Armenia

Since the 2003 parliamentary elections when many more notorious oligarchs and businessmen with dodgy and sometimes illegal economic concerns entered the Armenian National Assembly than normal, I’ve increasingly raised my concerns with the lack of distinction between the government and criminal elements in society.
Indeed, one regional analyst shrugged his shoulders when I raised this […]

RFE/RL reports that yet another high-profile killing has been reported in Armenia. The murder of a businessman in Yerevan comes close on the heels of yesterday’s assassination of Alexander Givoyev. No wonder an American analyst friend of mine calls Armenia a “Mafia State.”
A businessman was found death with traces of violence in his Yerevan apartment […]

Citing Newsarmenia.ru, PanArmenian.net reports that another assassination has taken place in Armenia. Interestingly, this time the victim was the head of a Children’s Rights NGO although I daresay the reasons for the killing had something to do with business. They nearly always do.
Head of Organization for Children’s Rights Protection Killed in Armenia
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Well-known entrepreneur, head […]

RFE/RL reports that a police officer has been arrested in connection with the largest bank heist in Armenia’s short post-Soviet history. The arrest comes after the Ardshininvest bank reported the disappearance of cash and jewelry worth an estimated $600,000. One of the bank’s guards is currently missing, and therefore considered a suspect in the case.
Armenia […]

As some circles attempt to limit concerns about the increasing number of attacks on Armenians in Russia, Zarchka at Life Around Me says that they continue to occur. One of the attacks was on popular Russian singer Jasmine although somewhat ironically, although her attackers identified her as an ethnic Armenian, she apparently denies this. Nevertheless, […]

Via Martuni or Bust comes news that police have arrested Stepan Hakobyan in connection with the assassination of a senior member of the Yerkrapah Union of Karabakh War Veterans a little over a week ago. The murder also claimed the life of an innocent bystander, 37-year-old mother of three, Karine Sargsyan. I’m told that had […]

Via di cavoli e di re, RFE/RL reports that a senior member of the Yerkrapah Union of Karabakh War Veterans was assassinated in broad daylight yesterday. An innocent bystander was also killed.
Witnesses told RFE/RL that Sedrak Zatikian, head of the Yerkrapah chapter in the city’s Malatia-Sebastia district, was riddled with bullets fired from an expensive […]

I missed this story when it came out last Thursday, but it came up in discussion with RFE/RL’s Emil Danielyan last night and I did see that Blogrel posted something on this rather concerning story. As most parents will tell you, the last place they want their sons to end up is in the Armenian military, and not least because more end up dead as a result of hazing than from the enemy.

Factor in a normal “salary” of $3 a month for a conscript and apalling food, and you can perhaps understand why many pay thousands of dollars in bribes to get out of serving their country. However, this story surpasses all of that.

Three Armenian army soldiers are facing a life in prison, accused of a double murder which they say they did not commit and which their lawyers believe was the work of their military commander in Nagorno-Karabakh.

An appeals court in Yerevan convicted this week Razmik Sargsian, Musa Serobian and Arayik Zalian of killing two fellow conscripts in December 2003, in a trial denounced by Armenian human rights organizations as a parody of justice.

The high-profile case has cast a rare media spotlight on dozens of out-of-combat deaths that occur in Armenia’s Armed Forces each year. Official figures show that Armenian servicemen are at much greater risk of dying at the hands of their commanders and comrades than from enemy fire.

[…]

Several soldiers of their unit were promptly arrested by military prosecutors on suspicion of involvement in the crime. One of them effectively testified that the killings were committed by none other than Captain Ivan Grigorian, the Karabakh Armenian commander of their battalion.

The investigators, however, dismissed the testimony, releasing the suspects and arresting three other soldiers that were subsequently given life sentences. The conviction was based on a videotaped “confession” made by one of them, Razmik Sargsian, after fours days of interrogation in April 2004. Sargsian and a team of lawyers representing the three men insists that the confession was extracted under sadistic duress and threats of rape. The 20-year-old has alleged that Armenia’s chief military prosecutor, Gagik Jahangirian, personally punched him in the face.

Although Sargsian’s face was clearly swollen and bruised in video of the interrogation shown during a court session in Yerevan last year, the investigators have strongly denied torturing him. A court in the Karabakh capital Stepanakert, which has a legally questionable status of an Armenian district court contradicting Armenia’s constitution, refused to investigate the torture allegations before sentencing the three servicemen to 15 years in prison one year ago.

[…]

Larisa Alaverdian, Armenia’s former human rights ombudsperson who has personally dealt with the case, likewise decried “blatant violations” of due process which she believes were committed during the pre-trial investigation and the court hearings in Stepanakert and Yerevan.

