Author: Talar Tumanian

                                        Thursday, April 2, 2020

EU Announces Coronavirus Aid Package For Armenia


Belgium -- European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen holds a news 
conference detailing EU efforts to limit economic impact of the coronavirus 
outbreak, Brussels, April 2, 2020.

The European Union announced on Thursday 51 million euros ($55 million) in 
assistance designed to help Armenia deal tackle the coronavirus epidemic and its 
severe socioeconomic consequences.

The EU Delegation in Yerevan said this includes 18 million euros in “new funds” 
allocated to Armenia and 33 million euros that will be “redirected” from other 
projects which it had planned to finance in the country.

It said the aid package will be used for supplying medical equipment, training 
medical personnel, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises and providing 
humanitarian assistance to socially vulnerable groups of the population.

“More is yet to come through access to important regional banking facilities and 
further restructuring of projects,” the delegation added in a statement.

According to additional information posted on the mission’s Facebook page, the 
EU will spend 30 million euros on supporting Armenian businesses by improving 
their “access to cheap loans, working capital and guarantees.”

It also says: “Over 3,000 vulnerable households with elderly people, people with 
disabilities and large families in Shirak, Tavush and Lori regions will receive 
humanitarian aid packages.”

The EU announcement marks the largest coronavirus-related aid allocation secured 
by Armenia so far.

The United States last week pledged to provide with more than $1 million in 
similar aid. It is primarily aimed at strengthening Armenian health authorities’ 
capacity monitor infections and detect the virus.



Armenia Praises Karabakh Polls


Nagorno-Karabakh -- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian (C), Karabakh 
President Bako Sahakian (R) and Archbishop Pargev Martirosian leave a newly 
built church in Stepanakert, May 9, 2019.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on Thursday described the latest presidential and 
parliamentary elections in Nagorno-Karabakh as democratic and said they could 
facilitate a resolution of the Karabakh conflict.

“I think that those were high-quality elections and that is evidenced by their 
official results,” Pashinian said as he opened a weekly cabinet meeting in 
Yerevan.

“The unprecedentedly large number of presidential candidates and participants of 
the parliamentary elections is quite telling,” he said. “Also quite telling is 
the fact that opposition, rather than pro-government, forces finished second and 
third in the parliamentary elections.”

“And I think that further development of democracy in Artsakh (Karabakh) is 
important also in terms achieving a just settlement of the conflict and security 
and stability in the region,” added Pashinian.

Azerbaijan strongly condemned the Karabakh elections held on Tuesday, saying 
that they run counter to Azerbaijani and international law. It also said that 
that the Armenian-populated territory, which broke away from Azerbaijani rule in 
19991, is governed by an “illegal regime installed by Armenia.”

U.S., Russian and French diplomats co-heading the OSCE Minsk Group stressed, for 
their part, that Karabakh is not recognized as an independent state by the 
international community and that “the so-called general elections” cannot 
predetermine the outcome of Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks mediated by them.

The mediators noted at the same time that they “recognize the role of the 
population of Nagorno-Karabakh in deciding its future” as part of a future 
resolution of the conflict.

The Armenian Foreign Ministry called the latter point “noteworthy,” saying that 
peace proposals made by the three mediating powers uphold the Karabakh 
Armenians’ right to self-determination.

Official election results showed Ara Harutiunian, a wealthy businessman and 
Karabakh’s former prime minister, winning the first round of the presidential 
ballot with over 49 percent of the vote. Masis Mayilian, the outgoing Karabakh 
foreign minister, came in second with 26.4 percent, meaning that the two men 
will face each other in a runoff two weeks later.

Also, five parties won seats in the Karabakh legislature. Harutiunian’s Free 
Fatherland will control the largest number of seats but will lack an overall 
majority.

Both Harutiunian and Mayilian have good relations with the current Armenian 
government, unlike Vitaly Balasanian, a retired general who finished third in 
the presidential race.

Balasanian has harshly criticized Pashinian over the past year. Pashinian’s 
political allies have responded by accusing him of maintaining close ties with 
Serzh Sarkisian, Armenia’s former president toppled in the 2018 “Velvet 
Revolution.”

Incidentally, Sarkisian also praised the conduct of the “democratic” elections 
and urged all Karabakh factions to recognize their official results.

