Opposition protest outcome of 2003 Presidential Elections, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003

RFE/RL reports that the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Armenian Foreign Minister participated in the signing ceremony of a compact that will see Armenia receive $235 million in financial assistance over the next five years. According to RFE/RL the signing and disbursal of the money had been delayed “pending a demonstration by Armenia of its commitment to strengthening democratic institutions and ensuring fair elections in 2007-08.”

The money from the MCC will be disbursed over a five-year period and will be contingent on Armenia’s policy performance in three areas: “ruling justly, investing in people, and encouraging economic freedom.” More specifically, Rice said that the United States expects Armenia to deliver on its pledges to improve the conduct of national elections.

“Armenia must continue to advance its democratic reforms,” she said. “International and domestic monitors did express concerns about the conduct of the recent constitutional referendum. And the Armenian government has acknowledged these difficulties and pledged to improve the conduct of the elections to be held in 2007 and 2008.”

Armenian Foreign Minister Oskanian agreed. “The elections of 2007 and 2008 that you refer to will test our democratic practices,” he said. “Our task until then is to partner with the United States and European governments to implement the necessary corrective steps.”

Lovely. Declarative statements and no sign of anything changing on the ground in terms of democratization, although the money can apparently be stopped if next year’s parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential election resemble those that preceded them. Unfortunately, however, Washington-based analyst Richard Giragosian is not so convinced.

[…] according to Giragosian, “the feeling is that the Armenians have not really learned any lessons from past electoral violations and are still likely to resort to their habitual ballot rigging.” The key question, he said, is one of degree, that is, how blatant will the vote rigging and other types of election fraud be in practice.

I hope that the guys at the MCA Monitoring Blog will continue to keep a close eye on how things develop. According to them the MCA is already getting hammered, and most recently in an article published by Rolling Stone.

In a pattern that has become a hallmark of the administration, however, Bush’s aid initiative — the Millennium Challenge Corporation — has become an object lesson in dramatic ideas followed by disastrous action. Over the past three months, Rolling Stone has reviewed the MCC’s “compacts” with foreign countries, compared the work of similar agencies and spoken with a wide range of supporters and critics — including many of the conservative insiders responsible for creating the program. Instead of hiring aid experts, the administration at first staffed the MCC with conservative ideologues. Rather than partnering with other countries, the White House operated on its own, disconnected from the rest of the world. And when experts criticized the new agency, the administration responded with a bunker mentality, refusing to talk to detractors and learn from its mistakes.

[…]

In some cases, the MCC appears to be using aid to reward countries that support the president’s war on terror — even though it is not supposed to base assistance on political favoritism. Georgia, which has served as a base for U.S. military operations, received $295.3 million from the MCC — despite corruption and human-rights abuses that should make it ineligible for assistance under the MCC’s own guidelines. “I see an awful lot of politics in this,” says Fiona Hill, an expert on the former Soviet states at the Brookings Institution. “Georgia has taken steps back in terms of rights and freedoms.” Testifying before Congress, even Applegarth acknowledged that the aid to Georgia involved what he discreetly referred to as an “element of judgment.”