Armenian News...A Topalian... Trump's example of 'Business in Politics'

RFE/RL Report

rmenian Tycoon Cites Trump’s Example Of ‘Business In Politics’

November 07, 2018

Gayane Saribekian

An Armenian tycoon has insisted that he will continue to engage in political activities despite an appeal by popular acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian for the separation of business and politics ahead of next month’s snap parliamentary elections.

Gagik Tsarukian, a wealthy businessman who leads the Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK), the second largest group in the outgoing parliament, referred to United States President Donald Trump as an example of how big business can be in politics.

“If as a journalist you understand something in politics, then you should know that a country like the United States today is led by the country’s largest business owner – Trump,” Tsarukian said, talking to a group of journalists on Tuesday.

“And today under the Trump administration America has the lowest unemployment rate,” he added.

Armenia’s Constitution bans businessmen from seeking and becoming lawmakers and occupying government posts. Despite this prohibition, however, quite a few large businessmen had been present in both the legislative and executive branches of power using some legal loopholes, thus promoting their commercial 

interests and eventually contributing to government corruption.

After becoming prime minister in May Pashinian declared a fight against government corruption and as one of his cabinet’s priorities set the goal of separating business from politics.

Speaking in parliament on October 24, the acting prime minister said: “Why would a businessman need to become a lawmaker? We guarantee that all businesspeople will have equal opportunities and the status of a lawmaker will give no additional privileges to them.”

Pashinian and his team believe that the absence of businesspeople in the party lists of candidates in the December 9 elections will essentially reduce the practice of vote buying and will thus contribute to the competition of political platforms and ideas.

A number of leading businesspeople have already stated that they no longer have the intention to run for parliament.

Tsarukian, who has always insisted that he has no personal interest in engaging in politics, but is doing so “for the people’s benefit”, said, however, that he will himself top the list of candidates of his party and that other ‘business owners’ will also be present among the BHK candidates.

“I will present my program to the people and will say what I can do together 

with my team. I will be able to do as much as people trust me to do,” he said.

Tsarukian said he was not keen on forming an alliance ahead of the December 9 elections. “We still need to see what an alliance could give us. Today all political parties have high ambitions and speak about 15-20 percent… Why would they need to be with us then? Let them participate alone and get their votes,” he said.

Tsarukian said that the BHK is ready to become parliamentary opposition or part of the next government. “Everything depends on the election outcome. But I support the [revolutionary] movement, I support Pashinian and will be next to him… that’s for sure,” he concluded.

JAM News

Nov 8 2018

Armenia: hundreds of prisoners freed on amnesty

The decision to grant amnesty was made on the occasion of Yerevan’s 2,800th anniversary and centenary of the First Armenian Republic

Hundreds of prisoners have been released in Armenia a day after a bill on amnesty came into effect.

How many people were freed?

As of 13:00 on 7 November, 330 prisoners were released from penitentiary institutions. Among them were 13 foreign citizens.

The decision was made on the occasion of the 2,800th anniversary of Yerevan and the centenary of the declaration of independence of the First Republic.

• Letters from prison: The future is beautiful… when you have one

• Armenia: 25 years of struggle

To whom does the amnesty apply?

The amnesty was applicable to prisoners whose sentences did not exceed three years. Prisoners with disabilities whose terms did not exceed six years were also amnestied.

Prisoners over the age of 60 will be released, as will those under the age of 18 years who have committed a crime and do not have a previous conviction.

According to Acting Justice Minister Artak Zeinalian, about 6,500 people will be granted amnesty. Approximately 650 people will be released, while the rest will receive commuted terms.

Why was amnesty given?

The initiators of the bill stated that amnesty was given for humanitarian reasons. The government is also pursuing the goal of freeing up penitentiary institutions in the country.

During a discussion of the bill in the National Assembly, some deputies demanded that it not apply to members of the armed group Sasna Dzrer. In 2016, the group captured a police station in Yerevan and held it for two weeks. Policemen were killed during the event.

A compromise was reached – members of the group would be released only if the relatives of the deceased did not oppose the decision.

A special case

Among those who received a pardon was well-known political figure Shant Harutyunyan who many consider to be a political prisoner. He has already been released.

