Tuesday, 

Armenian, Azeri FMs May Meet Again

        • Naira Nalbandian

U.S. - Foreign Ministers Elmar Mammadyarov (R) of Azerbaijan and Zohrab 
Mnatsakanian (second from right) of Armenia pose for a photograph with the OSCE 
Minsk Group co-chairs in New York, 26 September 2018.

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday did not rule out the possibility of yet 
another meeting of the Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers later this 
month.

The ministry spokeswoman, Anna Naghdalian, said that Foreign Minister Zohrab 
Mnatsakanian will participate in an annual security conference that will be 
held in Munich, Germany on February 16-18. “As far as we know, Azerbaijan’s 
foreign minister [Elmar Mammadyarov] has also confirmed his participation [in 
the conference,]” she told a news briefing in Yerevan.

Commenting on the possibility of Mammadyarov and Mnatsakanian meeting on the 
sidelines of the Munich forum, Naghdalian said: “Whenever there is an agreement 
on a meeting between the two ministers we announce it in a coordinated manner … 
We have always adhered to that principle and we will not breach it if there is 
such an agreement.”

Mnatsakanian and Mammadyarov have met for four times in the last seven months. 
According to international mediators, at their most recent talks held in Paris 
on January 16 the ministers acknowledged the need for “taking concrete measures 
to prepare the populations for peace.”

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev 
have also held a series of talks in recent months. Their last meeting took 
place in Davos, Switzerland on January 22. It fuelled more talk of major 
progress in long-running efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Pashinian downplayed last week his “informal contacts” with Aliyev. He also 
stated that the Armenian side will not agree to territorial concessions 
Azerbaijan in return for mere peace in the region. “We can’t even discuss the 
lands-for-peace formula,” he said.

The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry criticized those remarks, saying that 
“withdrawal of Armenian from the occupied Azerbaijani territories” has long 
been at the heart of the negotiation process mediated by the United States, 
Russia and France. “Does that statement by Pashinian mean a renunciation of 
negotiations?” it said in a statement.

Naghdalian insisted in this regard that Yerevan remains committed to further 
negotiations with Baku under the aegis of the OSCE Minsk Group co-headed by the 
three world powers. “For Armenia the status and security of Artsakh (Karabakh) 
are the overriding priorities in this process,” she said.




Israel Lifts Ban On ‘Suicide’ Drone Sales To Azerbaijan


Nagorno-Karabakh -- Smoke from fire rises above the ground in Martakert 
district, after an Israeli-made Azerbaijani "suicide" drone was shot down by 
the Karabakh army, 4 April 2016.

Israel’s Defense Ministry has lifted its ban on exports to Azerbaijan of 
“kamikaze” drones that are manufactured by an Israeli company accused of 
hitting Armenian positions in Nagorno-Karabakh with one of them in 2017.

According to Israeli media reports, the company, Aeronautics Defense Systems, 
was working on a potential $20 million deal with Baku when Azerbaijani 
officials asked its specialists to demonstrate its Orbiter 1K unmanned aerial 
vehicle (UAV) on Karabakh Armenian soldiers in the summer of 2017.

The reports said two Aeronautics employees refused to carry out the attack 
before two higher-ranking executives eventually agreed to do it. They said the 
drone did not directly hit their targets but two soldiers were injured in the 
attack.

Aeronautics' export license was suspended after a complaint was filed with the 
Israeli Defense Ministry. Israel’s Justice Ministry moved in August 2018 to 
charge the company’s chief executive, deputy CEO, and other employees with 
violating an Israeli law on security export controls. The company denied any 
wrongdoing.

The Times of Israel newspaper reported that the Defense Ministry returned the 
export license on Monday, leading the company to inform the Tel Aviv Stock 
Exchange that the ban on Orbiter 1K sales to its “central customer ‘A'” has 
been lifted. “The company can continue to supply the UAV to the aforementioned 
customer as soon as possible,” Aeronautics said in a statement.

The ministry’s decision came three weeks after Aeronautics was purchased by 
another, state-owned Israeli defense company, Rafael, in a $231 million deal.

The Azerbaijani army heavily used similar suicide drones manufactured by 
another Israeli company during the April 2016 hostilities in Karabakh. Baku had 
bought the Harop drones as part of multimillion-dollar defense contracts signed 
with Israeli arms manufacturers.