Mayilian stopped short of doing so in a statement released on Thursday. “We are 
now holding political consultations and will inform the public about our further 
steps in the coming days,” he said.

Balasanian made clear, meanwhile, that he will not endorse Harutiunian or 
Mayilian ahead of the planned runoff because of his “ideological differences” 
with them. He also urged the rival camps to “avoid upheavals and 
destabilization.”

Both Mayilian and Balasanian again criticized the authorities in Stepanakert for 
not postponing the polls because of serious concerns about the spread of 
coronavirus in Karabakh. Mayilian pointed out that the coronavirus epidemic 
inhibited the work of hundreds of election observers who arrived from Armenia.

Some of those observers reported serious irregularities on election day. They 
were particularly alarmed by the fact that many Karabakh voters photographed 
their marked ballots before casting them.



Government Approves More Cash Handouts To Struggling Families

        • Artak Khulian

Armenia -- Labor and Social Affairs Minister Zaruhi Batoyan at a news conference 
in Yerevan, April 2, 2020.

The Armenian government approved on Thursday cash payments to more people who 
have been hit hard by economic disruptions resulting from the coronavirus 
epidemic.

The fresh financial assistance will be provided to the underage children of 
those Armenians who had no officially registered jobs or businesses or did not 
receive poverty benefits when the unprecedented shutdowns began on March 12. 
Their parents will receive 26,500 drams ($52) per child.

The government already allocated on Monday 68,000 drams to registered workers 
who have lost their jobs during the crisis. The employees of hotels, travel 
agencies, restaurants, clothing stores and other businesses closed since March 
13 will be paid up to 136,000 drams.

The government initially planned no such one-off payments to people involved in 
the informal sector of the Armenian economy.

Labor and Social Affairs Minister Zaruhi Batoyan said the government will now 
also help “those citizens who could not benefit from the measures announced by 
us” earlier. Speaking during a cabinet meeting in Yerevan, she gave no estimates 
as to the number of the new recipients of the government aid.

As part of its efforts to cushion the economic impact of the coronavirus 
lockdown, the government also decided last week to allocate grants to many 
private firms and subsidize commercial bank loans to small businesses and 
farmers.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said on Thursday that this aid package “will help 
hundreds of thousands of our compatriots to overcome this crisis.”

Pashinian’s political opponents have dismissed these measures as insufficient.



More Armenian Hospitals To Treat Coronavirus

        • Ruzanna Stepanian
        • Narine Ghalechian

Armenia -- Medical workers are seen outside the Nork hospital in Yerevan where 
coronavirus patients are treated, March 20, 2020.

Health authorities are setting up hundreds of additional hospital beds to cope 
with a continuing rise in coronavirus cases in Armenia.

The Armenian Ministry of Health on Thursday added the country’s largest 
hospital, the Grigor Lusavorich Medical Center, to the list of hospitals that 
are currently treating only people infected with coronavirus.

Dozens of ambulances began transporting its patients suffering from other 
diseases to three other hospitals also located in Yerevan.

“We will finish [the evacuation] today and be ready to admit [coronavirus] 
patients starting from tomorrow,” Grigorich Lusavorich’s deputy director, Petros 
Manukian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service.

Manukian said that around 400 hospital beds, including those of an intensive 
care unit, will be made available for that purpose.

Eight other hospitals located in Yerevan and four other cities were turned into 
COVID-19 clinics last month. According Health Minister Arsen Torosian, a total 
of 16 medical centers across the country are currently treating coronavirus 
patients.

Torosian said on Thursday that the authorities are also making contingency plans 
to convert indoor sports arenas into makeshift hospitals that would accommodate 
hundreds and possibly thousands of more patients. “We must be prepared for any 
scenario,” he told a news conference.

More than a hundred beds have already been placed at Yerevan’s Karen Demirchian 
Sports and Concert Complex, Armenia’s largest concert hall.


Armenia -- Health Minister Arsen Torosian at a news conference in Yerevan, March 
26, 2020.

The urgent measures were announced as the number of officially registered 
coronavirus cases in the county reached 663, up from 571 cases reported on 
Wednesday morning.

