Corruption within the Armenian government resulted in a revolution that shifted the tides in the relationship between the media and the government. Armenia has been added to the list of countries around the world enforcing censorship behind “hate speech” and “fake news” laws.
Armenia is no stranger to conflicts between the government and the media. In 2018, investigative journalists uncovered mounting evidence of corruption in the government. The findings sparked the Velvet Revolution in April of 2018. The revolution was Armenia’s first revolt against the government since its separation from the Soviet Union. It was a seemingly peaceful transition to democracy within the country.
A key moment in the Velvet Revolution started with Armenian parliament member Nikol Pashinyan and his “My Step” protest march on March 31. His movement would begin in Armenia’s second-largest city of Gyumri and was only composed of Pashinyan and a dozen people, mainly journalists. As they journeyed to the capital, Yerevan, thousands joined the movement in the two-week march.
The revolution gained widespread coverage within the country, with TV companies covering breaking news opposing the political agenda influenced by supporters of the corrupt government. After the Velvet Revolution, corruption in the media became a popular issue for government officials to address.
The revolution was influenced by the mass protests following Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan’s announcement of his candidacy for prime minister. Anti-government protests wreaked havoc across the country in the wake of Sargsyan coming to power in 2008. Sargsyan’s presidency was the root of the country’s years of corruption. He was indicted for embezzling one million dollars of state money.
If it succeeds, the Velvet Revolution would be the first successful movement since the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Three weeks after the protest, Pashinyan was elected as a temporary head of the government.
Starting in early October, the office of the news website Hayeli.am, was attacked for “Anti-Armenian” headlines attacking Pashinyan, now Prime Minister. The coverage was seen across the political spectrum was as an inappropriate attack against the press.
Since 2018, Pashinyan and his allies were successful in taking control of a majority of the corrupt government. Although some outlets continue to be loyal to the previous administration, many are fiercely loyal to Pashinyan and his allies.
Even with the gradual gains of press freedoms since 2018, the growing conflict between the government and media has grown. From 2018 to 2019, Armenia moved up 19 places on the World Press Index by Reporters Without Borders, ranking them 61 in 2019.
The Committee to Protect Freedom of _expression_ (CPFE) recorded 33 additional lawsuits against journalists in their third-quarter report of the situation in Armenia, to the 83 reported lawsuits in the first quarter. CPFE blamed the rise in suits to the fact that media outlets continue to be infected with hate speech, fake news, biased comments, and manipulation.
“In the post-revolutionary period, when the polarization and division of the media into political and financial camps became more acute, many media outlets turned into propaganda machines primarily serving the interests of their political sponsors and ignoring the public interest,” CPFE reported.
Armenia is dealing with “fake news” from well-known platforms hiding behind the right to free speech. Before Pashinyan came into power last year, many of the media outlets worked under former president Sargsyan’s son-in-law, Mikayel Minasyan. After the revolution, a multitude of Minasyan’s media outlets were sold to buyers still connected with the former authorities.
Out of all the outlets sold by Minasyan, the 5th Channel is the most anti-government. The channel covers a combination of political persecutions against the former authorities by the new government and the weakness of the new powers.
“5th Channel is a part of Kocharyan’s political campaign, it’s a propaganda tool,” said Vardanyan of the Media Initiative Center.
On October 29, the Armenian Institute of International Security Affairs hosted an event but declined to allow a handful of media outlets.
CPFE and the Media Initiative Center faltered at this discussion, saying, “although there is a reality in the Armenian media field where the media serve different political interests, non-governmental organizations should not be discriminated against, guided by their sympathy or hatred.”
It is unlikely that 5th Channel’s license will be renewed due to Armen Tavadyan’s arrest on suspicion of false testimony, and either bribery or coercion to give a false testimony. Tavadyan had been arrested because of his connections to the 2008 criminal case involving Varuzhan Mkrtchyan, a supporter of former president Kocharyan.
Pashinyan faces an uphill battle with 90 percent of media in Armenia being controlled by supporters of the old government. He is still fighting against corruption in the media. Through all the roles he’s had across Armenia, Pashinyan and his family still a low circulated newspaper, Armtimes.
Armenia may choose to draw on the legacy of its own long history, as opposed to the Soviet legacy narratives. Doing so will help the country through institutional development and reforms.
March 6, 2020 – Valentina Gevorgyan
The history of Armenia spans from antiquity to present. The sentence “According to the Bible, Noah landed his ark on Mount Ararat” is learned by every schoolchild of Armenian descent, and also, Armenians proudly claim to be the first nation in the world to have adopted Christianity as the state religion (301). However, what usually gets lost in this conversation is that the history of Armenians goes farther than that. Armenia is a state survivor from periods of invasions, wars, migration and treaties. Its people have been scattered among the Ottoman, Russian and Persian Empires, and it has a worldwide diaspora. For most of Armenia’s history, its lands lay between rival empires, a circumstance which has continuously affected the life of its people for centuries.
