ARMENIA’S TRAFFIC POLICE ‘MORE EUROPEAN THAN GEORGIA’S’
By Astghik Bedevian and Emil Danielyan
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
May 19 2006
The chief of Armenia’s notoriously corrupt traffic police claimed
on Friday that his officers are doing a much better job of ensuring
road safety than the famously reformed police service of neighboring
Georgia.
Colonel Ishkhan Ishkhanian, head of the State Automobile Inspectorate
(SAI), insisted that traffic in Georgia is even more chaotic than
in Armenia despite a radical police reform carried out by Georgian
President Mikhail Saakashvili two years ago. He said he arrived at
such conclusion during a recent visit to Tbilisi.
“Compared to Georgia, we are Europe,” Ishkhanian told a news
conference. “They wanted to attain European standards in Georgia,
but it is clear that they have failed.”
The claims are in sharp contrast to media reports, witness accounts
and the dominant opinion of Armenian motorists about the results of
the Georgian reform. Shortly after sweeping to power in the November
2003 “rose revolution,” Saakashvili disbanded his country’s entire
traffic police and formed a Western-style patrol service manned by
well-paid and mainly young officers.
The drastic change seems to have all but eradicated rampant bribery
among Georgian road policemen, a problem that had turned Georgia into
a virtual no-go zone for cars with Armenian license plates. Armenians
have since had little difficulty driving through Georgian territory.
Scores of them traveled to Georgia’s Black Sea resorts by car last
year.
By contrast, bribing a traffic policeman remains the norm in Armenia,
with kickbacks for avoiding legal punishment for an alleged or proven
violation of traffic rules starting from 1,000 drams ($2.3). Officers
patrolling streets or highways are allegedly obliged to transfer a
large part of that money to their superiors.
Many of the high-ranking traffic policemen are wealthy individuals
with extensive business interests. Ishkhanian, for example, is believed
to own a major taxi service.
That traffic police corruption is a serious problem was admitted on
Tuesday by Major-General Ararat Mahtesian, deputy chief of Armenia’s
Police Service. Mahtesian referred to SAI as the “vulnerable spot”
and the “pain” of the Armenian police. He said the Armenian government
will soon embark on a reform of SAI to be financed by the World Bank,
but gave no details.
Ishkhanian also acknowledged the problem, saying that 66 of his
subordinates were subjected to “disciplinary action” last year. But
he would not say how many of them were fired and whether there were
any senior officers among them. He spoke instead of the need to create
unspecified “conditions” that would discourage police bribery.
The SAI chief also said that President Robert Kocharian has formed a
“working group” tasked with making proposals on how to improve road
safety in Armenia.
According to police data, 58 people were killed and 446 others injured
in 317 accidents that were officially registered across Armenia during
the first four months of this year. The official death toll for the
whole of last year stood at 310.
The deeply entrenched corruption hardly bodes well for the success
of the stated police efforts to reduce the number of deadly road
accidents. The increasingly heavy traffic in Armenia and Yerevan in
particular is disorderly and dangerous not least because of wealthy
government-connected drivers that routinely ignore traffic rules.
The road police rarely dare to flag down their luxury cars that usually
carry license plates with repeating numbers, a badge of prestige among
the local rich. The “fanciest” of the easy-to-remember plates may be
worth as much as $2,000 in the police black market.
Reports of ordinary citizens dying as a result of negligent driving
have not been uncommon in the Armenian press. The “Aravot” daily said
this week that a plush Mercedes driven by a son of Seyran Saroyan,
a feared army general, ran over two boys in a village in southern
Armenia, killing one of them and critically injuring the other. The
paper alleged that eyewitnesses of the accident have been bullied
into not testifying against the young man and that a village mayor has
“confessed” to the crime instead.
“I have no such information at this point,” Mahtesian told RFE/RL,
referring to the case. “I am ready to look into those reports and
tell you whether they correspond to reality.”
In another infamous incident, a U.S.-made Hummer rammed into a taxi in
Yerevan at an enormous speed in January 2005, killing a 30-year-old
woman and wounding her infant daughter. An unemployed man was
subsequently identified by the police as the expensive SUV’s driver
before being given a short prison sentence. The man was reportedly
released from jail a few months later.
(Photolur photo: An expensive car ignoring red light at a busy
intersection in Yerevan.)
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