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    Categories: 2021

RFE/RL Armenian Report – 02/09/2021

                                        Tuesday, 

Civic Groups Deplore Pashinian’s Reluctance To Hold Snap Elections

        • Gayane Saribekian

Armenia -- Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (C) talks to deputies from hs My Step 
bloc during a parliament session, Yerevan, September 16, 2020.

Civic groups and activists strongly criticized Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s 
administration on Tuesday for deciding not to hold fresh parliamentary elections 
to end the continuing political crisis in Armenia.

In a joint statement, ten Western-funded non-governmental organizations insisted 
that such elections are “the only way to overcome the current crisis of trust” 
in the Armenian government.

They charged that Pashinian and his team “place partisan interests above public 
ones” and are therefore no different from the country’s former leadership 
toppled in the “Velvet Revolution” of April-May 2018.

“A considerable part of the public has no confidence in the current authorities’ 
ability to not only cope with external and internal challenges brought about by 
the war [in Nagorno-Karabakh] but also guarantee Armenia’s peaceful 
development,” said the NGOs that had strongly supported the Pashinian-led 
revolution.

Pashinian expressed readiness in late December to hold snap elections in the 
coming months following opposition protests sparked by Armenia’s defeat in the 
six-week war. Opposition forces have since continued to demand that the prime 
minister hand over power to a new and interim government that would hold the 
elections within a year.

In a weekend statement, Pashinian and his My Step bloc said they see no need for 
snap polls now because of the opposition’s stance and what they described as a 
lack of popular “demand.”

A leading member of the bloc, Alen Simonian, defended the apparent U-turn and 
blamed the opposition for it on Tuesday.

“My Step could not hold elections arbitrarily. When the opposition demands 
elections we will discuss that,” Simonian told reporters.

The NGO statement dismissed that explanation. “The claim that there is no 
broad-based public support for pre-term elections is as manipulative as the 
parliamentary and extra-parliamentary opposition’s claim that elections 
organized by the current government will definitely be rigged,” it said.

Nina Karapetiants, a civil rights activist, likewise said that Pashinian and his 
allies are using the opposition stance as an excuse not to dissolve the current 
parliament controlled by them.

“They just realized that they would not get the votes that they got [in the last 
elections] … I’m sure that the current authorities would not get even a quarter 
of those votes,” Karapetiants told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.

Pashinian’s bloc garnered over 70 percent of the vote in the elections held in 
December 2018.



New Head Of Armenian High Court Elected

        • Tatevik Lazarian

Armenia - Judge Lilit Tadevosian addresses parliament before being elected as 
new head of Armenia's Court of Cassation, February 9, 2021.

The Armenian parliament elected on Tuesday a 42-year-old senior judge and former 
prosecutor as head of the Court of Cassation, the country’s highest body of 
criminal and administrative justice.

The new court chairwoman, Lilit Tadevosian, was backed by 102 members of the 
132-seat National Assembly, among them opposition parliamentarians. Her 
predecessor, Yervand Khundkarian, became a member of Armenia’s Constitutional 
Court in September.

Tadevosian was nominated for the vacant post by the Supreme Judicial Council 
(SJC), an independent body monitoring Armenian courts.

Tadevosian worked as a prosecutor before taking the bench in 2012. In 2016, then 
President Serzh Sarkisian appointed her as a Court of Cassation judge. She 
became the head of the court’s Criminal Chamber in 2018.

Tadevosian emphasized the importance of judicial independence when she addressed 
lawmakers before they voted in secret ballot to install her as court chairwoman.

“Independence and autonomy are inalienable characteristics of the judiciary to 
which all branches of government and all strata of the society must contribute,” 
she said.

Tadevosian was pressed by several pro-government lawmakers to comment on 
Armenian judges’ systematic refusal to allow the pre-trial arrests of opposition 
figures and other activists trying to topple Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s 
government over its handling of the recent war with Azerbaijan. She pointedly 
declined to criticize those judges.

“If I don’t avoid, as you put it, answering your questions today I will have to 
avoid administering justice on those cases tomorrow,” explained Tadevosian. 
“That’s not what I am standing here for. Justice will not be administered here.”

Lilit Makunts, the parliamentary leader of Pashinian’s My Step bloc, hailed her 
stance.

Tadevosian also drew praise from Edmon Marukian, the leader of the opposition 
Bright Armenia Party, for not “commenting on political processes from the number 
one podium.”

Vladimir Vartanian, the chairman of the parliament committee on legal affairs, 
stressed the fact that Tadevosian will be the first woman to head an Armenian 
high court. “If we want revolutionary changes we must take this fact into 
account as well,” he said.



