The closer the elections are, the more the political power opens the state’s pockets to solve its political problems.

The other day, they came up with another pre-election initiative. just 2-2.5 months before the elections, the Minister of Economy, Gevorg Papoyan, hastened to announce that farmers will soon be granted zero percent agricultural loans.

Naturally, there are no zero interest loans. This means that the burden of paying the interest on these loans is fully borne by the state budget. They will be subsidized at the expense of the taxes paid by all of us.

It is clear to everyone why they decided right now that they should provide interest-free loans to the peasants when there are elections. with this, the political power solves political problems for itself, at the expense of state funds, attracting the peasants to vote for the ruling power during the elections.

This obvious pre-election initiative will be presented as support for the agricultural sector, but when the initiative implemented at the expense of state funds is announced right on the eve of the elections, it inevitably takes on a political tone as an impulse aimed at the electoral period and a targeted intervention aimed at certain groups of society.

Providing zero-interest loans, which implies subsidizing interest at the expense of the state budget, actually means that public funds are used to improve the financial conditions of a certain social group at the very moment when that group needs to make a political decision.

Such a coincidence, even without direct evidence, raises a legitimate question: is this a direct support for agriculture or a pre-election bribe to farmers?

On the eve of the elections, they are going to interest the peasants with interest-free loans, when without it, the peasants are squealing under the loans. They boast that they have implemented projects worth billions of drams in agriculture, but there has been a decline in agriculture for years. Meanwhile, at one time Nikol Pashinyan announced that they are going to develop agriculture at a revolutionary pace in Armenia.

“The use of new technologies should also be widely spread in the field of agriculture, in this case also having as a strategic goal the sharp reduction of the number of uncultivated agricultural lands and, ultimately, the exclusion of the existence of such lands,” Nikol Pashinyan made this statement almost 8 years ago, when he assumed the position of the head of the government. In these 8 years, the governments and political authorities led by him have achieved success in terms of developing agriculture at a revolutionary pace and reducing the amount of uncultivable land, not to mention eliminating the existence of such land, is in front of everyone’s eyes.

Even today, almost 50 percent of arable land in Armenia remains uncultivated. According to the latest data, only 220-230 thousand of the available 446 thousand hectares of arable land are under cultivation.

Nothing has changed here in recent years, instead, the authorities are trying to create the impression that they have achieved great success in agriculture. They think that by building several greenhouses, they are developing agriculture. Eight years ago, the share of agriculture in GDP was much higher than it is now.

The weight of agriculture has almost halved in eight years. 2017 It was 15 percent of GDP, last year it was only 7.9 percent.

It is so, because in 2018 after that, agriculture was almost always in decline. In 2021, the reduction of the gross output of the sector reached about 8 percent. 2022 to some extent recovered, but foundations for sustainable growth were not created.

In the following years, the same trends were maintained, without creating an opportunity to compensate the losses of the previous period.

This situation shows that the management of the agricultural sector has failed for years, on the eve of the elections they decided to bribe the villagers with interest-free loans in order to vote for the ruling political force.

Loan interest subsidization means that the state takes over the financial burden, reducing the borrower’s expenses at the expense of the budget. But they forget that the problems of peasants and agriculture are not limited only to financial ones. Inefficiencies in irrigation systems, limited access to markets, product sales problems, and climate risks continue to limit the development of the sector. Under these conditions, even zero-percentage loans cannot be a guarantee for increasing the farmer’s income.

Moreover, it can have the opposite effect. Giving in to the temptation of interest-free loans, people can find themselves under a new credit and debt burden. With this, the debt burden of many people can deepen at a faster pace. Besides that, today the peasant is heavily burdened with loans.

So, the interest-free agricultural loan, which they are going to offer on the eve of the elections under the name of “free” assistance to the peasants, can actually cause new risks and problems for the peasants. Not taking into account that providing “free” loans is also problematic in terms of the budget. That means an increase in budget expenses. And where will they get the money from? Naturally, they will cut from other expenses that have less political significance and influence.

All this happens at the moment when the political processes enter the pre-election active phase. Everyone understands that such “random” coincidences do not just happen.

HAKOB KOCHARYAN

—

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian told Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif that confidence is needed to support negotiations and mediation in the conflict settlement in the Middle East.

During the telephone conversation, the leaders of the two countries discussed military operations and efforts to stop the conflict in the region. Sharif briefed Pezeshkian on Pakistan’s diplomatic contacts with the United States and the Gulf states, the statement said.

In a post on X, the Iranian president appealed to the countries of the region, stating that if they want development and security, they should not allow Tehran’s opponents to “wag a war on your lands.”

—

 The issue of ensuring Armenia’s security and territorial integrity is already reflected in the pre-election struggle. While the government under the slogan “either KP or war” proposes to continue the course of pacifying the enemy, the opposition promotes the idea of ​​”guaranteed peace”, and if the dangers and losses arising from the path adopted by the government are quite visible, the possibility of realizing the opposition’s idea is still unclear, and using this opportunity, the KP tries to discredit the approaches of its main political opponents.

The statement made by the country’s prime minister the other day was from this series, in which, in order to prove his truthfulness, he referred to Cyprus and Ukraine as examples of guaranteed but failed peace. 

