ARMENIA RANKED AMONG WORLD’S MOST CORRUPT COUNTRIES

Asbarez
Nov 17th, 2009

YEREVAN (RFE/RL)-A respected international watchdog reported on Tuesday
a further slight increase in government corruption in Armenia, ranking
it among the 60 most corrupt countries of the world covered by its
annual surveys.

Armenia as well as Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan Mongolia and Vietnam
share a lowly 120th place in Transparency International’s latest
Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of 180 nations. It was 109th in
the previous CPI released by the Berlin-based group a year ago.

The 2009 survey assigned Armenia a score of 2.7 measured on a 10-point
scale, with zero indicating an extremely high degree of corruption
as perceived by entrepreneurs and experts. The South Caucasus state
scored 2.9 points in 2008.

"I must point out that as a rule, a change of up to 0.3 points is
not deemed significant within the framework of this study," said
Amalia Kostanian, chairwoman of Transparency’s Armenian affiliate,
the Anti-Corruption Center (ACC).

Still, Kostanian stressed the fact that the watchdog has found
no decreases in the scale of widespread bribery and other corrupt
practices in the country for the past decade. "In fact, we have been
stagnating since 2003," she said, presenting the findings of the
latest CPI at a news conference.

The Armenian authorities claim to have stepped up their declared fight
against graft in recent years, adopting various anti-graft programs
and forming special bodies tasked with their implementation. The
administration of former President Robert Kocharian launched in 2003
the first such program consisting of mainly legislative measures.

There is little evidence that it has strengthened the rule of law in
the country, however.

Kocharian’s successor and longtime close associate, Serzh Sarkisian,
admitted last year that the virtual absence of prosecutions of
corrupt government officials has undermined public trust in the stated
crackdowns on corruption. His prime minister, Tigran Sargsyan, has
been even more vocal in acknowledging the seriousness of the problem.

The ACC and other local civic groups believe that the situation has
barely improved under the Sarkisian administration. Kostanian stated
in September that anti-corruption drives periodically announced
by the government will be doomed to failure as long as Armenia’s
top government officials are allowed to have extensive business
interests and strangle entrepreneurs challenging them. She described
the "fusion between large entrepreneurs and politicians" as the root
cause of the problem.

Armenia continues to compare favorably, in terms of corruption
perceptions, with two of its neighbors, Azerbaijan and Iran, that are
143rd and 168th respectively in the Transparency rankings. However,
the two other neighbors, Turkey and Georgia, are well ahead of it,
ranking 61st and 66th in the closely watched survey.