In a surprising move, one of Armenia’s strongest women officials has been fired for corruption allegations.

Alvina Zakaryan is a member of the so-called Karabakh clan (like the current president). Her agency, the Department of Passports and Visas at the Armenian Police (commonly known as OVIR), is widely considered to be Armenia’s most openly corrupt agency.

While firing Zakaryan is quite cosmetic - OVIR was really damaging Armenia’s image - it is interesting to see how the “fight against corruption” will continue in Armenia.

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When, in February 2006, the European Parliament officially condemned Azerbaijan’s December 2005 deliberate destruction of the world’s largest Armenian medieval cemetery – Djulfa – the Azeri authorities denied European delegations’ visit to the site.

Azerbaijan, which still claims Djulfa was never destroyed because it didn’t exist in the first place, then said that it would only agree to the visit IF the delegation visited Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan (which is impossible since Nagorno-Karabakh is in a technical war with Azerbaijan and the only real way to visit Nagorno-Karabakh is from Armenia).

In an apparent desperation in the face of Azerbaijan’s continuous tricks to keep the delegation out of Djulfa, Edward O’Hara  - head of the PACE Committee on Culture, Science and Education – has now suggested to drop the idea of visiting all countries at the same time and instead start off by visiting Azerbaijan first.

Azerbaijan’s response? NO WAY JOSE! Read the rest of the post at the Djulfa Blog.

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Image: Former Armenian president and opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan greets supporters during a rally in central Yerevan, June 20, 2008. This is the first mass opposition rally since March 1 violent clashes with government forces when several people were killed. REUTERS/Photolure/Hayk Badalyan

While they are not the only one, Armenia’s opposition in its new protests continues to polarize the society in the smallest ex-Soviet republic by making racist statements about the current government.

According to a transcript posted on an opposition website , former president and opposition Levon-Ter Petrosyan called Armenia’s current administration a “Tatar-Mongolian” regime, a euphemism for “invading Turks,” just seconds into his speech on Friday, June 20, 2008.

By calling Armenia’s leaders “Tatar-Mongols,” Petrosyan is not only insulting his own nation, the fight for Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia’s society, but also millions of people around the world who have Turkic origin. The worst thing is that this kind of racism doesn’t turn the thousand protesters off. So is Levon just a racist himself or is he catering a racist audience?

Bitter, oppressed and poor people often find scapegoats. But how long are we going to tolerate this kind of racism? What right do we have to mock Azerbaijan - where the word Armenian is purposely spelled with a lower-case “a” and condemn its institutionalized racism - when our own “leaders” accuse each other of being a Turk?

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Asst. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Fried has testified in front of the House Foreign Relations Committee on the South Caucasus countries.

In the introduction, Fried set the tone of the discussion. Talking about the South Caucasus countries’ relationship with NATO (which means alienation from Russia), he said:

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Georgia has made a choice to join NATO. The United States and the nations of NATO welcome this choice, and Georgia’s neighbors should respect it.  Azerbaijan has chosen to develop its relations with NATO at a slower pace, and we respect its choice. Armenia’s situation is different, due to its history and currently complicated relations with Azerbaijan and Turkey, and we respect its choice as well.

[...]

Speaking about Azerbaijan, Fried said that “Azerbaijan has had the world’s fastest growing economy for three consecutive years.” Talking about Nagorno-Karabakh, he said “While we support Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, Nagorno-Karabakh’s final status must be determined through negotiations and a spirit of compromise that respects international legal and political principles.” By “legal [principle] Fried means “territorial integrity,” by “political principles” he means “self-determination.” In other words, he hopes there is a golden mean to the conflict of the two. Fried finished the presentation on Azerbaijan by referencing the recent anti-Armenian rhetoric. “We hope that the Azerbaijani government will avoid the temptation of thinking that renewed fighting is a viable option. In our view, it is not. We have noted our concern with persistent bellicose rhetoric by some Azerbaijani officials.” Mr. Friend, again and again, failed to mention the 2005 destruction of the Djulfa cemetery by Azerbaijan. I will send him an e-mail shortly.

