RFE/RL Armenian Report – 03/28/2022

                                        Monday, 


Local Election Marred By Violence, Claims Of Foul Play

        • Marine Khachatrian

Armenia - Defense Minister Suren Papikian (third from right) and other senior 
members of the ruling Civil Contract party hold an election campaign meeting in 
Vedi, March 25, 2022.


Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party has won a repeat election 
held in Armenia’s southern Ararat province amid accusations of foul play voiced 
by opposition figures, election observers and some media outlets.

Voters in a community comprising the provincial town of Vedi and surrounding 
villages went to the polls on Sunday for the second time in three months to 
elect a new local council empowered to appoint the community’s chief executive.

The first election held there in December produced inconclusive results. A local 
opposition bloc called My Strong Community won the largest number of votes but 
fell short of an overall majority in the council. The two other election 
contenders, including Civil Contract, failed to cut a power-sharing deal, 
forcing the conduct of the repeat vote.

Official results showed Civil Contract winning 56 percent of the vote this time 
around, enough to install its top candidate, Garik Sargsian, as head of the 
community. My Strong Community got 41 percent. The opposition bloc did not 
immediately concede defeat or announce plans to challenge the vote results in 
court.

In January, the Armenian government appointed Sargsian as interim community 
mayor in a clear effort to boost the ruling party’s electoral chances. 
Opposition figures have since repeatedly accused him of abusing his 
administrative levers to gain an unfair advantage over his opposition 
challengers.

Armenia - Garik Sargsian.

Daniel Ioannisian, a Yerevan-based civic activist who coordinated a team of 
local election observers, added his voice to the accusations on Monday. 
Ioannisian singled out Sargsian’s decision to provide financial aid to 
low-income local residents in the run-up to the ballot. That, he said, amounted 
to vote buying.

Minister for Territorial Administration Gnel Sanosian dismissed such claims. 
Sanosian, who is a senior member of Pashinian’s party, insisted that the Vedi 
election was free and fair.

The election was also marred by a violent incident that occurred outside a 
polling station in a village near Vedi. A local opposition activist was 
reportedly assaulted by two dozen Pashinian supporters.

Ioannisian claimed that police officers guarding the polling station witnessed 
the beating but did not intervene to stop it. He called for an internal police 
inquiry into their inaction.

A spokesman for the Armenian police told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that no such 
inquiry has been launched so far.

For its part, the Office of the Prosecutor-General said law-enforcement 
authorities are investigating this incident. It said they are also looking into 
several reports about multiple voting and unauthorized presence of people in 
some polling stations.



Vaccinations Plummet In Armenia Amid Record-Low COVID-19 Cases

        • Robert Zargarian

Armenia - A medical worker fills a syringe with COVID-19 vaccine at a mobile 
vaccination center in Yerevan, January 14, 2022.


The already slow pace of vaccinations in Armenia has continued to drop in recent 
weeks amid falling numbers of new coronavirus cases reported by health 
authorities there.

The Armenian Ministry of Health said on Monday that only ten people tested 
positive for the coronavirus in the past day, the lowest single-day number of 
cases recorded by it since the start of the pandemic.

The ministry reported an average of two dozen cases a day last week, sharply 
down from a record high of 4,500 cases registered on February 2 at the height of 
an Omicron-driven wave of infections.

The country’s infection rate has steadily declined since then despite the 
Armenian authorities’ failure to enforce a mandatory health pass for entry to 
cultural and leisure venues introduced on January 22. Very few restaurants, bars 
and other private entities have required visitors to produce evidence of their 
vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test result.

Not surprisingly, Armenia’s vaccine rollout has slowed further over the last two 
months. According to the Ministry of Health, only 46,000 people received a 
second dose of a vaccine in March, compared with over 120,000 such shots 
administered in January.

Gayane Sahakian, the deputy director of the ministry’s National Center for 
Disease Control and Prevention, expressed serious concern at this downward 
trend. Sahakian warned that Armenians should brace themselves for a new wave of 
infections anticipated by the health authorities.

“We will have a visible increase [in infections] at the end of April,” she said, 
arguing that first cases of the more contagious BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron have 
already been detected in Armenia.

As of Monday, just over 967,000 people making up more than a third of the 
country’s population were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only 34,300 of them 
also received booster shots.



Opposition Mayor Freed After Trial

        • Naira Bulghadarian

Armenia - Mayor Arush Arushanian visits a newly repaired sports school in Goris, 
June 5, 2021.


The jailed mayor of the southeastern Armenian town of Goris and surrounding 
villages was set free but risked losing his post on Monday five months after his 
opposition bloc’s victory in a local election.

