ARMENIA TO INVITE WESTERN VOTE MONITORS
By Ruzanna Khachatrian

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Dec 11 2007

Armenia will ask the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe to monitor its upcoming presidential election despite misgivings
about the work of Western-led observer missions, officials in Yerevan
said on Tuesday.

"We have long cooperated with the OSCE’s Office of Democratic
Institutions and Human Rights and maintain contacts with its
representatives with regard to election monitoring," Vladimir
Karapetian, the Armenian Foreign Ministry spokesman, told RFE/RL.

"We will extend an invitation to observe the presidential elections
in due course," he said.

Armenia joined Russia, Belarus and four Central Asian states last
October in demanding serious restrictions on the activities of mainly
Western observers acting under the aegis of the OSCE/ODIHR. Under their
Russian-drafted proposals submitted to the OSCE, observer missions
deployed in OSCE member states would comprise no more than 50 people
and would be barred from assessing the conduct of a particular election
before the announcement of its official results.

Although the OSCE has criticized as deeply flawed virtually all
elections held in Armenia until now, Yerevan’s decision to back the
Russian proposals was somewhat unexpected given Western observers
largely positive assessment of last May’s Armenian parliamentary
polls. The ODIHR said it is bewildered by the move.

Under Armenian law, international observer missions can be invited by
the president of the republic, the government, the Foreign Ministry,
the National Assembly and the Central Election Commission (CEC). The
CEC chairman, Garegin Azarian, said on Tuesday that the electoral
authority will only ask the OSCE to dispatch short-term observers,
who only watch polling and the vote count. It is the Foreign Ministry
that will invite long-term observers, he said.

The presidential election slated for February 19 is also expected to
monitored by parliamentarians from the OSCE, the Council of Europe
and the European Union. The leadership of the Armenian parliament
will extend formal invitations to them soon, a spokeswoman for the
National Assembly said.

The ODIHR, meanwhile, said it is already making preparations
for Armenian vote monitoring. A spokeswoman for the Warsaw-based
watchdog, Urdur Gunnarsdottir, told RFE/RL that an ODIHR has sent a
"needs assessment" team to Yerevan and is awaiting its report on how
to organize the process. She could not say when the observer mission
will likely kick off its work in Armenia.