Self-reliance and revolution, as emerging ideas with the goal to liberate identity, have been defining characteristics of the Armenian people. Since the nineteenth century, the history of Armenian emancipation has resembled revolutionary cycles manifested in various forms. Westernised and nurtured on the lessons of the French Revolution, Armenians considered the concept of revolution as something to be historically significant and relevant. In 1880 Raffi, a great Armenian writer, released his novel Khent (“the Fool”) in which he created prophetically the model of the “new Armenian man” as a revolutionary. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Armenian political parties were developed as promoters of revolutionary ideas, including the Armenakan party formed in Van[1] (1885), the Hnchak (Social Democratic)[2] party founded in Geneva (1887), and the Dashnaktsutiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) party established in Tiflis (1980). The historical role assigned to parties was their ability to properly balance the centuries-old national traditions and culture with universal values by uniting and spreading them among Armenians. The parties also served an important platform to counter the fear, hatred and genocide policy towards Armenians adopted by the Sultan, Young Turk and Kemalist authorities.
Armenian history can be summarised as a history of struggle to liberate Armenian literature, language, and the right to schooling and secular thinking. The quest for education, research and an enlightened mind is wrapped in the exploratory and explanatory enquiries of Armenian thinkers that the nation, luckily, had more than a few. In the eighteenth century, Armenian culture was preserved and revitalised by a small group of monks. In 1717, Armenian scholar Mkhitar Sebastatsi founded the Armenian Catholic Congregation in San Lazaro, Venice. The group revived the Armenian tradition through compiling, recopying and organising ancient Armenian texts. The Mkhitaryans have left a voluminous data on multiple disciplines (including physics, chemistry, mechanics, geology, botany, zoology, mining, meteorology and astronomy) in the form of textbooks, monographs and articles. Then the developments witnessed an even greater shift in Armenian national ideology: from religious to secular, followed by the emergence of new intelligentsia. Among the representatives of Armenian thinking was Khachatur Abovyan (1809-1848), a writer and an advocate of national unity and spiritual revival. His “The Wound of Armenia” was the first novel in Eastern Armenian. It is a collective of Armenian psychology: a quest for liberation and secrets of the continuous power of resistance. He openly discussed universal values that are capable of guiding people regardless of any nationality. His elevated thinking manifested in the concept of universal values that were meant for all people, regardless of their religious or political affiliation. Abovyan, one of the founders of the Eastern Armenian new pedagogy (a secular content-based learning), dedicated his scholarship to liberating Armenian thinking from backward views imposed by churchmen and imperialists. The newspaper Hyusisapayl (the Northern glaze), launched by another advocate of secular ideas, Mikayel Nalbandian, provided a space for critical analysis and largely applied the perspective of European enlightenment to analyse life phenomena.
The image of an Armenian based on commitment to education followed many generations, and eventually generated disastrous attitudes towards Armenians by neighbours, as the history shall show. The achievements of Armenians were interrupted by the massacres of Sultan Abdulhamid in 1895-1896 and eventually contained by the Genocide in 1915. The Turks were fearful of Armenian potential and their understanding of statehood, an idea which has never lost its grace in the discourse of the Armenian community. However, even in the period of extremely unequal distribution of power, Armenians successfully defended themselves. An example of this is the long Armenian resistance in 1915 on the mountain in the Syrian desert (a historical instance, developed into the Franz Verfel’s novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh, published in 1933). In 1918, Armenia established its first republic around Erevan. It was an opportunity that came at the worst possible historic moment. In 1921 Armenia, along with other countries, became a constituent part in the newly emerged Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. This was a development that delivered a number of tragedies, as a consequence of a closed society built on fear. But, fortunately, not a lost hope for revival.
Another attention-worthy element in the history of Armenian people is the rise of a sense of social consciousness and public activism defined by the value of common people. The quest for public activism has never ceased to be a defining feature of Armenians. It was put on hold after the shocks they experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Armenians organised mobilisations, in an unprecedented way for Soviet history. In 1965, 100,000 people gathered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. There was also an Armenian revolutionary movement in 1987 and 1988 that demonstrated opposition against communist rule and expressed support for Nagorno-Karabakh. A showcased dissident thinking emerged with the establishment of the human rights group in Erevan in April 1977 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Agreement of 1975.
In the early years of independence, the country’s reality was a devastating economic situation that was plagued by mismanagement, informal decision-making, partisanship and corruption – practices that continued their legacy for three consecutive regimes. With the 2018 revolution, the Armenian people chose a chance to progress and relied on the new government for its delivery. The new events seemed to resemble the past as society expressed an increased interest in participation, holding those governing accountable, and pursuing a good life.
Armenia has spent a long time around. Its variety of experiences have opened the door to choose the right legacy as a foundation for development. Armenia’s is not the Soviet legacy. Its Soviet history was just a detrimental period in time. Revolution, secular thinking and public activism represent the trilogy of the nation’s intellectual and social history, as well as the defining characteristics of the Armenian people. Recognizing the right legacy may help navigate the country towards institutional development and reforms that resemble the practice of enlightened societies. These societies function based on the rule of law and respect towards human dignity and rights. Today, Armenia may choose to erase its Soviet legacy, drawing instead on its wealthy history of progressive and revolutionary ideas and a healthy social consciousness for development.
