Sisian, Siunik Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2002

There’s no doubt about it. I hope that this will be my last winter in Armenia for some time. Famous last words, perhaps, but as this is my ninth consecutive winter when almost every other foreigner but me has packed up and gone somewhere warmer, I think I’m allowed to comment on what must be the dullest period in Armenia. Don’t get me wrong, the whole country is beautiful when there’s snow on the ground, but all those other peculiar things that make Armenia what it is kind of get amplified and thus detract from what would otherwise be a picturesque White Christmas.

Maybe I’m being unfair given that while many in Yerevan now have gas, it’s cold in my apartment. Actually, it’s freezing in the living room as well as the kitchen, toilet and bathroom. Yes, I know. I can have the luxury of gas heating if I really want to live dangerously, but I just don’t trust it. At least three Armenians from the Diaspora and dozens of others have died from inadequately installed heaters in recent years, and I’m not going to put my life on the line in the face of corruption, incompetence, and what is still probably the lack of any mechanism for oversight.

This would have been my first winter with gas had I decided to buy a heater, because while all the pipes and meters were fitted last winter, they forgot the most important thing of all. Yes, that’s right. They forgot the gas.

Still, we’ve got it now if we want it, I suppose, but I don’t want to take the risk.

I know it’s all a matter of proper ventilation and stuff, but given all the scare stories I think I’d probably sleep with all the windows open just in case, and that would kinda defeat the whole point of having a gas heater. So I think I’ll wait and see how many families die from asphyxiation this winter before considering it as an option for the future. When the number of fatalities remain in single figures, I‘ll feel safer. Besides, it’s warm in the bedrooms, even if they are heated by inefficient and expensive electric heaters.

Sure, one winter I carried three cubic meters of wood up five flights of stairs to burn in a wood stove, but that’s not going to happen again. Firstly, the environmentalists will shake their heads at me in disgust, and secondly, I’m just too lazy anyway. Even so, it’s easy to understand why some families still burn wood, although I’ve noticed less on sale this winter which kind of indicates more and more families are indeed switching to gas. Still, for those homes in places where gasification hasn’t reached yet, and especially for socially vulnerable families, there’s not doubt about it.

Burning wood to heat your home is not only effective, but it’s free if you have an axe to hand and a forest nearby. Armenia might be forestless by 2025, but who the hell has the luxury of being able to think about the future these days?

Well, whichever way I eventually decide to survive the winter, I’m lying in bed typing this first letter from Armenia on my laptop. As I plan to hibernate and not venture outside unless I really have to, these posts will at least occupy me until when the weather improves. For a while, though, I thought my laptop had the same idea. It died on me and it’s taken two hours to get back up and running. XP says it’s a disk error, but even chkdsk from a command prompt doesn’t get past 30 percent before the computer turns itself off. No wonder all the internet cafes in my area are using pirate copies of Vista.

It’s working now, though, so on with my ramblings. Again, don’t get me wrong. Armenia, and Yerevan in particular, looks really nice in the winter, but the local and municipal authorities do little or next to nothing to make the streets safe to walk on. Last year I managed to escape serious injury, although I did fall down twice, but others weren’t so lucky. And although there’s less snow than last year, I can already see from the road outside my apartment building that the problems are going to be the same. When the snow melts, there’s going to be no road at all. It’s going to be a river.

I guess I really must be tired of winter here, although I have to be honest and say that they’ve been better than my first, experienced in 1998/99. That was just depressing. No snow, gray everywhere, and very dull. Also caught my first bout of the flu, which took me by surprise. It was nothing like the flu I’ve caught in England. This flu wiped me out. Think it was then that the Defense Minister of Armenia, Serzh Sarkisyan, announced Armenia had a cure for AIDS. As you can imagine, Yerevan was full of the same joke for the whole winter. “Oh, you have flu? What a pity. If you had AIDS, there’s a cure.”