From the beginning, let’s emphasize that although the crises that arose in the two mentioned countries are often pointed out as cases of disappointment with “guaranteed peace”, their essence and the reason for the lack of resolution to date is not the imperfection of external security mechanisms. In both cases, internal political developments, conflict of interests and different interpretations of the obligations of external players played a decisive role. 

Cyprus․ internal crisis as a prelude to external intervention

The declaration of independence of Cyprus in 1960 was the result of international legal and political agreements. In addition to the Constitution, the Treaties on the Establishment of the Republic and the Union, an Agreement on Guarantees was also signed, the object of which was to guarantee the independence, territorial integrity, security and constitutional order of Cyprus, as well as to prevent both enosis (unification with Greece) and taksim (division of the island). In case of violation of the established order, consultations were planned between Greece, Turkey and Great Britain acting as guarantors, and in case of impossibility of joint actions, the right of everyone to act in order to restore the established order was recognized.

Already in 1963, the contradictions between the Greek and Turkish communities had turned into a sharp confrontation. In March, a UN peacekeeping mission was deployed on the island. Nevertheless, the tension did not subside, and in 1974 On July 15, the Cypriot National Guard, with the support of the Greek military junta, carried out a coup d’état in pursuit of the unification of Cyprus and Greece. Five days later, on the grounds of protecting the Turkish community of the island and fulfilling its commitment to the state as a guarantor, Turkey introduced its armed units to the island.

Thus, the security problems of Cyprus were due, first of all, to not because of the imperfection of the mechanisms for implementing external security guarantees, but because of internal political developments. 

Ukraine. Assurances of safety in lieu of warranties

In 1994 on December 5, the USA, Great Britain and Russia signed three memorandums with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan in Budapest. They contained security assurances in exchange for the abandonment of nuclear weapons by the mentioned countries. One of the memoranda referred to Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Accordingly, in 1996, all nuclear warheads were transferred from Ukraine to Russia, as a result of which the main goal of the Memorandum was realized – the denuclearization of Ukraine, and Ukraine, as a non-nuclear state, joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

According to the Budapest Memorandum, the USA, Great Britain and Russia committed to “respect the independence, sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine” and to “avoid economic coercion” in order to gain any advantage. The document also provided that the parties are obliged to consult if there are any issues related to the fulfillment of the assumed obligations. Moreover, the Memorandum did not envisage any mechanism of military assistance similar to Article 5 of NATO in case of armed aggression against Ukraine. Thus, the USA, Great Britain and Russia did not give security guarantees to Ukraine, but only assurances.

Security guarantees are clearly defined obligations, including providing unconditional military assistance to the attacked state. Unlike security guarantees, security assurances are merely promises and agreements of a political nature without a commitment to provide direct military assistance to the state that is the victim of aggression.

It should also be noted that the mechanism of multilateral political consultations defined by the Memorandum failed to be launched at the crucial moment. Therefore, Russia, as well as the other two powers that signed the Memorandumno considering him as a guarantor of Ukraine’s security is an unfounded claim. 

Over time, it also became apparent that the Memorandum’s provisions on security assurances were not only legally insufficient to ensure Ukraine’s security, but also became the subject of conflicting interpretations, which, in turn, contributed to the unleashing of a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war.

Russia’s position is conditioned by the logic that the Budapest memorandum was the first to violate the West, because it was the West that, contrary to the fundamental provisions of the document, resorted to economic pressure, openly interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine and supported the violent change of power in 2014, violating the obligations to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and not to exert pressure for its own interests.

According to the Russian interpretation, under the guise of protecting democracy and human rights, the West itself violated the provisions of the Memorandum and, thus, freed Moscow’s hands in respecting the established restrictions.

The Western interpretation, on the contrary, stems from the perception that the main meaning of the Memorandum was the obligation of the three powers to respect the independence, sovereignty and borders of Ukraine, so it was Russia that grossly violated the Memorandum. According to this logic, the pressure used against Ukraine in the past, as well as the political support for democracy and human rights, cannot be considered a violation of the Memorandum, because they did not pursue the goal of making Ukraine serve their interests.

Consequences

The experience of Cyprus and Ukraine shows that it is very difficult to form multilateral legal and political conditions that will be able to fully ensure the security, sovereignty and territorial integrity of a vulnerable state. Both discussed cases show that even internationally established external mechanisms can be ineffective in practice if they  from a juridical and political point of view, they are not sufficiently clear and binding, and their provisions leave room for conflicting interpretations.

Moreover, as a result of the wrong decisions of the government of a vulnerable country, the operation of external mechanisms is hindered and the full implementation of the obligations undertaken by the guarantor states is hindered.

In the created geopolitical conditions, the formation of a hybrid security model anchored on the combination of diversification of external support and fixing security with limited international mechanisms is of fundamental importance for the Republic of Armenia. Within its framework, the external mechanisms will not be primary, but will become a complementary function to the internal security tools. 

ARMEN MARTIROSYAN 

 Deputy of the RA Supreme Council (1990-95)

Deputy of the RA National Assembly (1995-99)

RA Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary

—

Taking the territories that Azerbaijan considers its own, the so-called “captured”, or as we used to say, liberated, or Artsakh, was essential for Aliyev in order to maintain his power.

He had to show his people that he is conquering Artsakh.

But from a strategic point of view, Syunik has always been important for Azerbaijan and Turkey.

For that reason, Syunik is a most important strategic issue for them, and Artsakh is a matter of maintaining authority and power.

Details in the video

—