Armenia Now has two very interesting articles of specific interest this week. The first is on youth in Armenia and government attempts to prevent the emergance of an active student movement by controlling the sphere themselves through the Baze Pan-Armenian student and youth festival.

I blogged about this earlier in the week and I’m glad to see that Eleonora Manadyan, one of the leaders of the student movement in 1996 and now probably Armenia’s most impressive activist as head of the New Armenia organization, is quoted in the article.

“The horrible thing is that 80 per cent of the festival organizers are from the Republican party and blindly follow their ideas; if our country is in such a condition then that is everybody’s fault, including the Republican party. Consequently we need to struggle against the growth of this party,” says Hakobyan.

Eleonora Manandyan, head of the “New Armenia” non-governmental organization supports the young representative of the university. She says: “The budget of the Baze is unimaginable for many organizations involved in much more important problems for the country.

“Last year, 60 million drams were allotted to the Baze from the State Budget for 600 young people to be entertained for 3 days, yet alongside this we have innumerable half-ruined schools and villages without any schools at all.”

Meanwhile, Armenia Now also covers the continuing and absurd story of ArmenTel and the fact that its virtually impossible to ring any of their subscribers.

ArmenTel has invited specialists from abroad but say they still haven’t determined the causes of the breakdown.

Meanwhile the provider – for which users pay from 43 to 45 drams (about 10 cents) per minute – is asking its customers to not even try to use its service.

“Every attempted call that doesn’t have a real need just reduces the possibility for a successful call of other users and at the end of all users,” said a statement from the company.

Predictably, the message did not sit well with subscribers.

No kidding. I thought that with the arrival of VivaCell on the market, ArmenTel would finally sort out their act but instead, all the deficiencies of their monopoly on the mobile phone market until recently have now come to the fore.

Anyway, Armenia Now is updated weekly every Friday and can be read online here.