Armenia

Manana, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Tufenkian Foundation 2006
Yesterday saw more work for the Tufenkian Foundation in Armenia, and a return visit to the Manana Youth Educational-Cultural NGO in Yerevan. It was kind of refreshing to have the opportunity to accompany kids from the Manana photography class as they walked to document […]

Botanical Gardens, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Tufenkian Foundation 2006
Today, as part of work commissioned by the Tufenkian Foundation, I visited a nursery operating under the umbrella of the Armenian Forests NGO situated in the Botanical Gardens in Yerevan. According to the NGO’s web site, Armenian Forests was established by Armenian-American philanthropist […]

Freedom House has released its 2006 Nations in Transit report, “a comprehensive, comparative, multidimensional study focusing on 29 countries and administrative areas from Central Europe to Eurasia.” The report does not make for pleasant reading or provide much optimism for the future, as the official press release indicates.
The Freedom House study Nations in Transit 2006, […]

Nessuna over at di cavoli e di re has posted her thoughts on today’s protest outside the Russian Embassy in Armenia. It’s worth pointing out that not only did Nessuna tell me about the action, but she also made sure that she attended it. Unfortunately, not many other Armenians felt taking an hour out of their “busy” schedule was worth it.

The good part is there are people who care, even if it’s only a few dozen. The media was present in front of the embassy (which was good), and they accompanied the crowd to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, 45 minutes later.

Why protest? Because one cannot keep silent when racist violence is growing in Russia, and the Russian government does nothing to stop the madness. Well, the Foreign Ministry in Armenia is not any better because it is keeping silent.

Nessuna has also posted an interesting comment to the same post that would have made an excellent blog entry, but anyway.

Just talked to a friend in Moscow on icq, and she was keen on leaving Russia. The sooner the better. Jesus, the whole situation is worse than I thought.

“Of course there are fewer people in Moscow; nobody is crazy to go on a protest in Moscow,” she told me. “The situation is getting really dangerous. They will kick everybody out of Russia, and the government won’t do anything.”

Today, for example, she was approached by some guys in the subway, who showed her a photo of Bin Laden and told her to confess he was her relative. Few days ago again in the subway a 60 year old woman tripped a young girl up, just because she had dark skin. In daylight, with people watching. The girl fell down, nobody even moved.

Two days ago when she called regarding some job and asked if she could email the link to her portfolio, she was asked what nation she was and then was told there was no need to send the link, because they would not even consider hiring her. Whenever there is an announcement for selling/buying/renting something it almost always specifies FOR RUSSIANS ONLY.

Those are not skinheads, those are “normal” citizens of Russian Federation.

This makes me sick…

Anyway, RFE/RL has posted Anna’s story in English, and it pretty much sums up today’s protest. Although it is exam period for many students in Yerevan at the moment, it really is depressing to find that the vast majority of youth in Armenia are apathetic and couldn’t care less about anything.

Several dozen people staged a rare demonstration outside the Russian embassy in Yerevan on Monday to condemn and protest against the continuing racially motivated killings of Armenians and other dark-skinned residents of Russia.

The protesters, most of them representatives of several Armenian civic groups, accused Moscow of connivance and even complicity in the xenophobic violence widely blamed on tens of thousands of neo-Nazi skinheads operating across Russia. They also denounced the Armenian government’s reluctance to bring the Kremlin to task over the killings.

[…]

Russian human rights organizations say a total of at least 15 people from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Africa have lost their lives in racist attacks since January. The death toll for the last year is estimated at 28.

Few of the perpetrators of those killings have been arrested and brought to justice, with Russian law-enforcement agencies and courts notoriously lenient towards them. A case in point was the trial in Russia’s second largest city of St. Petersburg of seven teenagers who were convicted of collectively stabbing to death a 9-year-old Tajik girl but were sentenced to only between 18 months and five years in prison last February.

In a petition handed to Russian embassy officials, the organizers of the Yerevan protest suggested that the neo-Nazi groups guilty of the attacks are openly operating “with the sponsorship of some Russian state structures.”

[…]

The protesters also marched to the Armenian Foreign Ministry to condemn its failure to publicly criticize the Russian authorities for their failure to stop the violence. Armenia’s ambassador in Moscow and other diplomats say they regularly raise the issue with Russian officials. But the organizers of the protest insisted that Yerevan is scared of openly challenging its ex-Soviet master and closest ally.

Unfortunately, civil society in Armenia is also still rather impotent, and even the Babe Theory of Political Movements didn’t seem to help. Anyway, A1 Plus also has a news item here.