Harutyunyan is the head of the Tseghakron party. On 5 November 2013, he and his supporters were arrested in Yerevan for “anti-governmental accusations” and an attempt “to walk to the presidential palace to start a revolution”. He was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison.

The new government of the country, which came to power in the spring of this year after the Velvet Revolution, has repeatedly offered him freedom.

To do this, as reported by the government’s press service, Harutyunyan needed only to sign a “document confirming changes to his sentence” – a petition for clemency. He, however, refused. His son, Shahen Harutyunyan, explained why:

“Shant Harutyunyan did not want to sign any document in which he admits to guilt; he did not want to write a petition for a pardon because he is a political prisoner. He has been recognised as a political prisoner by international human rights organizations.”

BBC Monitoring, UK

Nov 9 2018

CSTO blocks Armenia chairmanship after row with Russia

The Russia-led CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation) military alliance appears to have blocked Armenian attempts to appoint another chairman after the country's previous occupant of the rotating post was dismissed.

Russian business daily RBC said on 8 November that Armenia had hoped the alliance would appoint another representative of the country as its next secretary-general after Yerevan recalled Yuri Khachaturov in a move that angered Moscow. The country's 3-year rotating chairmanship is due to run out at the end of 2019.

"Of course Armenia wants an extension. All the heads of state have said that there is only one year left [in Armenia's term] and he [a new Armenian secretary-general] will not manage to visit all these countries. Therefore we need the next secretary-general to be a proper active one, from Belarus... According to our charter, in alphabetical order the next after Armenia is Belarus," Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev said at a summit of the bloc in Astana, Interfax news agency reported on 8 November.

Following Khachaturov's dismissal, his deputy, Russia's Valery Semerikov, was appointed as the bloc's acting secretary-general.

"A significant amount of time has been set aside for the issue of choosing a new CSTO secretary-general. The heads of state have agreed to make a final decision on the matter in St Petersburg on 6 December," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, as quoted by Interfax on 8 October.

Another CSTO summit is expected to take place in St Petersburg on that date, Peskov confirmed.

In July, Armenia called for Khachaturov to be removed from the CSTO post after he was charged with "overthrowing the constitutional order" in connection with the violent suppression of mass protests against the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

Official results handed victory to the then President, Serzh Sargsyan, but prompted allegations of vote-rigging from the opposition. At the time, Khachaturov was a commander of the Yerevan military garrison.

In August, influential business paper Kommersant suggested that Armenia's decision to open court proceedings against Khachaturov had caused Russian authorities "particular irritation".

The CSTO includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

RFE/RL Report

Armenian PM To Visit Paris For WWI Armistice Centennial Events

November 09, 2018

Armenia’s acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian will pay a working visit to France on November 10-11, his press office said on Friday.

In the French capital Pashinian is due to attend a ceremony dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the armistice in World War I and take part in a session of the Paris Peace Forum.

The events will be hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and will bring together a number of world leaders, including United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Armistice of November 11, 1918 put an end to fighting on land, sea and air in World War I between the Allies [France, the United Kingdom, the United States and others] and their opponent, Germany.

It marked a victory for the Allies, with previous armistices eliminating Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the war.

Around 40 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the four-year war waged by the world’s leading powers of the time.

Armenians, then a people divided between two opposing empires – Ottoman Turkey and Russia – suffered severe consequences of the war.

Some 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman authorities during the years of World War I in what many historians and more than two dozen governments of the world today recognize as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Pashinian’s visit to Paris will be his third since assuming the post of 

Armenia’s prime minister in May.

In September, Pashinian went to France for talks with Macron ahead of the summit of Francophonie nations that was held in Yerevan the following month and was attended by the French leader.

On October 5, the Armenian leader visited Paris for a national homage to Charles Aznavour, a world-renowned French-Armenian crooner who had died at the age of 94.

Pashinian attended that ceremony jointly with Macron.

RFE/RL Report

Most Small Hydropower Plants In Armenia Work With ‘Gross Violations’

November 08, 2018

Anush Muradian

A majority of small hydropower plants in Armenia have for years operated with gross violations of the law, but relevant officials of the Environment Ministry have not taken any measures to redress the situation, according to prosecutors.