Torosian said that the vast majority of the 92 persons who tested positive for 
the virus in the past day had come into contact with known COVID-19 patients. 
Others include Armenians who were infected abroad and returned home in recent 
weeks, the minister said at a cabinet meeting in Yerevan.

The Ministry of Health also reported another coronavirus-related death on 
Thursday, raising the nationwide death toll from the virus to 5. In Torosian’s 
words, four other people infected with the disease are in a critical condition. 
No other patients are connected to lung ventilators at present, he added.

Coronavirus cases in the country are thus continuing to rise despite 
stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions and business shutdowns initiated by the 
Armenian government. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian blamed that on “widespread 
complacency” among Armenians.

“It is this complacency which is creating the danger of a faster pace of 
infections,” complained Pashinian. He stressed at the same time that “the 
situation is still manageable.”

Torosian also informed Pashinian and fellow cabinet members that the health 
authorities will sharply increase the number of coronavirus tests which have 
reportedly averaged over 200 a day in the past week.

“Very soon 400-500 tests will be conducted on a daily basis,” he said. “This 
number will reach 1,500 after we acquire new equipment.”

The equipment also includes 100 ventilators which are due to be shipped from 
China to Armenia in the coming days. Armenian hospitals currently have more than 
70 such life-saving devices set aside for coronavirus cases.


Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2020 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

 

                                        Wednesday, 

Government Vows Utility Bill Relief For Struggling Families

        • Artak Khulian

Armenia - The Gazprom Armenia headquarters in Yerevan, 31Oct2014.

Armenia’s public utility companies have agreed not cut off electricity, natural 
gas and water supplies to people failing to pay their bills because of economic 
disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian 
said on Wednesday.

The crisis has led to the temporary closure of various businesses across the 
country. Many of them put their workers on unpaid leave.

Workers with modest salaries and no cash savings have been hit particularly hard 
by the stoppage. Some of them are now unable to pay their utility bills for last 
month.

At least one utility, the Gazprom-Armenia gas operator, has refused to grant 
them a reprieve. One of its employees, Lusine Arustamian, spoke to RFE/RL’s 
Armenian service as she disconnected defaulting households of a Yerevan 
neighborhood from supplies on Wednesday.

Arustamian said that most of its residents have not yet paid their gas bills. 
She said the Gazprom-Armenia management ordered her to cut off gas supplies to 
them.

Pensioner Araksya Poghosian lives in of the disconnected apartments with her 
daughter and a grandchild. She said the gas operator declined her request to 
wait until the end of this month.

Opposition lawmakers cited more such stories during the Armenian government’s 
question-and-answer session in the parliament. They demanded urgent government 
assistance to the affected families.

Pashinian spoke out against opposition calls for freezing all utility payments, 
saying that such a measure would be exploited by unscrupulous consumers who can 
pay their bills. He also argued many other Armenians, notably public sector 
employees, continue to receive their wages despite the coronavirus lockdown.

Pashinian said the utility bill relief should therefore cover only needy 
families. He said the Armenian government has already reached relevant 
understandings with Gazprom-Armenia, the Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) 
power utility and the Veolia-Djur national water operator.

Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian confirmed “preliminary” agreements with ENA 
and Veolia-Djur and said a similar deal with Gazprom-Armenia will be finalized 
later on Wednesday.

ENA told RFE/RL’s Armenian service earlier this week that it will not cut 
electricity supplies to low-income consumers for the time being.




Armenian Police Enforce Coronavirus Lockdown

        • Susan Badalian

Armenia -- Police officers check documents of a man in Yerevan as part of a 
coronavirus lockdown imposed by the government, .

Police in Armenia stopped cars and pedestrians and warned other citizens to stay 
at home on Wednesday as they began enforcing a nationwide lockdown aimed at 
stopping the spread of coronavirus.

Unprecedented restrictions on people’s movement imposed by the Armenian 
government late on Tuesday mean that people are only allowed out to buy food, 
receive medical care or briefly exercise near their places of residence. The 
curfew does not apply to a limited number of public and private sector employees 
allowed to continue to go to work.

As is the case in France and other European countries, all citizens must not 
only carry valid IDs but also fill out a form specifying their reasons to leave 
their homes. The form must contain the carrier’s name and birthdate. It can be 
downloaded from a government website or drawn by hand.