Talking about Armenia, Fried referenced the genocide by saying that Turkey needs to recognize it while Armenia needs to guarantee that it will not territorial claims against Turkey (ironically, official Armenia has always done the latter.

In Fried’s words:

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Reconciliation between Armenia and Turkey, however, will require dealing with sensitive, painful issues. Turkey needs to come to terms with a dark chapter in its history: the mass killings and forced exile of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. That will not be easy, just as it has not been easy for the United States to come to terms with dark periods of our own past. For its part, Armenia must be ready to acknowledge the existing border and disavow any claim on the territory of modern Turkey, and respond constructively to any efforts Turkey may make.

[...]

The report went into great detail describing Armenia’s post election unrest. It said in part:

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When peaceful mass protests followed the disputed vote, the United States and others pressed continuously for the government of Armenia to refrain from responding with force. However, on March 1, within hours of formal assurances by the Armenian government that they would avoid a confrontation, police entered the square. Ensuing clashes later in the day between demonstrators and security personnel led to at least 10 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Mr. Ter-Petrossian was taken to his residence by security forces, where he appeared to remain under de facto house arrest for weeks. A State of Emergency (SOE) was declared in Yerevan. Freedom of assembly and basic media freedoms were revoked. Opposition newspapers were forced to stop publishing and news websites were blocked, including Radio Liberty. The government then filled the information void with articles and broadcasts disseminating the government version of events and attacking the opposition. While it was alleged that some protesters were armed before the March 1 crackdown, there have been no convictions to date on such charges.

[...]

Ironically, Fried finished his remarks on Armenia by connecting the recent unrest (and the need to resolve it) to the absence of a US ambassador to Armenia (the Democratic-controlled U.S. senate has refused to appoint an Ambassador who refuses to refer to the Armenian Genocide as such).

Summarizing Georgia’s political situation, Fried said “Georgia’s young democracy has made progress, but Georgia needs to make more progress if it is to live up to the high standards that it has set for itself. The United States will help as it can to support democratic reform, urging the Georgian authorities to take seriously their ambition to reach European standards of democracy.”

The rest of the talk on Georgia was a detailed condemnation of Russia’s pressure on the ex-Soviet republic:

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Moscow has in recent years put economic and political pressure on Georgia: closing their common border; suspending air and ground transport links; and imposing embargoes against exports of Georgian wine, mineral water, and agricultural goods. This year, despite recently lifting some of the economic and transport embargoes, Moscow has intensified political pressure by taking a number of concrete steps toward a de facto official relationship with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where Russian peacekeeping forces have been deployed since the early 1990s – up to 3,000 in Abkhazia, and 500 Russians plus 500 North Ossetians in South Ossetia. In March, Russia announced its unilateral withdrawal from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) sanctions on Abkhazia, which would allow Russia potentially to provide direct military assistance (though the Russian government has offered assurances that it will continue to adhere to military sanctions). On April 16, then-President Putin issued instructions calling for closer ties between Russian ministries and their Abkhaz and South Ossetian counterparts. Russian investors are known to be buying property in Abkhazia in disregard of Georgian law. Some of these properties may have belonged to displaced persons, making their eventual return even more difficult. Russian banks maintain correspondent relationships with unlicensed and virtually unregulated Abkhaz banks, an open invitation to money launderers. 

[...]

Interestingly, if you take Fried’s words for real there is no discrimination against minorities in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. While the U.S. State Department official repeatedly refers to “separatists,” there are no talk about discrimination against minorities and destruction of minority culture in either of the South Caucasus republics.

The report also lacks mentioning human trafficking, which is very prevalent in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Fighting and preventing human trafficking is a major step of building democracy.

The Q&A transcript hasn’t been posted as of June 18, 2008.

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Threatening to damage its uniquely objective reputation in the smallest of the former Soviet states, ArmeniaNow.com has published a partisan commentary on a recent Jewish-American visit to Armenia written by a member of a Diaspora organization often criticized as “soft” for its cooperation with some not-so-pro-Armenian groups.  The same Armenian organization, some say, is now criticizing others for the same thing it has been doing for many years.