The Prosecutor-General’s Office has concluded that as a result, “significant damage was caused to the legitimate interests of the state.”

Based on this, the Prosecutor-General’s Office instituted a criminal case, instructing the Investigative Committee to conduct a preliminary investigation in connection with the alleged violations.

Abuse in the sector was revealed by a working group that had been set up according to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s decision.

Inspections revealed that no water gauging devices had been installed at 143 out of 184 small hydropower plants operating in Armenia, which constitutes a violation of the water use permit requirements. Besides, no fish protection facilities are available in the riverbeds, in some cases the volumes of environmental emissions are not maintained, and water drainage multiple times 

exceeds the permissible quantity, the working group said.

Acting Prime Minister Pashinian spoke about these findings in parliament on November 1. He described the sector as “a giant domain of abuses.”

“We have a situation when more water is used for a more powerful generator to generate more electricity and more income, which not only disturbs the water balance, but also results in the loss of state revenues… let alone environmental problems,” Pashinian said.

Panorama, Armenia

Nov 8 2018

2019 to be declared a Year of Caucasian Leopard in Armenia

A draft decision of the Government has been worked out by the Ministry of Nature Protection proposing to declare 2019 a year of Caucasian leopard in Armenia.

It is noted that the necessity is conditioned by the fact that in the spring of 2018, the World Wildlife Fund photojournalists, filmed a Caucasian leopard in Khosrov Forest State Reserve for the first time in the history of the reserve, with no records made by photographers previously.

The same draft also suggests to approve the 2019 state program of the Preservation of the Caucasian Leopard.

Since 2002, the Ministry of Nature Protection and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF Armenia) have been implementing a Caucasus Leopard Preservation Program in Armenia. The main objective of the project is to increase the population and protect the habitats of the leopard which is on the verge of extinction, as well as of other species, like Bezoar goat, Armenian mouflon.

The species is registered in the Red Book of Armenia and is on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as "critical".  At present, 7-9 leopards are registered in Armenia, their habitats being Ararat, Vayots Dzor and Syunik regions.

The ministry believes that the adoption of the project will give an opportunity to develop and strengthen specially protected areas both in terms of nature protection and ecotourism organization.

"The recorded photos show that after the fire last year the nature is being restored given that the leopard has returned to the reserve, it means that it has plenty of species to hunt. The leopard photoshoots are more obliging, since we should be more careful and strengthen the system of preservation of the protected areas of the Republic of Armenia, " said the project's authors.

The government believes that the adoption of the draft resolution "On Approving the 2019 State Program for the Preservation of the Caucasian Leopard and the Declaration of 2019 a Year of the Caucasian Leopard" will contribute to the broader coverage of the leopard which is on the verge of extinction through the organization of assemblies, films and exhibitions as well as raising the public awareness.

News.am, Armenia

Nov 10 2018

Garo Paylan raises issue of Turkish-Armenian border opening in Turkish parliament 

                  

Turkish parliament deputy of Armenian origin, Garo Paylan raised the issue of the Turkish-Armenian border opening during discussions in the Turkish parliament, Demokrathaber reported.

Garo Paylan recalled that the Turkish-Armenian border has been closed for 26 years now.

"As a citizen of Turkey, I want to the best for Turkey and want Turkey to have good relations with all the neighbors. The border with Armenia has been closed for 26 years. Why has it been closed? All products go to Armenia through  Georgia.  Some are imported to Armenia from Iran and China," Paylan noted.

Maritime Herald

Nov 8 2018

At Least 5,000 People Died in 1941 When the Ship ‘Armenia’ Was Sunk by the Germans

The Soviet ‘Titanic’

With Hitler’s Wehrmacht only 27 kilometres from Moscow, Stalin presided on November 7, 1941, a symbolic military parade to commemorate the Bolshevik revolution, but above all to instill courage and courage in the army, and especially a population that feared to repeat what happened in 1812, when the city was abandoned to Napoleon. 

It was an emotional stop, which began at 8 o’clock in the morning so that the low visibility avoided the attacks of the German aviation. The modern Russian historiography considers this legendary parade as the revulsive that inflamed the Red Army to repel the invader. “The dawn of a victory still far away”, as the writer Vladimir Karpov pointed out. In fact, it marked the beginning of the Soviet counter-offensive that changed the course of the Moscow battle. 