[…]

The three young men may now spend the rest of their lives behind bars because of what another human rights campaigner, Mikael Danielian, regards as yet another high-level cover-up of army deaths. “This case is not unprecedented,” he told RFE/RL. “There have been numerous such cases. It’s just that they did not have so much resonance.”

[…]

The Armenian military insists that the number of deaths within its ranks has steadily declined since the late 1990s. However, even the official death statistics shows that it is still far from eliminating the problem. According to the Military Prosecutor’s Office, 89 soldiers died in the course of last year and only 15 of them were shot dead in skirmishes with Azerbaijani forces on the Karabakh frontline and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

Ishkhanian estimated that at least 1,000 Armenian conscripts aged between 18 and 20 have lost their lives in out-of-combat incidents since the 1994 truce. He could not recall any instances of senior or mid-ranking army officers prosecuted in connection with those deaths.

Great stuff, and something for the Diaspora to bear in mind when they consider applying for citizenship of the Republic of Armenia, or before they condemn the rest of us for decrying the lack of the rule of law and blatant human rights violations in the country. The full news item is here.

By Nessuna

When a friend of mine who has been studying in Moscow for the last few years visited Yerevan last summer, she didn’t remove her hat so as to prevent her skin from getting darker under the sun. Many times she personally witnessed racial intolerance, and at times brutal violence, aimed at at anyone with dark skin person in Moscow. At Yerevan’s Zvartnots aiport, coffins “arriving” from Moscow has been a usual sight for some time already.

Even so, the last month has seen an unprecedented increase in the number of racially motivated violence crimes on the streets of Russia. Apparently, there’s a reason for this, as Andrew Osborn writes in an article published by The Independent:

April 20, Hitler’s birthday, is always a time of increased tension in Russia since skinheads have promised to mark the occasion “by killing African or Asian people”. The human rights group Sova said that last year alone, citizens from at least 24 different countries were attacked [on different dates] and that the method rarely varied.

As Osborne states, if Russia “was the country to make “the most appalling sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany 60 years ago” nowadays it is the country where “skinhead culture has taken hold like nowhere else”.

Forty-four people were killed in racially motivated murders last year, more than double the previous year, human rights activists say, and in many cases the perpetrators were young, white, bomber jacket-clad skinheads shouting neo-Nazi or nationalist slogans. They rarely shoot their victims, preferring to stab them repeatedly or beat them to death with chains or knuckle-dusters. And the odds are always stacked in their favour because they hunt in packs of at least three and pick the most vulnerable targets. Their ranks seem only to swell, from about a dozen in the early 1990s to up to 60,000 today.

Racially motivated violence is happening on a daily basis in Russia which is why news of a 17-year old Armenian being stabbed to death at the Pushkinskaya subway station in the center of Moscow on April 23 was nothing new to me. Armtown.com has more:

“The Fuehrer’s successors conquer Russian cities swifter than the Nazi troops in the autumn of 1941,” one of Moscow’s newspapers gives alarm on occasion of the murder of 17 years old Armenian student Vahan Abrahamiants.

What strikes one in this heinous crime is its unspeakable impudence that is certainly the result of assurance of staying unpunished. The headlines of Russian papers are evidence of that — “Student Slain In Front of A Dozen of People”, “Killing and Leaving by Train”, “Hitler Conquers Moscow” etc.

However, the 17-old Armenian’s murder apparently triggered a massive protest in Moscow, as well as discussion on one of the Armenian blogs as well as a local forum. Unfortunately, the general consensus seems to be that “the bastards will go unpunished and it all starts to resemble state policy.” In fact, many blame the Russian government for negligence:

“It is clear even to a kid that without the connivance of the authorities, there will be no skinhead disease,” “the authorities have to react from the very beginning on such displays [of xenophobia] and kill it in the first stages so the others will learn the lesson.”

According to Andrew Osborn, the Russian authorities say that the skinhead problem is exaggerated, and all countries face similar problems, but I wonder how exactly Russian officials explain the sentencing of the killers of a nine-year old Tajik girl brutally knifed 11 times in front of her father to 5 years in prison. When asked if they felt sorry for the girl, her killers replied cynically, “When you kill cockroaches you don’t feel sorry for them, do you?”

BRANDED: A member of the neo-Nazi group Schultz88 shows off his fascist tattoos © SERGEY MAXIMISHIN for TIME

While reflecting on the murder of the 17 year-old Armenian in Moscow, David at Lawyer’s Notes is puzzled by something else:

What is surprising is that in Armenia, and even in Russia, Armenians think of Russia as their friend and strategic ally, while considering Americans and Europeans, if not their enemies, then potential adversaries.

