Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
Feb 20 2008

Armenia: Voting Incidents Mar Election

Presidential ballot overshadowed by polling-booth violence and other
allegations of foul play.

By IWPR reporters in Armenia (CRS No. 432 20-Feb-08)

Armenia’s leading politicians all voted at the same polling station,
No. 9/11, in Yerevan on February 19 but had different verdicts on the
honesty of the election.

Prime minister and official candidate Serzh Sarkisian – later
declared the winner in the first round of voting – said, `It’s not
important how many rounds there will be, the main thing is that the
elections go normally and there is strong trust in the results of the
elections.’

His main opponent former president Levon Ter-Petrosian said that he
had heard `the elections are going very badly, there are a lot of
definite [evidence] of violations.’

Ter-Petrosian’s campaign team said that a high number of incidents
called the whole election into question. `There are no elections in
Armenia at this moment, there was just an attempt to seize power,’
said the former president’s press secretary Arman Musinian.

Eduard Sharmazanov, press secretary of Serzh Sarkisian, went round
various polling stations, saying that the elections were on the whole
calm and fair and met European standards – a verdict that later
received qualified support from international monitors.

However, a series of incidents recorded by IWPR reporters suggested
that there were at the least several violations of electoral rules.

In polling station 13/16 in the Erebuni suburb of Yerevan, journalist
Lusine Barseghian who works for the opposition newspaper Haikakan
Zhamanak was beaten up. Barseghian said that she had asked the head
of the electoral commission there why they were not recording alleged
violations of procedure – and received a rude rebuff when several men
tried to eject her from the station.

`Armen Martirosian [a member of parliament from the opposition
Heritage Party] saw that I was being thrown out, intervened and
called the police,’ she said.

Barseghian said that when the local police chief arrived he
confiscated her camera and Dictaphone, `When I tried to take them
back, they hit me. They began to beat me and Armen Martirosian and
tried to remove us from the polling station.’ She said that another
member of parliament Zaruhi Postanjian arrived and they also tried to
confiscate her camera.

In the town of Razdan, a quarrel broke out between the head of the
electoral commission in polling station 25/12 Harutiun Khachatrian
and a representative of opposition candidate Ter-Petrosian, Jivan
Vartanian.

`People do not trust promises and Serzh Sarkisian is a man not of
promises but of deeds,’ said Khachatrian.

Khachatrian told IWPR that officially unemployment in his region was
eight per cent although in actual fact it was higher. Overhearing
this, Vartanian intervened and said that unemployment had overwhelmed
the whole district and was more than 60 per cent. Khachatrian angrily
retorted, `You should speak less! You are selling your motherland!’

Amongst examples of malpractice, IWPR correspondents saw several
instances of two voters entering the same booth and someone who was
not on the electoral list casting a ballot, but none of these
incidents was recorded by electoral officials.

Larisa Tadevosian, representative of Ter-Petrosian in the town of
Abovian, was abducted from polling station 28/07.

`They took me to some waste ground outside the town and someone hit
me in the face and said, `You shouldn’t get in the way and you should
keep silent. If you carry on, you’ll have nowhere to hide. And tell
your people that they should expect the same thing.’ They said
terrible things to me and insulted me,’ she said.

She was abandoned with a beaten face and collected by her party
colleagues. She said that she recognised her assailant as the
bodyguard of a prominent oligarch.

Anoush Afrikian, head of the polling station, did not deny that
Tadevosian had been abducted but said that it had been done by her
`friends’.

Two other opposition supporters, Erjanik Abgarian and Gurgen
Eghiazarian, said they had also been beaten up and had complained to
the police. Eghiazarian said that he later saw on television he was
being sought by the police as a `hooligan’.

Three other opposition representatives, all women, Greta Khachatrian,
Maro Minasian and Anaid Tamarian, said they were all forcibly ejected
>From polling station 28/16 by a group of young me, who, they said,
wanted to stuff the ballot boxes.

`Several big lads came in, took hold of us and dragged us out,’ said
Khachatrian. `And then eight men came in with packets of ballot
papers which they did not try to hide.’

Officials in the local electoral commission said they could not
confirm the incident.

Reporters Anahid Gogorian, Rima Garibian, Bella Ksalova and Dmitry
Avaliani are all in Armenia covering the election as part of IWPR’s
EU-funded Cross Caucasus Journalism Network.