The 31-year-old mayor, Arush Arushanian, received a suspended six-month prison 
sentence for abuse of power and assault at the end of his high-profile trial. A 
local court at the same time cleared him of other, more serious charges, 
rejecting prosecutors’ demands to sentence him to nine years in prison.

Arushanian is one of the four heads of major communities of Syunik province who 
were arrested shortly after the June 2021 parliamentary elections on various 
charges rejected by them as politically motivated. They all demanded Prime 
Minister Nikol Pashinian’s resignation before joining the main opposition 
Hayastan alliance formed by former President Robert Kocharian in the run-up to 
the snap polls.

The court cleared Arushanian of trying to buy votes. Law-enforcement authorities 
claim that he ordered the head of a village close to Goris, Lusine Avetian, to 
provide financial aid to local residents promising to vote for Hayastan.

Arushanian strongly denies that, saying that the poverty benefits approved by 
the local council were allocated on a regular basis and had nothing to do with 
the general elections.

The accusation was based in large measure on Avetian’s incriminating pre-trial 
testimony against Arushanian. The village chief retracted it when the trial that 
began in November.

Armenia -- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (L), Goris Mayor Arush 
Arushanian (C) and other officials walk through the center of the town, 
September 12, 2020.

The Syunik court also banned Arushanian from holding public office for the next 
five years. His lawyer, Erik Aleskanian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that he 
will appeal against the verdict. Aleksanian insisted that his client can 
continue to serve as Goris mayor pending a higher court’s ruling on the appeal.

Arushanian was reelected for a second term as a result of a municipal election 
held last October three months after his arrest. A bloc led by him defeated 
Pashinian’s Civil Contract party by a wide margin.

The mayor reportedly received a hero’s welcome from his supporters in Goris 
after walking free in the courtroom. He told journalists that he will continue 
to “fight for the homeland” and its “internal enemies.”

Two of the three other jailed Syunik community heads, who were elected to the 
Armenian parliament on the Hayastan ticket, were set free in December after the 
Constitutional Court deemed their arrest illegal.

The third community chief, Manvel Paramazian, was freed in October only to be 
arrested again in February after the Court of Appeals overturned a Syunik 
judge’s decision to grant him bail. The judge was also arrested on the same day 
on charges which he rejects as government retribution.



Azeri Troops 'Withdrawn' From Karabakh Village

        • Artak Khulian

NAGORNO-KARABAKH -- A Russian peacekeeper patrols at a checkpoint outside 
Askeran, November 20, 2020


Azerbaijani forces have withdrawn from a village in Nagorno-Karabakh’s east but 
continue to occupy territory outside it seized by them last week, military 
authorities in Stepanakert said on Monday.

The Azerbaijani army captured the village of Parukh on Thursday before advancing 
towards a strategic mountain to the west of it. Three Karabakh Armenian soldiers 
were killed in ensuing fighting for the sprawling Karaglukh mountain. Russian 
peacekeeping forces stationed in Karabakh helped to largely halt the fighting on 
Saturday evening.

In a weekend statement, Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Azerbaijani of 
violating a Russian-brokered ceasefire that stopped the 2020 
Armenian-Azerbaijani war. It urged Azerbaijani forces to leave the peacekeepers’ 
“zone of responsibility.” Baku denied violating the ceasefire regime in the area 
bordering the Aghdam district regained by it following the six-week war.

The Defense Ministry in Moscow announced on Sunday evening that Azerbaijani 
forces have pulled out of Parukh.

Karabakh’s Defense Army confirmed the following morning that the small village 
is now “under the control of the Russian peacekeeping troops.” All of its 
residents fled their homes on Thursday.

The Defense Army also said that Azerbaijani soldiers continue to hold “fortified 
positions” at a section of Karaglukh but that “the main part” of the sprawling 
mountain is controlled by the Karabakh Armenian side. The Russian contingent’s 
command keeps trying to ensure a full Azerbaijani withdrawal from the area, it 
added in a statement.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry said, meanwhile, that Yerevan expects from the 
Russians “concrete measures” to reverse the Azerbaijani “incursion” into parts 
of Karabakh’s eastern Askeran district. It also reiterated Yerevan’s calls for a 
“proper investigation” into the peacekeepers’ failure to thwart that incursion 
in the first place.

The Russian military said on Sunday that the peacekeepers have managed to 
“stabilize the situation” in the area. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told 
reporters on Monday that Moscow’s chief objective now is to ensure the 
conflicting parties’ full compliance with the 2020 truce accord.

Neither side reported serious truce violations on Sunday and Monday morning.


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