By Nessuna

Today, the Congress Hotel in Yerevan hosted a presentation of a new publication, “Anti-Corruption Policy in Armenia,” and three anti-corruption Public Service Announcements (PSAs) developed by the Center for Regional Development/Transparency International Armenia (CRD/TI). This was within the project “Towards More Effective Anti-Corruption Policy in Armenia” funded by Counterpart International/CASP and USAID.

The goal of this publication is to evaluate anti-corruption policy in Armenia, based on the analysis of the developments that took place in this field during the last three years. The given analysis was made through application of internationally recognized evaluation criteria. The first chapter of the publication presents general information about corruption, its impact around the world and the existing international anti-corruption approaches and tools.

Representatives of state institutions, political parties, non-governmental and international organizations, as well as the media were invited to participate at the event to share their opinion on the anti-corruption policy in Armenia. Sounds good, save for the fact that out of around 200 people invited to attend, only 50 at most showed up.

No wonder that Amalia Kostanyan, CRD/TI Chairperson, started proceedings by expressing her personal disappointment at the low turn-out.

I recall only two state officials in attendance, and nobody from the TV channels, which highlighted how little, if at all, key players care about the issue. This also included an absence of representatives from the Anti-Corruption Council, Monitoring Commission, political parties and MPs from the National Assembly. Even after the presentation I could see how deeply hurt and stressed she was by this.

The event started with the screening of Anti-Corruption PSAs from 2003 before the “Anti-Corruption Policy in Armenia” document was presented to the assembled audience along with the three new PSAs for 2006. While the 2003 PSAs stressed that corruption is everybody’s fault, with ordinary citizens as responsible for the situation as officials, the new PSAs focused on the message that corruption is intolerable and should be resisted by everyone.

The event ended with a general discussion about corruption in Armenia. Overall, Kostanyan and her colleagues were critical about the situation in Armenia. In fact, CRD/TI believed that “anti-corruption initiatives in Armenia are still a mere imitation of the real fight against corruption.”

According to public and expert opinion, since the declaration of the official fight against corruption in Armenia, the level of corruption has not decreased but rather increased. The spread of corruption is accompanied by accelerated violations of human rights, and increase in limitations of access to information and freedom of speech, a hindrance of economic competition, a flourishing shadow economy, falsified elections and criminalized political processes.

It is no secret that corruption is deeply rooted in virtually every single aspect of Armenian life. At some point after encountering cynicism and indifference by state officials on the issue of corruption, Kostanyan even had to stop and ask herself whether fighting corruption in Armenia is feasible at all. The discussion was not particularly optimistic towards the end, regardless of how the only two State officials in the hall tried to make it seem like there has been progress in fighting corruption.

According to them, adopting an anti-corruption policy is as much as the government can do. The rest is up to civil society.

While Kostanyan agreed that civil society has to be active, she also made it clear that unless the Government ensures that laws are enforced, and that everyone is equal before the law, civil society will not be able to fight corruption. Thus, the pre-requisites for an effective anti-corruption policy include prevention and detection of corruption as well as the conviction of those found guilty of this crime.

However, this is something that we have not seen the government doing.

In 2002, the Center for Regional Development/Transparency International Armenia (CRD/TI Armenia) NGO conducted a study titled “Country Corruption Assessment: Public Opinion Survey”, according to which the traffic police, the army and the healthcare system were named as the most corrupt. The majority of 1,000 households mentioned that in the last five years corruption level in the country had increased and that the main perpetrators of corruption were state officials. The interviewees referred to poor law enforcement, imperfect legislation and absence of control and punishing mechanisms to be the main causes of corruption in Armenia.

In 2005, a countrywide phone survey of 1,500 households was carried out by CRD/TI Armenia, which revealed that 62.9% of respondents believe that the level of corruption in the country has increased. The majority of respondents believed that all state institutions were corrupt, while the police, the courts and the prosecution system were named as the most corrupt institutions. Hard socio-economic conditions, anarchy and greed of state officials were mentioned as the main causes of corruption.

At that point, one of the two public officials was hiding behind the chair in front of him, smiling and chatting with his colleague. It was as if he couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to care about the issue. That is how bad the situation is. The discussion ended on what was referred to as a “very optimistic” note. That is, there comes a point after which corruption is so powerful that it cannot be fought. Unfortunately, maybe Armenia is way beyond that point already.

Anyway, CRD/TI’s publication on anti-corruption policy in Armenia is available in both English and Armenian here.