GINA OUT OF ARMENIA, AS QUESTIONS LOOM
David Vella
Malta Star, Malta
April 16 2007
Gina Khachatryan, the asylum seeker who was deported from England
to Armenia via Malta last week, has managed to once again leave her
homeland and is now "in a place of safety", according to her friends
in the UK.
But while human rights groups are relieved that she is not in danger
of persecution, journalists in Armenia are casting doubts on whether
or not Gina’s story of her hardships before leaving the country are
actually true.
Khachatryan made headlines in numerous British and Maltese newspapers,
including this e-newspaper, when she appealed for help to prevent her
deportation, since this would have put her, her husband, and their
five year old daughter at risk of political persecution.
The family had been living in the UK as asylum seekers since 2003.
But the British Home Office never granted them refugee status, and
last week the family was taken to a detention centre to be deported.
But human rights groups in the UK, along with a number of
journalists and journalist associations, started rallying against
the deportation. Gina had fled her country after exposing a case
of electoral fraud in 2003. She even spent 40 days in prison before
managing to escape Armenia, or so she claimed.
maltastar.com had talked to Gina herself, hours before she boarded an
Air Malta plane from London to Malta last Friday. She had explained
that she is afraid of going back to her country "because they will
arrest us immediately".
Unable to track down Gina’s story
But during the weekend, at least two journalists working in Armenia,
confirmed that they did not manage to find any details on Gina’s
experience back in 2003. On a blog hosted on the website of ‘The
Guardian’ newspaper, where Gina’s case was first mentioned, Roy
Greenslade wrote that a friend of his in Armenia "was unable to find
anyone at the Yerevan press club or the Investigative Journalists of
Armenia who knew of her or the incident she described. Furthermore,
[he] asked people in the newsroom of Armenia’s public TV company,
where Gina claims to have worked, and no-one there remembered her".
At the same time, in response to these doubts, the editor of
an Armenian newspaper wrote "we, too, have tried to validate Ms
Khachatryan’s claims, but so far found them unsubstantiated".
But, as Greenslade wrote in his blog, this does not necessarily mean
that her story was not true. "None of this is, of course, conclusive
proof that Gina has lied, but Armenian journalists – and journalists
everywhere – will be unhappy if she has pretended to be a journalist
in order to stay illegally in Britain… The truth is that there was
so little time to act after hearing about Gina’s detention that none
of us had time to check her story. On the other hand, we still don’t
know the truth. The whole thing remains a mystery".