Friday,
Armenian Parliament Approves Community Enlargement
• Karine Simonian
Armenia - Deputies from the ruling Civil Contract party preside over
parliamentary hearings on a controversial enlargement of Armenia's communities
sought by the government, Yerevan, September 22, 2021.
In a move strongly condemned by its opposition minority, the National Assembly
approved on Friday a controversial government proposal to merge the vast
majority of Armenian cities and villages into much bigger communities.
A government bill passed by lawmakers will turn 441 existing communities into 38
administrative units that will resemble districts. Armenia will have a total of
79 communities, including the capital Yerevan, as a result.
Most of the current communities already consist of multiple villages and/or
small towns consolidated by the former Armenian government.
The current government has opted for a further community consolidation, saying
that it will make local self-government and budgetary spending on communities
more efficient.
Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Gnel Sanosian
defended the measure during a parliament debate. He said government experts have
concluded that good governance and socioeconomic development is highly
problematic in rural communities with fewer than 3,000 residents.
Sanosian assured their residents that every small Armenian village will retain
its administration subordinate to the wider community leadership. “No settlement
in Armenia will be liquidated or renamed,” he said.
Many elected community heads are strongly opposed to the consolidation. The
country’s two main opposition groups have also denounced it as arbitrary and
unfounded.
Lawmakers representing them walked out of the parliament at the start of
Friday’s debate in protest against what they called an unconstitutional bill.
Hayk Mamijanian of the opposition Pativ Unem bloc claimed that the government is
pushing through the bill to get rid of elected local officials affiliated with
or sympathetic to opposition parties.
Government officials have denied any political reasons for the community
enlargement.
Armenian Speaker’s Brother Wins Government Contracts
• Naira Nalbandian
Armenia- Speaker Alen Simonian chairs a session o f the National Assembly,
Yerevan, September 13, 2021
A road construction company run by parliament speaker Alen Simonian’s brother
has won in the last few months two government contracts worth $1.4 million,
raising suspicions of a conflict of interest and even corruption.
The investigative publication Hetq.am revealed this week that the relatively
small firm called EuroAsphalt won a recent government tender for paving rural
roads around Aparan, a small town in Armenia’s central Aragatsotn province. It
signed a relevant contract with the local government on September 19 after
pledging to carry out the road works for 287 million drams ($595,000).
In June, EuroAsphalt was contracted by the Armenian Ministry of Territorial
Administration and Infrastructures to repair country roads in northwestern
Shirak province. The repairs were supposed to cost the state 386 million drams.
EuroAsphalt had an authorized capital of just over $100 when it was founded by
two little-known individuals in 2018. Simonian’s brother Karlen became its
executive director early this year.
Karlen Simonian also manages another construction company called EuroAsphalt-1.
It was registered in February 2021 and was worth 140 million drams at the time.
Deputy Prime Minister Suren Papikian, who served as minister of territorial
administration until recently, insisted on Thursday that EuroAsphalt won the two
contracts as a result of transparent and fair tenders, rather than its chief
executive’s government connection.
“If people have information about corruption schemes, let them make it public,
for God’s sake,” said Papikian.
Civic activists see a cause for concern, however. Varuzhan Hoktanian of the
Armenian affiliate of the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International
said that the integrity of tenders won by individuals linked to state officials
has long been in serious doubt in Armenia. He said an Armenian Finance Ministry
division in charge of state procurements must therefore scrutinize the contracts
granted to EuroAsphalt.
“When such tenders are won with amazing consistency by relatives or cronies of
state officials there are corruption risks involved,” agreed Artur Sakunts, a
veteran human rights campaigner. “This must definitely become a subject of
investigation.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian for years alleged corrupt practices in the
administration of tenders won by such individuals when he was in opposition to
Armenia’s former governments. He claimed to have eliminated “systemic
corruption” in the country after coming to power in 2018.
Alen Simonian is a close associate of Pashinian. A spokeswoman for the
parliament speaker told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday that he will not
comment on his brother’s business activities for now. She said at the same time
that he is ready to answer questions submitted in writing.