Kocharian Wants Deeper ‘Integration’ With Russia

        • Naira Nalbandian

Armenia -- Members of a newly created movement seeking Armenia's closer ties 
with Russia rally in Yerevan, February 6, 2021.

Former President Robert Kocharian has again called for Armenia’s deeper 
“integration” with Russia in remarks publicized during his latest visit to 
Moscow.

“We need to speak of serious integration,” Kocharian told the Russian Sputnik 
news agency in an interview published over the weekend. “A regionalization of 
the world is underway. Global processes are giving way to some regional 
integration processes.”

“In this regard, I believe that Armenia should very seriously think about deeper 
interaction with Russia. A much deeper one that exists now,” he said without 
elaborating.

Kocharian already made a case for closer ties with Russia in early December. He 
insisted that only Moscow can help Armenia rebuild its armed forces and confront 
new security challenges in the aftermath of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian announced on New Year’s Eve plans to further 
deepen the Russian-Armenian relationship, saying that his country needs “new 
security guarantees” now. Pashinian reaffirmed those plans at a January 11 
meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin.


Russia -- Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Armenian Prime Minister 
Nikol Pashinian, Moscow, January 11, 2021.

Similar statements have also been made by other Armenian politicians. Edmon 
Marukian, who leads one of the two opposition parties represented in the 
Armenian parliament, called in late December for the opening of a second Russian 
military base in the South Caucasus state.

On February 6 a group of fringe parties and politicians held in Yerevan the 
founding congress of a new movement that will campaign for a “new union” of 
Armenia and Russia.

Commenting on these developments, Hakob Badalian, a political analyst, suggested 
that Armenian political actors are increasingly vying for Moscow’s support in 
their domestic political struggle. He noted a lack of specifics in their 
pro-Russian discourse.

“One gets the impression that they are offering their services to Russia,” 
Badalian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Namely, [they are competing to 
demonstrate] who will better serve Russia and who will offer Armenia’s deeper 
subordination to Russia, and in return for that expect Russian support in terms 
of solving Armenia’s political issues.”

Badalian said that Kocharian is particularly keen to secure such support for his 
bid to return to power. He said Russian influence in Armenia has grown 
significantly since the Karabakh war and Moscow is not averse to expanding it 
further.



Armenian Tech Sector Keeps Growing Despite Recession

        • Sargis Harutyunyan

Armenia -- Young people at the annual Digitec Expo exhibition in Yerevan, 
October 6, 2018.

Armenia’s technology sector continued to grow rapidly last year despite a 
recession primarily caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Minister of High-Tech 
Industry Hakob Arshakian said on Tuesday.

“The combined turnover of [tech] companies rose by 20.6 percent to about 198 
billion drams ($380 million),” Arshakian told a news conference.

“Please note that this includes only high-tech industry companies and doesn’t 
include telecom operators,” he said.

The total number of such firms reached 1,228 in 2020, Arshakian went on. The 
number of their officially registered employees jumped by 22 percent to 18,747, 
he said.

Many of them work for local subsidiaries of U.S. tech giants like Synopsys, 
National Instruments, Mentor Graphics and VMware. A growing number of other 
information technology (IT) engineers are employed by Armenian startups and 
other homegrown firms.

In Arshakian’s words, 192 new IT firms qualified last year for tax breaks that 
were first introduced by Armenia’s former government in 2015. Local startups 
also attracted $50 million in mostly foreign investments, added the minister.


Armenia -- Minister of High-Tech Industry Hakob Arshakian speaks at a news 
conference, February 9, 2021.

The official figures cited by him contrast sharply with the country’s overall 
macroeconomic performance. The Armenian economy contracted by an estimated 8 
percent in 2020 mainly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The six-week war in 
Nagorno-Karabakh, which broke out in late September, also contributed to the 
significant decline in economic activity.

The Armenian tech industry dominated by software companies appears to be the 
only sector of the domestic economy practically unaffected by the recession. It 
has been growing at double-digit annual rates for more than a decade.

According to Arshakian, the sector’s average monthly wage rose from almost 
544,000 drams in 2019 to over 580,000 drams ($1,113) in 2020. The nationwide 
average wage stood at less than 190,000 drams.

Despite their continuing rapid growth, local IT companies generated less than 3 
percent of the Armenian government’s 2020 tax revenues. Arshakian said the total 
amount of taxes paid by them exceeded 41 billion drams. Armenia’s largest mining 
company, the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC), contributed roughly the 
same sum to the state budget.


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