The commentary, provided by the Armenian Assembly of America (AAA) to its sponsored publication, reads:

A two man delegation representing the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has just finished a visit to Armenia accompanied by two employees of Gerard Cafesjian (founder of the Cafesjian Foundation and long-time philanthropist/investor in Armenia), where they met with the new president, defense minister and others. Their visit to Armenia in itself is not surprising, since the AJC had sought such a trip in conjunction with the Armenian Assembly of America for the past five years, but the Assembly has repeatedly said “no.”

The Assembly told the AJC that its opposition to the passage of the Armenian Genocide resolution made such a visit under Assembly auspices inappropriate. I was involved in the first rejection, as was the former Executive Director of the Assembly, Ross Vartian. Now, however, Vartian, is the Executive Director of Cafesjian’s private Washington, D.C. operation named USAPAC.

He arranged for Peter Rosenblatt, a prominent leader of the AJC and Barry Jacobs, who has the title of Strategic Studies Director, to meet with Armenia’s top leadership.

Jacobs circulates articles from various sources supporting not only Israeli positions but pro Turkish and pro Azerbaijani policies as well. Jacobs’s bias against Armenia is palpable. A New York Times photograph taken at the session of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee showed Jacobs seated among a group of Turkish protesters wearing badges saying “NO” to the pending Genocide resolution.

[...]

According to David Boyajian, an outspoken Armenian activist who sparked the recent fight against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, the controversy at stake is not as much the obvious anti-Armenian Jewish leaders’ visit to Armenia (which needs to be condemned), but that the Armenian Assembly of America - the organization that now criticizes its breakaway wing - has a long history of cooperating with deniers of the Armenian Genocide itself.

In Boyajian’s words:

It takes chutzpah AAA - long-time apologists for the very Jewish denialists that it is now criticizing - to criticize USAPAC, not that USAPAC does not fully deserve it (and I have been emailing many people the past few days and getting them to call/write USAPAC).
 
And where does Armenia stand on this?  It’s president gave an audience to a genocide denier.  Maybe Armenia deserves some criticism too.
 
Fact is, AAA has done next to nothing to help on ADL/NPFH issue, and we all know it.
 
Suddenly, AAA is now some sort of hardliner?
 
The main reason AAA is criticizing USAPAC now is that the latter is run by Cafesjian and Vartian, who quit AAA.  Whom is the AAA kidding? 
 
AAA would be (very) well-advised to look to its own record.
 
This article is also full of outright falsehoods, and I will be proving it.

Jewcy, a website by young Jewish-American bloggers, has condemned Barry Jacobs, the gentleman who was given a free ride to Armenia by USAPAC, for denying the Armenian Genocide. As a supporter of open dialogue, I myself am not outright against USAPAC’s sponsorship of Jacobs’ trip to Armenia pending on the results. If Jacobs gives up his anti-Armenian campaign, which is highly unlikely to happen, then USAPAC will be proven right in its judgment. 

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The International Herald Tribute has an interesting article on diaspora Armenians immigrating to Armenia.

What would prompt a young family to abandon a comfortable life and move to a poor country where running water is still a luxury for many, politics are messy and the threat of war looms large?

For Aline Masrlian, 41, her husband, Gevork Sarian, and their two children, it was their motherland calling.

“It is something special when you live in your own land,” said Masrlian, who moved here after her family had lived for generations in Syria.

Lured by the economic opportunities in a fast changing country and the lure of home, some people from Armenia’s vast diaspora are moving to the land that their ancestors had long kept alive as little more than an idea. Longtime residents, meanwhile, are no longer fleeing the country in large numbers.

While 3.2 million people live in this landlocked Caucasus mountain nation — the smallest of the ex-Soviet republics — an estimated 5.7 million Armenians reside abroad. The largest disappears are in Russia (2 million), the United States (1.4 million), Georgia (460,000) and France (450,000), according to government data.

[...]

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