Author: Emma Nadirian

                                        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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