However, far from the Soviet capital, that same day there was a catastrophe that, lost in the midst of the great tragedy that was that war, has passed almost forgotten. A hospital ship, The Armenia, sank in the Black Sea with thousands of people on board, wounded soldiers, but also women and children trying to escape the advance of the Nazis in the Crimean peninsula. It is estimated that there were four times more deaths than in the sinking in 1912 of the British ocean liner Titanic, converted into a symbol of navigation catastrophes. 

Armenia was part of a fleet of ships for civilian use that began to be built in the Soviet Union in the 1920s when the new country was beginning to recover from the civil war. In the Baltiski shipyards of the then Leningrad, work began on a series of ships that were to be destined for the maritime routes linking Crimea with the Caucasus. Therefore, they were assigned names from several regions of that area. The first to be launched would be the Adzharia, in 1927. It was followed by the Crimea, Georgia, Abkhazia, Ukraine and, finally, Armenia. 

The maritime tragedy coincided with the start in Moscow of the counter-offensive against Hitler 

With 107.7 meters of length and a width of 15.5, the latter was able to displace 5,770 tons and had a capacity for 950 passengers, in addition to a crew of 96 members. But on November 7, 1941, the boat climbed many more. 

The reason is that since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, as they call their part of the Second World War in Russia, Armenia put itself at the service of the army. He took it to the Odessa shipyard, where it was converted into a floating hospital, prepared to transport and care for up to 400 wounded. In August of that 1941, it entered service, under the command of Captain Vladimir Plaushevski. 

But after a few days, his mission changed suddenly. The German army arrived in Odessa and the ship was dedicated to evacuation work, not only of the wounded but also of the civilian population that fled from the invader. 

That work continued later. On November 4, Armenia left Tuapsé in the direction of Sevastopol, where the German army was advancing to take over the strategic port of that city. On the 6th, Plaushevski is ordered to stop in Yalta to bring refugees and local party assets on board. When he arrived in Yalta, there was a large crowd in the harbour. Not everyone could get on board, as he remembered two years ago in Argumenti I Fakti Vera Chistova, who was then 9 years old: “Dad bought the tickets, and me and my grandmother had to leave Yalta in Armenia. On the night of November 6, there were many people on the dock. First, they got the wounded, then the civilians. Nobody checked the tickets and on the catwalk, all the people gathered. The most daring climbed the ship by cables. The boarding ended at dawn, but we did not manage to climb. Hundreds of people stayed at the dock. ” 

Officially, 5,000 people were on board, although it is admitted that there could be up to 7,000, and there are versions that increase the amount. At that time, of course, no one made a list to record passenger data. 

At the same time that the Red Square parade began in Moscow, Armenia took to the sea accompanied by two military ships and guarded by two Soviet warplanes. The Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, Filipp Oktiabrski, would later declare that he had ordered the captain to wait until night, to sail safely. But staying in the port was not safe either since in Yalta there was no anti-aircraft defence and the ship would have been an easy target for the Luftwaffe planes. 

One of them, a Heinkel-111 bomber that was looking for Soviet ships on the Crimea-Caucasus route, attacked the hospital ship at 11 hours and 25 minutes that morning. “It is not possible that the German pilots did not see the red crosses” painted on the helmet and on the bridge, Leonid Repin wrote in his Komsomolskaya Pravda column, recalling the anniversary. 

After receiving a torpedo on the bow, Armenia took four minutes to sink. Only eight people were saved. “There were explosions, panic, cries of the people, all mixed in an indescribable nightmare. People were going around the deck without knowing where to protect themselves. I jumped into the sea and started swimming. I fainted. I do not remember how I got to the shore, “explained one of them, Anastasia Popova, a resident of Yalta. 

The news came immediately to Moscow. Stalin was informed at lunchtime. In the capital, there were other concerns. Most of the 24,000 soldiers who had participated in the parade went directly to the front, where the Soviet counter-offensive against the Nazis began. 

Afterwards, historians have dealt with Armenia more insistently. In the first decade of this century, Ukraine started searching without concrete results. The exact place where it sank is still a mystery.