In 2012, Israeli defense officials confirmed a reported deal to provide the 
Azerbaijani military with more weapons worth a combined $1.6 billion. Those 
included, among other things, sophisticated anti-tank rockets which were also 
used by Azerbaijani forces in April 2016.

Armenia has long expressed concern at the Israeli-Azerbaijani arms deals, 
saying that they undermine international efforts to end the Karabakh conflict. 
A senior Armenian military official hailed in September 2017 the freeze of 
Orbiter 1K sales to Baku.

Commenting on the lifting of the Israeli ban on Tuesday, an Armenian Foreign 
Ministry spokeswoman said: “We will raise this issue both in our bilateral 
meetings [with Israeli officials] and on multilateral platforms … We will keep 
telling our international partners that an arms race is extremely dangerous for 
our region.”

The “suicide” drone scandal was exposed by the Israeli press more than two 
weeks after Israel’s Minister of Regional Cooperation Tzachi Hanegbi visited 
Yerevan in an apparent bid to improve his country’s frosty relationship with 
Armenia. Then Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian visited Israel and 
met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2017.




Armenian Newspaper Reports Arson Attack

        • Tatevik Lazarian

Armenia - A car belonging to the "Syuniats Yerkir" newspaper pictured after 
being set on fire, Kapan, February 5, 2019.

An Armenian regional newspaper claimed to be systematically bullied by 
individuals linked to the country’s largest mining company after a car 
belonging to it was set on fire early on Tuesday.

Photographs posted by the “Syuniats Yerkir” newspaper based in Kapan, the 
administrative center of the southeastern Syunik province, showed that it was 
partly destroyed by what its editor, Samvel Aleksanian, described as a 
deliberate arson attack.

“I regard that as a crime committed because of our professional activities,” 
Aleksanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).

Aleksanian pointed the finger at Vahe Hakobian, a former Syunik governor, and 
other influential persons thought to be close to the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum 
Combine (ZCMC), an industrial giant located in the nearby town of Kajaran. He 
said his paper has been at odds with the company because it has consistently 
tried to ascertain who its real owners are.

“In the last two years there have been numerous incidents involving our 
newspaper and myself but none of them has been solved,” said Aleksanian. In 
particular, he claimed to have been physically assaulted outside his Kapan 
office in August.

“This latest attack was the continuation of the previous ones,” the editor went 
on. “We raise issues which hidden shareholders of the Kajaran plant don’t like.”

Hakobian, who was sacked as Syunik governor shortly after last spring’s “velvet 
revolution” in Armenia, flatly denied the allegations. “The media outlet 
mentioned by you has for years spread untrue and slanderous reports and even 
personal insults but we are following only the legal path,” he said, pointing 
to over a dozen libel suits filed against “Syuniats Yerkir” by him and senior 
ZCMC executives.

The former governor also suggested that Aleksanian might have himself burned 
down the newspaper car in “yet another attempt at self-promotion.”


Armenia - A copper ore-processing plant in Kajaran, 6Feb2016.

ZCMC, which employs more than 4,000 people, was privatized in 2004 at a 
relatively modest price of $132 million. A German metals group, Cronimet, 
gained a 75 percent stake in the industrial giant at the time.

The rest of ZCMC is controlled by at least two obscure Armenian firms. 
Ownership of those firms has long been a subject of speculation in Armenia, 
with some local commentators and opposition politicians linking them to former 
President Serzh Sarkisian or his predecessor Robert Kocharian.

Hakobian worked as a senior ZCMC executive before Sarkisian appointed him as 
Syunik governor in 2016. In early 2017, he also became the head of the regional 
branch of Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia (HHK).

According to the Hetq.am investigative publication, Hakobian holds a 10 percent 
stake in Cronimet Metal Trading CIS, an apparent subsidiary of ZCMC’s largest 
nominal shareholder.

Hakobian already found himself in hot water shortly after Prime Minister Nikol 
Pashinian sacked him as Syunik governor last summer. An Anglo-American gold 
mining company, Lydian International, accused him of involvement in the 
continuing disruption of its operations in Armenia. Lydian released a short 
video that purportedly showed the driver of a car used by Hakobian delivering 
food to several dozen protesters blockading the Amulsar gold deposit developed 
by it.

