ARMENIA JOINED THE PROCESS KNOWING THE PRICE IT HAS TO PAY

Lragir.am
01 April 06

Poverty reduction by 6 per cent and about 34 per cent growth of
income of rural population in five years. This is the result that
the government of Armenia expects after the implementation of the
Millennium Challenge Corporation program on which an agreement was
signed in Washington on March 27.

The minister of finance and economy of Armenia Vardan Khachatryan,
who signed the agreement, met with Armenian news reporters in Yerevan
on March 31 and announced that they hope to get through with logistics
by August and manage work of 6 billion dollars in 2006. A total of 235
million dollars will be allocated within five years. It will almost
entirely be spent on the reconstruction of rural infrastructures.

A special body was set up for the financial management of the
program. The implementation will be controlled by the MCC office
in Yerevan to open in July. A target group board will be set up as
well, the members will be representatives of NGOs, five will become
members of the managing board of the MCC program. Besides these five
representatives of NGOs six members of the board will be from the
government, but only the representatives of NGOs will have the right
to veto.

Before signing an agreement with Armenia the Millennium Challenge
Corporation had signed agreements with another 7 countries, but Vardan
Khachatryan is hopeful that Armenia will be the first or one of the
first to get funding, because our program is more detailed and will
not arouse questions later.

However, not everything is as definitive as it may seem, and Vardan
Khachatryan is hopeful that if Armenia fails to comply with certain
stipulations, the program will be suspended. The stipulations, which
are 16, are different in scope: political, economic, social. Their
compliance is measured by coloring: good is marked green, not very
good is marked yellow, and poor is marked red.

“If two or three of these are marked red, the program will be
suspended, for it will mean that Armenia does not comply with the
stipulation of the program. If the reforms do not move forward, we
will be left out of the millennium programs. But I am convinced that
this will not happen, because the indices are improving year by year,”
says Vardan Khachatryan. Generally, he thinks that the stipulations
underlying the MCC program are problems that Armenia has been tackling
in the past 15 years, and with or without the American program, Armenia
is trying to promote democracy, build a fair system of governance,
because these are prime concerns.

“Last year the index of fair governance changed a little, connected
with the events of April 12. Thus, even if the index does not go down
but remains the same, does not grow, it is assessed as poor. The other
indices have always been satisfactory,” says Vardan Khachatryan. He
assured that when “Armenia entered the process, it realized what was
expected from it.”