Simonian also raised eyebrows when he appointed a businessman and friend of his
as chief of the Armenian parliament staff days after becoming its speaker in
August.
The businessman, Vahan Naribekian, owns a company supplying furniture to the
National Assembly and various government and law-enforcement agencies. According
to Hetq.am, the company has won 148 supply contracts since the 2018 regime
change.
Karabakh Conflict Unresolved, Insists Armenia
• Astghik Bedevian
Nagorno Karabakh -- Pedestrians walk past a poster bearing a flag of
Nagorno-Karabakh in Stepanakert on November 24, 2020,
Official Yerevan dismissed on Friday Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s fresh
claim that Azerbaijan ended the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with its victory in
the six-week war stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire last November.
“The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is a thing of the past,” Aliyev declared on late
on Thursday, addressing a session of the UN General Assembly.
“Azerbaijan no longer has an administrative-territorial unit called
Nagorno-Karabakh,” he said, adding that the international community should stop
using the Armenian-populated territory’s name.
“The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains unresolved,” countered Armen Grigorian,
the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council. “The issue of Nagorno-Karabakh’s
status still awaits a solution and we see that solution within the framework of
the OSCE Minsk Group.”
The U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Lynne Tracy, has repeatedly made similar
statements in recent weeks.
“We do not see the status of Nagorno-Karabakh as having been resolved,” Tracy
insisted on September 13 in remarks condemned by the Azerbaijani Foreign
Ministry.
Aliyev ruled out on July 22 any negotiations on Karabakh’s status, saying that
Yerevan must instead recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over the disputed
territory.
Later in July, the U.S., Russian and French diplomats co-chairing the Minsk
Group issued a joint statement calling for a “negotiated, comprehensive, and
sustainable settlement of all remaining core substantive issues of the
conflict.” They said the conflicting parties should resume talks “as soon as
possible.”
The Karabakh issue was on the agenda of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s
talks with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian held on Thursday on the
sidelines of the UN General Assembly. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry,
the two men reaffirmed their governments’ intention to continue to strive for
“stabilizing the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh, first and foremost in the OSCE
Minsk Group format.”
Le Drian also met separately in New York with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat
Mirzoyan.
Yerevan Still Hopeful About Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement
• Sargis Harutyunyan
Armenia -- Armen Grigorian, the secretary of the Security Council, at a news
conference in Yerevan, .
The Armenian government still hopes to normalize Armenia’s relations with Turkey
despite apparent preconditions set by Ankara, a senior official in Yerevan said
on Friday.
Armen Grigorian, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, said Yerevan is
ready to start a Turkish-Armenian “dialogue without preconditions” and discuss
all thorny issues during a “gradual” normalization process.
Grigorian did not explicitly deny that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian offered
earlier this month to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “We
believe that a dialogue at a high and the highest levels is one of the ways of
normalizing those relations,” he told reporters.
Erdogan claimed last week to have received the offer from Pashinian through
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili. He appeared to make such a meeting
conditional on Armenia agreeing to open a transport corridor that would connect
Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave.
In his earlier comments on Yerevan’s overtures to Ankara, Erdogan cited
Azerbaijan’s demands for a formal Armenian recognition of Azerbaijani
sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Asked about the apparent Turkish preconditions, Grigorian said: “The Armenian
side has stated on numerous occasions … that relations with Turkey should be
normalized without preconditions because whenever there are preconditions it’s
hard to make progress on any issue. So we hope that the normalization of
relations will be without preconditions.”
Armenian opposition leaders have denounced what they see as Pashinian’s secret
overtures to Erdogan. They say that Ankara continues to make the establishment
of diplomatic relations with Yerevan and the opening of the Turkish-Armenian
border conditional on a Nagorno-Karabakh settlement favorable to Baku.
Turkey provided decisive military assistance to Azerbaijan during the six-week
war in Karabakh stopped by a Russian-brokered ceasefire last November.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2021 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.