Hakobian denied that. He claimed that the videotaped car was driven by a ZCMC 
employee who accidentally met one of his relatives on a highway near Amulsar.

Lydian’s allegations were taken seriously by Deputy Prime Minister Tigran 
Avinian. He said in July that they are a cause for “deep concern” and require 
an “objective and consistent examination.”




Western Watchdog Hails Democratic Change In Armenia

        • Heghine Buniatian

U.S. - Freedom House President Michael Abramowitz speaks at the Freedom House 
2018 Annual Awards Dinner on May 23, 2018 in Washington.

The Washington-based rights group Freedom House praised the “velvet revolution” 
in Armenia and “markedly freer and fairer” elections which followed it, in an 
annual report on global democracy released on Tuesday.

The Freedom In the World 2019 report lists Armenia among a handful of countries 
where “positive breakthroughs” were registered last year. They show that 
“democracy has enduring appeal as a means of holding leaders accountable and 
creating the conditions for a better life,” it says.

“Entrenched elites in many Eurasian countries continued exploiting the 
advantages of incumbency to maintain their grip on power,” reads the report. 
“However, Armenia broke that pattern with the ouster of an unpopular leader and 
the election of a new, reform-minded government.”

“In the spring of 2018, Armenians took to the streets in protest of an attempt 
by Serzh Sarkisian to extend his rule by shifting from the presidency to the 
prime minister’s office,” it says. “To widespread surprise, the protests 
culminated in Sarkisian’s resignation and the rise of opposition leader Nikol 
Pashinian to the premiership. Pashinian’s My Step alliance decisively won snap 
parliamentary elections in December, clearing the way for systemic reforms.”

The polls were “markedly freer and fairer than elections in previous years,” 
added Freedom House.

Accordingly, the watchdog gave Armenia higher scores in various categories of 
political rights and civil liberties. Still, it continued to rank the South 
Caucasus states as “partly free” alongside other former Soviet states such as 
Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova.

Armenia’s three other neighbors -- Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran -- as well as 
Russia were rated “not free.”

The report says that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Azerbaijani 
counterpart Ilham Aliyev both won new presidential terms in 2018 through 
election campaigns that benefited from "strong-arm tactics that included the 
repression of independent media and civil society, the abuse of state 
resources, and the persecution of genuine political opponents -- as well as 
outright fraud."

It also says that the United States in 2018 saw "a decline in the rule of law" 
that put American democracy "on a level with Greece, Croatia, and Mongolia," 
and well below other long-standing democracies like Germany and Britain.


Press Review



“Zhoghovurd” claims that former President Robert Kocharian has adopted a new 
“defense tactic” in his efforts to disprove coup allegations brought against 
him. The paper quotes Kocharian’s lawyer Hayk Alumian as saying that the 
ex-president received information about the 2008 post-election developments in 
Yerevan from Gorik Hakobian, the then head of the National Security Service. 
Speaking in Armenia’s Court of Appeals last week, Kocharian also seemingly 
distanced himself from a secret order that was issued to Armenian army units in 
February 2008. This is construed by the paper as a sign that Kocharian now 
wants to blame other officials for the March 2008 violence.

“One must not say things that will not become a reality in the foreseeable 
future,” writes “Aravot.” The paper points to Mayor Hayk Marutian’s promises to 
build new metro stations in Yerevan. It also scoffs at parliament speaker 
Ararat Mirzoyan’s explanation for his decision to relocate with his family to a 
government compound in Yerevan. It argues that Mirzoyan’s two predecessors did 
not reside there while in office. “In Armenia, the National Assembly speaker is 
not the kind of a position that requires extraordinary security measures,” it 
says. “He or she is not someone who makes fateful decisions.” The paper says 
that the controversial payment of lavish bonuses to senior government officials 
was another mistake made by the new authorities and they should acknowledge it.

“Zhamanak” reports that former President Levon Ter-Petrosian has dismissed as 
untimely and meaningless a heated public debate on the possible change of 
Armenia’s national anthem. In written comments publicized on Monday, 
Ter-Petrosian said that there are far more pressing issues facing the country. 
The paper suggests that he used the topic to “remind” the public of his 
existence amid the continuing high-profile inquiry into the 2008 unrest in 
Yerevan.

(Lilit Harutiunian)


Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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