Embassy of the Russian Federation, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

Embassy of the Russian Federation, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

On 5 June 2006 a few dozen young Armenians and representatives of Civil Society assembled outside the Russian Embassy in Yerevan to protest against an unprecedented number of attacks against Armenians and other nationalities in Russia. It was also encouraging to see a number of Armenian-Americans also turning out, although it has to be said that the police and security at the Embassy acted like jerks.

Anyway, after handing in a petition and distributing leaflets that also criticized the Russian authorities for failing to take action against those nationalist and racist groups believed to be responsible for the attacks, the protestors then marched to stage a demonstration outside the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Armenia. Thanks to Nessuna for informing me about today’s action.

The text of the leaflets handed out read as follows:

Statement

The repeated occurrence of virulent racism and xenophobia in Russia in recent years is of great concern. In 2005 alone, 28 persons from ethnic groups other than Russian were murdered and another 402 such persons were assaulted and battered by racist groups. Targeted predominantly are persons who come from the Caucasus and Central Asia, with Armenians constituting a large number among those. Nationalist groups make anti-Armenian pronouncements. They committed ethnic hostility-motivated murders of six young Armenian young men in 2006 in Moscow alone. Yevgeny Baghdasarian, Hayk Dolukhanian, Harutiun Galstian, Robert Feroyan and Vigen Abrahamiants were among their victims as was Arthur Sardarian, the most recent victim murdered on May 25.

The fact that racist and fascist groups operate in an unimpeded fashion and that criminal acts and murders go for the most part unpunished gives grounds to believe that the said groups operate under the patronage of certain State structures of the Russian Federation. We, the representatives of the Armenian non-governmental organizations and the citizens of Armenia, condemn strongly the actions of the racist group raging in Russia and inadequate steps taken with respect to them and demand that the Russian Federation authorities should take prompt action to detain the murderers and bring them to justice.

Helsinki Committee of Armenia, NGO
For Science Development Initiative Group
Collaboration for Democracy, NGO
Free Forum for Civil Initiatives, NGO
Legal Center Forum, NGO
Citadel, NGO
Hope, NGO
Student Council of American University of Armenia
Yeritac Youth, NGO
World Independent Youth Union, NGO

Meanwhile, A1 Plus reports that similar actions were also being held in Moscow. Unfortunately, as was the case here in Yerevan, it doesn’t look as though many people turned out. It appears to be politically expedient for some to decry attacks in Georgia while remaining silent about many more incidents in Russia. In fact, both are wrong.

The Armenian community of Moscow has started a series of rallies in memory of the victims of the skinheads. The organizers of one of the rallies were young people from the Armenian community of Moscow and the nearby areas.

Students and lecturers of the Moscow State University, representatives of NGOs and members of the Armenian Intellectuals’ Union participated in the rally. By the way, the Union of Armenians in Russia refrained from participating in the June 3 rally saying that it was not allowed by the authorities, newspaper «Yerkramas» informs.

Still, that today’s event occured at all is positive, and not least since media attention was significant. I can remember seeing the ARF-D linked Yerkir Media TV there along with some other stations, but can’t recall if Public TV was present. If anyone watches the news tonight please post a comment on whether it reported on the demonstration.

It’s also worth pointing you in the direction of two posts by Nessuna on this subject matter. In addition to posting something on this blog recently, she also posted a news item on the latest murder of an Armenian in Moscow on her own blog. Anna Saghabalyan from RFE/RL was also present today so if there’s anything in English later on I’ll post it and also some more pics.

Embassy of the Russian Federation, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

Armenian Foreign Ministry, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

Art Tonoyan from iArarat.com has emailed me and a number of other bloggers in Armenia to discuss the idea of holding an Armenian Bloggers Conference in Yerevan when he’s over at the end of May. Personally speaking, when the media here is largely controlled by pro-governmental and pro-opposition political and economic forces, blogging represents an excellent medium to allow civil society activisits, citizens, foreigners and independent journalists to disseminate alternative information and opinion to an audience inside and outside of Armenia. Actually, this is apparently not too disimilar to the potential of blogging elsewhere.

Web logging, or blogging, is the new kid on the media block, complete with its own, unique lexicon. The verb is to blog and the participant in blogging is a blogger. If you are part of the blogging community, you are also part of the blogosphere - presumably with its own weather system.

A blog is simply a series of updated posts on a web page in the form of a diary or journal, often including commentary on, and hypertext links to, other web sites. Posts are in chronological order and can contain anything from simple text, to music, images and even streamed video.