Valentina Gevorgyan is Policy Research Fellowship Coordinator at the Open Society Foundations Armenia and Doctoral Researcher in Political Science at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg.
[1] The centre of Armenian kingdom Urartu in the second century BC; overwhelmingly Armenian-populated in ninetieth century before 1915; a city in Eastern Turkey today.
[2] Named after Aleksandr Herzen’s first revolutionary newspaper “Kolokol”, The Bell.
Each country’s Ministry of Defense points the finger at the other
For the last several days, tensions have been high on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On the morning of March 6, reported by the Armenian Ministry of Defense, the Azerbaijani side attempted to sabotage an Armenian Armed Forces military base to the north-east.
The Azerbaijani side refutes this information and claims that Armenian forces fired at the Azerbaijani base.
The military departments of both countries also report contradictory information regarding the number of losses.
From 1991-1994, Armenia and Azerbaijan were engaged in the Karabakh War-an armed conflict which occurred the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region of Azerbaijan and the surrounding area. At the moment, the conflict has reached a standstill and Nagorno-Karabakh has the status of a de facto independent republic, but gunfire periodically breaks out on the border. The last serious aggravation happened in 2016 – the so-called “April War”, or “Four-Day War,” which resulted in the deaths of dozens of people.
According to the State Border Service of Azerbaijan, on March 5 at 19:10 “the Armenian units committed a flagrant violation of the ceasefire on the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border.”
Orkhan Pashazade, a 23-year-old Azerbaijani border guard, was wounded by a sniper shot. He was taken to the hospital, where he later died.
“The responsibility for the murder of a soldier guarding the internationally-recognized borders of Azerbaijan rests with the military-political leadership of Armenia,” stated the border service on news site Trend.
As for the attempted sabotage from the Azerbaijani side, the border service denies this. They say that it was the Armenian Armed Forces who began shelling Azerbaijani bases on the morning of March 6 with large-caliber weapons and sniper rifles.
“The enemy’s provocation was suppressed by retaliatory fire,” said the border guard said in their statement.
On the evening of March 5, Defense Ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovhannisyan posted on his Facebook page that the Azerbaijani Armed Forces fired at the Armenian base located in the Armenian region of Tavush. He considered these actions to be provocative, since the Azerbaijani units fired large-caliber weapons in this direction over the course of several days.
“The Armenian Armed Forces, as a rule, show restraint, however, targeted gunfire will not remain unanswered. All responsibility for this provocation and the consequences will fall on the Azerbaijani side.”
And on the morning of March 6, a statement was published about a sabotage attempt from the Azerbaijani side. The Armenian Defense Ministry press service states that the operation began at about 5:30 and was aimed at one of the combat bases in the north-eastern section of the Armenian border.
It is also reported that the Azerbaijani military were thrown back to their original positions with losses, and that during the retreat, they left behind ammunition and a mine detector. On the Armenian side, one soldier was slightly injured.
“An analysis of the adversary’s actions shows that they conducted serious preparations for this sabotage attempt, which was perpetrated by soldiers who had trained for that purpose. It is worth noting that they used a German mine detector to find a way through the minefield,” reported the Defence Ministry in their statement.
105-year-old Italian citizen receives Armenian passport
12:02, 6 March, 2020
YEREVAN, MARCH 6, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has handed over an Armenian passport to Nourhan Josephovich, the 105-year old Italian citizen of Armenian descent who had applied for Armenian citizenship.
“I was greatly honored to grant the Republic of Armenia passport to our 105-year old compatriot Nourhan Josephovich (He was born in 1915 in Istanbul)”, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on social media. “It was even more touching to learn that Nourhan Josephovich had made the decision on returning to Armenia for permanent residency by being inspired with the non-violent, velvet, people’s revolution”, he added, posting a photo of the 105-year-old kissing the newly granted passport.
Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
Sarkissian signs into law smoking ban
12:55, 6 March, 2020
YEREVAN, MARCH 6, ARMENPRESS. President Armen Sarkissian has signed into law the smoking ban bill.
In particular, the law bans smoking in indoor public spaces, including in all restaurants.
“When I was signing the [bills], as President and as a citizen, I was pondering whether it is necessary for a law to exist in order to realize the damage which smoking inflicts to health, family, the environment,” Sarkissian said after signing the bill into law. “Do the strict legal terming of the law really have greater impact than the calls and advices we hear from parents, friends, the stories about health hazards from smoking we read nearly every day?”
Sarkissian also quoted Socrates – “When a man cares for his own health, he won’t find a doctor who will be more useful for his health than himself”.
“It’s never late to quit, and this shouldn’t require the need of any governmental body. I don’t think that an area which first of all requires sober thinking needs a legislative regulation. Certainly, the law draws some boundaries which should be adhered to,” he added.
Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan