Category: 2020

                                        Monday, 
Armenian Town Sealed Off Over Coronavirus Outbreak
        • Satenik Kaghzvantsian
Armenia -- A police checkpoint outside Maralik, .
Authorities sealed off a small town and an adjacent village in Armenia’s 
northwestern Shirak province on Sunday after 18 employees of a local hospital 
tested positive for coronavirus.
Two local residents died from COVID-19, a respiratory disease caused by the 
virus, after the Armenian police set up roadblocks around the town of Maralik 
and the village of Dzorakap in the morning.
The head of the provincial administration’s healthcare department, Leyli 
Aslanian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on Monday that one of them, a 
90-year-old man, was the father of an infected nurse working at the Maralik 
hospital.
Aslanian said that the old man was diagnosed with coronavirus just hours before 
his death. His family declined offers to hospitalize him even though he had a 
fever for almost a week, she said.
The Maralik hospital was temporarily shut down on Saturday after the 18 
coronavirus cases were confirmed among its 61-member staff. Shirak’s governor, 
Tigran Petrosian, said the infected medical personnel were taken to a hospital 
in the provincial capital Gyumri while their colleages were placed under 
quarantine. The authorities also ordered more than 40 relatives and friends of 
the infected medics to self-isolate, he said.
Local officials did not disclose the suspected source of the infections. Another 
Maralik resident died from coronavirus early this month. The 68-year-old man was 
reportedly taken to the local medical center before being hospitalized in Gyumri.
The latest fatalties brought Armenia’s death toll from COVID-19 to 22. The 
Armenian Ministry of Health reported on Monday morning that the total number of 
coronavirus cases in the country rose by 48 to 1,339 in the past day.
Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian, who oversees the enforcement of a 
coronavirus-related state of emergency in Armenia, announced his decision to 
lock down Maralik and Dzorakap on Saturday evening.
Avinian ordered the police to ensure that people can enter or leave the two 
adjacent communities only in cases of extreme necessity or for the purpose of 
agricultural work until April 25. The ban also does not cover trucks supplying 
food, fuel and medicine to the town of 5,000 residents located about 100 
kilometers northwest of Yerevan.
All roads leading to Maralik were blocked by police checkpoints on Monday. “We 
only let through people with special permissions,” a policeman manning one of 
those checkpoints told RFE/RL’s Armenian service.
Armenian President Concerned About Hardship Caused By Coronavirus
        • Harry Tamrazian
Armenia -- President Armen Sarkissian meets with children from socially 
vulnerable families, Gyumri, December 7, 2019.
President Armen Sarkissian has said that he feels the pain of scores of poor 
Armenians who have lost their jobs and other sources of income due to the 
coronavirus pandemic.
In a weekend interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian service, Sarkissian stressed the 
need to find the right “balance” between easing their hardship through renewed 
business activity and tackling the deadly virus.
“My thoughts are constantly with such families because they lack reserves, so to 
speak, to get by for one, two or three months [without work,]” he said. “They 
obviously need assistance and that assistance must come not only from the state.
“Of course, the state and business need to cooperate very closely, and I can see 
that the government is taking some steps in the financial, social and business 
sectors. To the best of my ability, I certainly give my advice when necessary, 
but it’s a quite difficult problem.”
“It’s not an Armenian problem, it’s a global problem, and it’s hard to find the 
right balance between public health and public well-being,” added Sarkissian.
The Armenian government ordered a nationwide lockdown last month in an effort to 
contain the spread of coronavirus. Since then it has also approved a series of 
measures designed to cushion the severe economic impact of the lockdown.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian listed those measures in a televised address to 
the nation aired on Friday. In particular, he touted some 7 billion drams ($14.4 
million) in one-off cash handouts planned or already paid by the government to 
about 100,000 socially vulnerable citizens. They include employees of private 
firms forced to suspend their operations, microbusiness owners, self-employed 
and unregistered workers as well as some pregnant women.
“The most endangered stratum in our country is those people who had no permanent 
jobs and were dependent on day labor; those families that have always had very 
modest incomes,” said Sarkissian. “Just imagine what a difficult time those 
families … are having now.”
The head of state, who has largely ceremonial powers, also said that despite the 
unfolding economic crisis Armenians should already think about “how we will be 
living after coronavirus.”
“In the case of Armenia, we can, for example start from the simplest thing: 
public health … Right now air in our city [Yerevan] is two or three times 
cleaner than it was before coronavirus. So why don’t we think about always 
having clean air?” he said.
Sarkissian suggested in that regard that the municipal authorities plant trees 
on more than 100 hectares of presently unused land adjacent to the 
Tsitsernakabert memorial to the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman 
Turkey. The public park could have 1.5 million trees matching the estimated 
number of genocide victims, he said.
“I have written to the government, the prime minister and the [Yerevan] mayor 
proposing that we discuss this issue,” the president said. He added that he will 
personally start raising private funds for the would-be park if they back the 
idea.
Pashinian Vows ‘Purge’ Of Armenian State Officials
Armenia -- Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian speaks during his government's 
question-and-answer session in parliament, Yerevan, April 15, 2020.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has pledged to purge Armenia’s government, 
judiciary and security apparatus of “remnants” of the country’s former 
leadership, accusing them of trying to discredit him and scuttle his 
far-reaching initiatives.
In a video message streamed live on Facebook on Sunday night, Pashinian charged 
that many Armenian media outlets are also sympathetic to the former regime and 
keen to undercut him.
“It’s probably about time that real purges within the government took place,” he 
declared before hitting out at former President Serzh Sarkisian and his 
political allies.
“They still have lots of their people in the government and the law-enforcement 
system,” he said. “They do because we said that there will be no vendettas and 
gave everyone a chance. But now the time for using that chance is up.”
“The state governance system must be cleansed of Serzh’s remnants … Nobody can 
blame us for doing that because they had that chance and haven’t used it,” added 
Pashinian. He did not name anyone.
The remarks followed a scandal that marred Pashinian’s live address to the 
nation broadcast on Friday evening by Armenian Public Television. Several other, 
private TV broadcasters, some of which are controlled by Pashinian’s political 
foes, were allowed retransmit it.
It emerged afterwards for at least 15 minutes preceding the broadcast, Public 
Television also filmed Pashinian’s preparation for the address which focused on 
the Armenian government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic. The sensitive 
footage was leaked to some of his detractors who circulated it on social media 
to mock the prime minister.
On Sunday morning, Pashinian’s spokeswoman, Mane Gevorgian, accused Public 
Television of negligence and a lack of professionalism, saying that it should 
have alerted the premier that he is being recorded. Gevorgian also lambasted the 
state-funded broadcaster for giving the other TV channels access to not only the 
speech but also what preceded it.
The Public Television management denied any wrongdoing. It insisted that prior 
to the broadcast one of its employees informed the prime minister’s aides about 
the filming.
Armenia -- Margarita Grigorian, executive director of Armenian Public Television.
Nevertheless, Public Television’s executive director, Margarita Grigorian, 
resigned on Monday, saying that she takes responsibility for the incident. In a 
statement, Grigorian also implicitly accused other broadcasters of violating 
ethical standards of journalism and leaking the footage. She described that as a 
“stab in the back.”
In his late-night Facebook message, Pashinian downplayed the incident while 
attacking “swaggering scumbags” who he said are taking advantage of his 
administration’s tolerance of political dissent. He stressed that during the 
2018 “Velvet Revolution” in Armenia he prevented their “lynching” by angry 
crowds that toppled Sarkisian.
“People were demanding that … we take the scumbags, who are swaggering now, out 
of their homes and swat them in the streets,” he said. “But we said no, this is 
not our work style.”
Pashinian went on to allege that Armenia’s former regime is stepping up its 
smear campaign against him because of what he described as major progress made 
in ongoing corruption investigations conducted by law-enforcement bodies. He 
said they are also worried about the Armenian parliament’s passage of government 
bills on judicial reform and confiscation of assets deemed to have been acquired 
illegally.
The 44-year-old former journalist also blasted the Armenian media, saying that 
that up until the 2018 revolution “99 percent of media outlets and 70 percent of 
journalists received money from the [former] authorities.” “They are not getting 
that money now and the entire media field is furious with that,” he claimed.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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