Blogs tend to be highly personalised - an online stream of consciousness. Nothing particularly unusual about that when you consider the rise of the personal home page, for example. But the phenomenon is that so many people are interested in what bloggers have to say.

Perhaps one attraction of blogging lies in its unmediated and dynamic quality. Without an agenda, editorial stance or pedantic sub-editor standing between the writer and reader, blogging can provide reportage in a raw and exciting form.

“Readers are flocking to online news sites by the millions for the latest news about the war in Iraq,” JD Lasica, senior editor of the Online Journalism Review, told dotJournalism. “But the story doesn’t end there.

“They are also streaming to weblogs for sceptical analysis, critical commentary, alternative perspectives rarely seen in mainstream media, [such as] the views of foreigners, and the occasional first-person account. A handful of reporters in the Gulf region are maintaining weblogs to provide fuller, more personal and colourful reporting of what they are witnessing first-hand.”

Of course, the problems with blogging are also the same, especially with regards to the need for information to be factual even if it is still to be opinionated. Too often individuals think they can just set up a blog on their own and not adhere to certain practices that are still necessary even in the most unbalanced of media in the West. It’s also no surprise that given the rise of the blogosphere that even media outlets are starting to introduce their own blogs to appeal to a readership that is eager for a more personal account on global news and events that might not otherwise be covered due to budgetary and time restrictions.

They are opinionated, ranting, often incoherent and frequently biased with little regard for accuracy or balance. They are also compellingly addictive and threatening to emerge as a new brand of journalism.

[…]

Then blogging went mainstream. Established print journalists from outlets such as MSNBC and Guardian Unlimited started to create their own weblogs to sit alongside news and features, blurring the distinction between journalism and blogging still further. And the tools to build blogs became more widespread with internet service providers such as AOL offering blogging tools to their users and Blogger.com receiving a financial boost from its acquisition by the search engine company Google.

But while some bloggers believe that a new brand of journalism is emerging, some new media pundits remain sceptical.

“It’s like all stuff on the web,” Mike Smartt, editor of BBC News Online, told dotJournalism. “Dissemination of information is great, but how much of it is trustworthy? They are an interesting phenomenon, but I don’t think they will be as talked about in a year’s time.

Despite the skepticism in the above quoted article from 2003, the situation with blogs has vastly improved. In the Armenian context, for example, the increasing number of Armenia-related blogs means that a plurality of opinion is narrowing the divide between views. It is now more difficult to push propaganda for example, and the ability to comment on posts also means that discussion can be initiated and encouraged.

The essence of the original blogs was that they were individual expressions of information and opinion, however eccentric or extreme. This raised an obvious credibility question. Some blogs may have been accurate, but many more clearly come off the wall. For every dissection of the CBS report on President Bush and the National Guard, we had 1,000 rants and 100,000 accounts of daily activities of interest to nobody except the author. The limits of the free-for-all were well demonstrated by the chaos that resulted when the Los Angeles Times opened its online editorial page to unrestricted contributions.

Such problems will encourage the growth of a more responsible online-information system that exploits the medium’s possibilities, but which also adheres to self-imposed standards that would have been seen as unacceptably restrictive by the original bloggers. The idea that the internet meant complete freedom will have to die in at least a part of the forest if the medium is to realise its potential as an information tool. Serious providers will have to accept that they are not free from responsibility.

Basically, civil society activists, academics and journalists bringing their own experience to this new medium will sooner or later be required to take writing in the Armenian blogosphere further. Again, this is no different from the situation in the rest of the World, as the Economist’s World in 2006 pointed out. It might also provide a necessary check and balance system to the local and global media that has both economic and political dependency on external sources of funding. This is especially true for Armenia and the Diaspora.

This will not come about primarily through any legal constraints, which remain cloudy in the blogosphere. Rather, a group of information websites will emerge from the world of blogs—small in relative number, but weighty in impact—which accept that the internet is not just a licence to peddle prejudices and pursue individual interests. The hierarchy of links pioneered by Google will become a key factor, discriminating in the good sense between the reliable and the dross, and creating a virtuous online circle. Thus can brands be built.

This will present newspapers, already hit by declining circulations, with an extra challenge, and the growth of video and audio feeds from citizen-reporters will drive at least the smaller broadcasters to try to co-opt them as contributors. Conventional media enterprises will have to find creative ways of drawing on the proliferating sources of content and channels of distribution to satisfy their customers. If they do not adapt, fast, they may all too easily find themselves overshadowed as new media come of age, taking their responsibilities seriously and exploiting new ways of connecting with consumers.

