Three days ago I was going to write a post about the cafe in the park outside my apartment building in Komitas, but decided against it. Diasporans, tourists and many others love Yerevan’s cafes even though they actually represent corruption, environmental destruction and the increasingly criminalized nature of society in Armenia. My post was going to begin something like this:

They prowl the park surveying their defacto fiefdom, pot bellies hanging over black pants synonymous with rabiz culture while eyeing up the girls strutting their stuff now that spring is upon us. What few trees remained are being cut, and the two owners of the cafe that has obliterated the park that used to be perfect for children and families to relax in continue to devour anything in their path like a plague of locusts.

Once I took the head of an environmental NGO in Yerevan and the environmental protection officer from a large anti-corruption organization to the park to see if something couldn’t be done to stop this destruction after a Diasporan living in the same apartment building had suggested we try to do stop it. However, after some digging around we were advised to leave well alone. These guys were not the sort you want to mess with.

That’s about as far as I got because, to be honest, no amount of writing is ever going to alert foreigners — and especially Diasporan Armenians holidaying in the capital — to the fact that Yerevan’s cafe’s are the most visible form of corruption in the city. As Edik Baghdasaryan, Editor-in-Chief of Hetq Online, has written on numerous occasions, the owners of the tasteless structures that have eaten up Yerevan’s green areas are government officials, their relatives or mafia.

Ordinary Armenian businesspeople patronize the restaurants and cafes around Opera Park, but they certainly don’t own them. So far, at least, it seems that ownership is a privilege reserved for the political elite - members of parliament, ministers, influential bureaucrats, and their cronies. The concreting over of Yerevan’s green spaces has been enabled by a loophole in the city’s law on allocation of land that has allowed the city to chop up and sell small cafe-size plots that it owns. Any plot larger than 20 square meters must be sold at public auction; anything less can be quietly sold to any buyer, for any price. Former Mayor Robert Nazarian, a man appointed by the president, was a champion of the loophole.

Although he is no longer in office, Nazarian’s legacy of political favoritism continues to deprive the city treasury of public funds and to line the pockets of government officials who “bought” parcels of land. A case in point: recently, according to reliable sources, a cafe in Freedom Park that was owned by a senior government official sold for $250,000. The official had spent $15,000 on the land on which the cafe has constructed. His final take after including construction costs? More than $220,000.

Some estimates of the total losses to the state treasury from corrupt land sales near the Opera, where 15 companies have built cafes, exceed $1 million.

But that’s not why I’m writing this post now, although it is part of a larger problem that afflicts almost every sphere of life in Armenia. With oligarchs — read mafia bosses — sitting in the Armenian Parliament there has been a noticeable deterioration in the already weak rule of law that existed in the country now that the process of democratization has died a slow and painful death.

Since the 2003 Presidential Elections the number of contract killings has increased, bugulary and armed crime is on the rise and in my neighborhood alone, business disputes are spilling out onto the streets. An attempt on the life of the head of Armenian Lada occured within a minute of where I live, and although they missed, they managed to finally get him in Moscow. Just before the 2003 Parliamentary Elections a taxi driver was murdered virtually on my doorstop.

Nobody knows who did it or why. All we knew was that the morning he was discovered a bunch of overweight cops stood around the cordoned off scene of the crime grinning while a large pool of blood made it look like a cow had been slaughtered for a traditional Armenian wedding party. Last summer, the owners of the cafe opposite fought a pitch battle over some dispute that involved about 40 guys in broad daylight.

Two policemen came and dispersed the mob, butI figured that these thugs would sort out their differences at a later date. The sound of semi-automatic gun fire outside my apartment building at 11.30pm the other night might just mark the start of that. Thankfully, nobody was wounded or killed, and it would appear that the gunfire was a warning, but I couldn’t say from who.

However, two Mercedes with matching number plates — identifying them as the cars of one of the clans that control Yerevan — were parked close to where the shooting took place earlier in the day while shaven headed thugs like those that attacked myself and other journalists in April 2004 stood closeby. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s any connection, and I certainly hope not because I could do without a mafia feud of the kind that left one dead in 2005 on my doorstop.

Now you know why the cafes in the center are patrolled by crack Ministry of Interior Red Berets.

Anyway, I ran into the head of an environmental NGO who lives in the same area while walking with her neighbor yesterday. I asked about the gunfire and the park, but her first response was a shrug. “This isn’t a country. This isn’t a state,” she said. “And nothing is going to change.”

I can only hope that’s she wrong, but the fact that no police turned up to investigate the shooting causes me some concern. My Diasporan neighbor told me last year that this isn’t the first time he’s heard semi-automatic weapons being fired off in the area, and is already so pissed off with the park — and not least the loud music that will be blasted out 7 days a week as of next month — that he’s already planning to move.

Still, at least life ain’t dull…