.
During those talks Pashinian reaffirmed his government’s readiness to have
Iranian companies participate in its plans to refurbish Armenian highways
leading to the Islamic Republic. The two governments set up in May a working
group tasked with looking into practical aspects of such participation.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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