Anyway, I do believe in the power of blogging and especially on Armenian-related issues, and so welcome Artyom’s move to initiate a meeting of bloggers in Armenia. Hopefully, all going well, he’ll be able to do something in the Diaspora as well. Certainly, for my part, aside from attending the recent Global Voices Summit staged by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Reuters’ Headquarters in London as well as a workshop in Oxford on e-Participation in Established and Emerging Democracies during December 2005, I’ve attempted to encourage others here.

Bloggers recognize they are early-adopting elites - and that the conversations happening on the blogs in most countries are not representative of the population as a whole. There was great interest expressed on Saturday in doing outreach to communities that currently have some internet access but are not currently blogging. People feel the need for better training materials and guidelines for outreach so that they can spread the blogging gospel more easily and efficiently.

[…]

Put it this way: for a conventional media organization, “content” is the end goal and “content creation” is the primary activity. For a Conversation Community like Global Voices, “content” and “content creation” are means to a larger end: conversation and dialogue. The first step towards conversation is having one’s voice heard around the discussion table. By linking to people’s blogs, our editors and contributors are in effect inviting people to the discussion table and moderating the conversation.

Zarchka, for example, started off here before the civil society activist and student migrated to her own blog, and new contributors to my own blog include two NGO workers, Nessuna and Headache, as well as a young journalist, LoonyMoony. Armyouth started up only after I spent hours evangelizing the power of blogs for civil society in Armenia, and I am especially interested in getting others to post on existing or new sites. Garo at Notes from Hairenik started blogging when I suggested the medium would be ideal for his writing, and Nessuna has also been prolific in translating what little exists in the Armenian-language blogosphere.

Anyway, blogging at its most basic form is very easy just as writing on a scrap of paper is. However, there are far more issues involved — both in terms of technical considerations as well as in terms of presentation and ethics. Therefore, I hope Artyom’s idea of meeting in Yerevan at the end of this month yields significant results and the further evolution of the Armenian blogosphere. If you would like to know more about this meeting please contact me at onewmphoto@yahoo.com or Artyom at ararat01@gmail.com.

Existing bloggers in Armenia are of course invited, but we’d also like to see students as well as young civil society activists and journalists attend as well, and not least because I suppose blogging in Armenia will really come into its own during the 2007 parliamentary elections. I also believe that blogs can play a vital role in encouraging civic participation in monitoring and decision making processes in the area of the environment and anti-corruption initiatives. More as of when.

Considering that Bagrat Yesayan, Presidential Advisor on “Anti-Corruption” Initiatives, seems to always say the dumbest things ever — see here and here — I’m glad that his effective counterpart in the NGO sector says it how it is. In fact, given that corruption has increased in Armenia, it’s astounding that Yesayan has the audacity to remain in his position.

“The vicious circle of corruption [in Armenia] begins and ends during elections,” the head of the Armenian affiliate of the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International, Amalia Kostanian, tells “Azg.” “Since 2003 our organization has been holding a monitoring of pre-election processes and elections in Armenia, and I can say that the situation worsens every time [an election is held].” Kostanian says Transparency International research has found that the courts, the prosecutor’s office, tax and customs authorities, public healthcare, education, the electoral system and government licensing agencies are perceived to be highly corrupt by most Armenians.

Incidently, I’ve interviewed Kostanyan twice since the 2003 Presidential Elections. Both interviews are available here and here.

Now, do you really think that authorities that come to power through political corruption can fight against it? I don’t think so. They can adopt as many strategies and laws as they like but if there is no true desire from the top of the governance system to start fighting corruption in Armenia any strategy and law will fail.

Interestingly, given Nessuna’s previous post, Kostanyan also graduated from the AUA with a Master’s Degree in Political Science and International Relations. Another graduate is probably Armenia’s best journalist and political analyst, RFE/RL’s Emil Danielyan.

Stepan Danielyan, President of Collaboration for Democracy Center NGO, has established a new blog for Human Rights in Armenia website called "Nor Darperak" in Armenian or "New Dimension" in English.  After speaking to him, he suggested that the HRA website needs to have a way to communicate and interact with the people regarding certain topics. 
As he explains […]

Armenian Forests Community Project, Gosh, Tavoush Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

Armenian Forests Community Project, Gosh, Tavoush Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

An article will be published in the next edition of Hetq Online.

Armenian Forests Community Project, Ijevan, Tavoush Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

Armenian Forests Community Project, Ijevan, Tavoush Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

An article will be published in the next edition of Hetq Online.