Of course, Sarkisyan meant HIV, and even then he was wrong. Armenicum is only a treatment like many others to delay the onset of AIDS. We know that now for sure, although I was always my cynical and disbelieving self, but many took the announcement by the then head of the National Security Service (NSS) for real. As I recall, he released this information when faced with an awkward question about something else, but nobody followed his statement up by asking why the head of the former KGB was announcing the breakthrough, and not the Minister of Health. Actually, they could have asked why the rest of the world didn’t believe Sarkisyan, but anyway.

So, I’m staying put for a while until there’s a reason to go out. After eight years here, I have to admit that I find Yerevan more and more boring as time goes by. Sure, there’s some nice places such as The Club that have opened up, and drinking holes like Red Bull have been around for ages, but you can count the decent spots on both hands. There’s many worse places, of course, but most are boring, and the clientele monotonous to say the least. There needs to be more variety, but unfortunately there isn’t. This is especially true in the winter. Yerevan is pretty much dead.

I spent time with my son, of course, but after New Year’s Day itself, I didn’t do much else, although I couldn’t refuse an invitation to visit Zarchka from Life Around Me and her family a few days ago. Probably she’s regretting that now as I managed to scoff as much of her mum’s homemade hummus as I possibly could, and I guess I polished down my fair share of wine as well. I even managed to convince her mum to get me a cigar, so I probably turned out to be nothing short of one of those gluttonous guests Zara mentioned in the very first post she made on this site last winter.

Kind of ironic if you ask me.

By the way, one interesting thing about the New Year holidays, is the number of shops and businesses that stay open even on 1 January itself. They open up later in the day of course, and usually about mid-day, but it’s an indication, I think, that the economy is still nowhere near strong enough for local groceries and other businesses to lose money, and that’s even with them operating as part of the shadow economy as 90 percent of all shops still do here. In my part of town, make that 100 percent. The law might make them have cash registers on their counters, but they all still use calculators.

Presidential Election Campaign Rally, Akhurian, Shirak Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003

Not much more to say, really. I’m stuck inside and so don’t have much to report on at all. Well, there is some bad news that has kind of put a question mark over 2007 for me, even though I was hoping that a proposal submitted to USAID/Counterpart International for monitoring the parliamentary elections would be accepted. That project would have been undertaken by Transparency International in Armenia, and my role in part of it would have been to establish a network of bloggers among students, youth groups and civil society in Armenia.

I even managed to get agreement from It’s Your Choice, the largest domestic election observation mission here, to allow it’s observers to blog. As Zarchka at Life Around Me is also head of the IYC Erebuni Youth Section and has blogged about the parliamentary elections she observed in Ukraine as well as recently attending a workshop for IYC on e-democracy, that included mention of blogging, in Slovakia, we really had high hopes for this project. Because the project would have been in both Armenian and English, there was even interest from the international media as well as other human rights and democracy related organizations outside of Armenia.

So, we managed to get through the first round okay, and we thought we’d get through the second and final round too, but then the unexpected happened. USAID/Counterpart International had to make some cuts and we didn’t get through. Anyway, back to politics.
Armenia is one of the few countries that is still willing to deploy its soldiers in Iraq, Serzh Sarkisyan has extended his hand to Turkey to normalize relations and open the border without preconditions, Kocharian appears to be ready to sign a peace deal with Azerbaijan as soon as Aliyev is, and Europe is happy that the necessary legislative changes in Armenia are going ahead even if they don’t necessarily function.

Sure, that’s sometimes by undemocratic methods such as falsifying the referendum in November 2005, but leave such important decisions up to the people?

Don’t be stupid. Managed Democracy is far safer, and certainly more predictable.

I mean, what can the West do if the elections are less than democratic? Wash their hands of Armenia and lose influence in other more important areas such as Karabakh and Turkey? They didn’t do that in Azerbaijan in 2005, and I don’t suppose they’ll be doing it in Armenia this year either. Why would they when it appears as though most of the population don’t even believe in the idea of democracy anyway? Such grand concepts are far less important in this region than larger geopolitical interests.

So, maybe that’s the reason why I’m not feeling so enthusiastic this winter. Basically, I can already sense what’s to come.

Presidential Election Campaign Rally, Azatan, Shirak Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003