Suddenly increasing its prices of gas, Russian government, forced Armenia to sell the 5th unit of the biggest Hrazdan power plant to Russia, therefore losing control over Iranian gas pipe line, the only hope for power independence from Russian energy sharks. At the same time the USA gives out 200 mln. dollars for developing infrastructure, and lots more for humanitarian aid and other projects for technical assistance. The attitude does not change – Americans and Europeans, living in Armenia, are spies, while Russians are friends and defenders.

Where is the logic? Maybe then it is just an ideology propagated by the authorities? Then the question is why do the authorities need it? I think there is an answer to that, an obvious one… for those who are able to think.

To show these new facists in their “glory,” an Armenian forum has posted some photographs.

As I was recently attacked for not writing about the murder of an ethnic Armenian in Moscow at a time when I had no time to do anything other than my work in Yerevan, maybe it’s time to highlight what the Armenian press is saying on the matter.

“Aravot” condemns as “odd and outrageous” the failure by the Armenian embassy in Russia to react to the weekend killing of an ethnic Armenian teenager in Moscow. The paper says that neither Ambassador Armen Smbatian nor his Russian opposite number in Yerevan have expressed sympathy to the family of the 17-year-old Vahan Abrahamiants. “Also silent are those Armenian political and public organizations that react very sharply and promptly to attacks on ethnic Armenians in any other country of the world, including Georgia. It is not clear whether this is the result of the Armenians’ inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Russians or other motives such as a slave mentality or unwillingness to pour scorn on [Armenia’s] strategic ally.”

Actually, the attack seems to have preoccupied most of the Armenian newspapers and RFE/RL’s press review has a comprehensive round up of what they’re saying. Really, I’m impressed because Armenians generally only concern themselves with such incidents when they can be used to attack “enemies” such as Georgia, and not “allies” such as Russia.

“One gets the impression that the Russians and especially their not highest class instinctively feel that something is wrong with them and that they are losing their national self-consciousness and waning g moral stature,” writes “Azg.” The paper says the Russians respond to that loss by adopting the “most primitive, most predatory way of struggle.”

[…]

Commenting on the subject, a senior member of the opposition Hanrapetutyun (Republic) party, Suren Sureniants, tells “Aravot” that it would be naïve to expect President Vladimir Putin to protect ethnic minorities because his regime fails to respect even the basic civil rights of ethnic Russians. “What is happening in Putin’s Russia is natural because that country has long deviated from democracy, while its authorities are guided by imperial ambitions,” says Sureniants. He claims that the authorities in Yerevan remain silent on the continuing killings of Armenians in Russia because they have turned their country into a Russian province.

“The Armenian authorities are subservient [to Russian] to such an extent that they are even scared of defending the interests and rights of their citizens and compatriots in the territory of supposed ally Russia lest the Russians treat us badly,” writes “Chorrord Ishkhanutyun.” “It’s about time we adopted a bit more dignified stance and asked the Russian authorities, ‘If you can not ensure the security of our compatriots, declare it so that we could urge our citizens not to travel to Russia.’”

“Taregir” reports that Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamlet Gasparian is ambiguous in presenting Yerevan’s official reaction to the latest Moscow killing. Asked “How many Armenians need to be killed in Russia in order to prompt a reaction [from Yerevan?],” Gasparian replies, “Such cases are at the center of our attention and of concern to us. Our embassy does keep in touch with relevant Russian services on a daily basis.”

“Hayots Ashkhar” says Moscow prosecutors are now effectively denying that Abrahamiants’s killing was racially motivated. They have suggested that the killing resulted from a dispute over a young woman. “Unfortunately, all the signs are that killings of and attacks on foreigners in Russia will continue,” writes the hitherto pro-Russian paper. It points the fact that a group of Russian skinheads who stabbed to death a 9-year-old Tajik girl in Saint-Petersburg were effectively acquitted by a Russian court last month. “In effect, [Russian] fascists were openly told, ‘Do whatever you want. You won’t get any punishment.’”

According to “Haykakan Zhamanak,” the criminal investigation into the Armenian teenager’s fatal stabbing in a Moscow underground station is little more than a cover-up. “Everything is being done to move what happened to a social plane,” says the paper.

Actually, we should be concerned with racism towards anyone and everyone wherever they are, including any attacks on minorities in Armenia. This also includes the way Yerevan State Medical University treats its foreign students.