As police began patrolling the largely deserted streets of Yerevan it emerged 
that many passersby did not fill out such forms. Some of them instead showed 
police officers their bags filled with groceries bought in supermarkets.

One elderly woman claimed to be unaware of the requirement. “Who is supposed to 
issue such papers?” she said.

“I don’t know who and what should be written there,” said another pensioner.


Armenia -- A police officer checks documents of a woman in Yerevan as part of a 
coronavirus lockdown imposed by the government, .

There seemed to be greater compliance with the rule in the center of Yerevan. 
“I’m taking my grandchild home,” one woman there said after showing policemen a 
form which she said was filled out by her daughter.

A deputy chief of the Armenian police, Hayk Mherian, said in the morning that 
officers will avoid fining or briefly detaining people in the first hours of the 
lockdown. “But we will be fully enforcing the law after 4 p.m.,” he told 
reporters.

Under a government bill passed by the Armenian parliament on Monday, citizens 
defying quarantine or self-isolation orders issued by health authorities will 
face not only heavy fines but also up to five years in prison. There were more 
than 3,000 quarantined people in Armenia as of Tuesday evening, according to the 
authorities.

Another lockdown rule bans private cars from carrying more than one passenger at 
a time apart from the driver. Mherian said police ordered 92 people out of cars 
for this reason at the start of the emergency street patrols across the country.




Karabakh Elections Not Cancelled Despite Coronavirus Concerns

        • Ruzanna Stepanian

Nagorno-Karabakh -- The parliament building in Stepanakert, September 7, 2018.

Authorities in Nagorno-Karabakh have registered no cases of coronavirus so far 
and are not planning to cancel presidential and parliamentary elections 
scheduled for March 31, a senior official in Stepanakert said on Wednesday.

“If such a decision [to delay the elections] was made there would be an official 
statement to that effect,” Tigran Abrahamian, a spokesman for a Karabakh task 
force coordinating measures against coronavirus, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service.

Earlier in the day, the task force urged Karabakh residents to refrain for the 
next seven days from travelling to Armenia where the number of confirmed 
coronavirus cases reached 265 the previous night.

The spread of the COVID-19 virus has led the Armenian government to declare a 
state of emergency and cancel a constitutional referendum that was due to be 
held on April 5. It has also fuelled calls for the Karabakh polls to be 
postponed by several months.

Abrahamian stressed that no coronavirus cases have been recorded in Karabakh so 
far. He said the authorities in Stepanakert have quarantined, as a precautionary 
measure, more than two dozen people, most of them Karabakh students of Armenian 
and other foreign universities who have returned home due to the pandemic.

The official also said that all members of Karabakh election commissions will 
have protective gloves, face masks and hand sanitizers during the March 31 vote. 
Also, he said, they will give every Karabakh voter a single-use pen for signing 
registration documents at polling stations.

The idea of delaying the elections is backed by some political forces in 
Karabakh, notably the opposition National Revival party. Its leader, Hayk 
Khanumian, argued on Wednesday that the polls are due to be monitored by 
hundreds of observers from Armenia. He said they would pose a health risk for 
Karabakh.

Daniel Ioannisian, a Yerevan-based civic activist whose Union of Informed 
Citizens plans to deploy 100 election observers in Karabakh, sought to allay 
these fears. He argued that hundreds of people are continuing to travel between 
Karabakh and Armenia on a daily basis.

“We will measure the temperature of all our observers both in Yerevan and right 
before their entry into polling stations,” said Ioannisian. “The observers’ 
physical contacts in Karabakh will be reduced to a minimum, and we already have 
sufficient quantities of face masks and hand sanitizers for them.”

The upcoming elections are expected to be the most democratic, competitive and 
unpredictable in Karabakh’s history.

Observers believe that only three of the 14 presidential candidates stand a 
chance of succeeding Bako Sahakian, Karabakh’s outgoing president who has been 
in office since 2007. Those are Karabakh’s Foreign Minister Masis Mayilian, 
former Prime Minister Arayik Harutiunian and retired army General Vitaly 
Balasanian.

The Karabakh parliamentary race is also tightly contested, with over 300 
candidates representing 12 parties and blocs vying for 32 seats in the local 
legislature.


Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
Copyright (c) 2020 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.
1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.