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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