THERE WERE VIOLATIONS, BUT NOT ESSENTIAL
By N. Petrosian

AZG Armenian Daily
15/05/2007

On may 13 “The Vote is YOURS!” NGO published the preliminary results of monitoring of the parliamentary elections. The NGO stated that the process of voting and of calculating the votes was conducted in peaceful democratic atmosphere. There were certain mistakes and law offences outside the election centers, but they had very little influence on the voting results.

As negative factors of the elections “The Vote is YOURS!” pointed out that the candidates were not given equal conditions for pre-election campaign, low number of alternative candidates at certain election centers, unbalanced proportions of electoral committee members, psychological pressure upon the voters (certain parties tried to “bribe” the voters rendering them humanitarian aid), low attention of the mass media to the election campaign.

In spite of all the violations, the NGO marked certain positive changes, which displayed the will of both the political powers and the voters to hold fair and democratic elections. The representatives of the “The Vote is YOURS!” organization, which has over 4 thousand volunteers in 10 regions of the Republic of Armenia, stated that the violations had no effect on the results of the elections and that
Armenia’s progress on the way to democracy is obvious.

May 12 parliamentary election in Armenia have become not the victory of the authorities but the defeat of the opposition, the National-Democratic party says in its statement, received by ArmInfo today. To recall, the NDPA, headed by Savarsh Kocharyan, which “broke off away” from the National-Democratic Union in 2001 and called itself oppositional, could not overcome the required 5% threshold to enter the Parliament.

According to the statement, May 12 election were organized by the authorities “normally in outward appearance” but with “previously controlled” results. Psychological pressure was used by the authorities during these election instead of physical pressure used at the previous ones. At the same time, using the bicycle technology, the authorities exaggerated the number of electors, having participated in the voting, one and a half times, and just these artificial votes were fixed in favour of the power parties. But even under conditions of absence of open fraud, victory of the opposition raises doubt, the statement says. According to NDPA’s estimation, the parliamentary election in Armenia have become not victory of the authorities but the defeat of the opposition. The main reason for this defeat lies in the fact that the oppositional forces could not join around the alternative ideology and programmes.

“Civilized parliamentary election” camouflages mass falsifications and violations, Amalia Kostanyan, chairman of Transparency- Armenia, said at a press conference, Monday.

“The country’s election system is controlled by high-ranking officials. This has become a reason for open bribery of voters, including by political figures,” she said. On May 12 people informed some public organizations that the persons representing some parties bribed voters, she said. However, the information was anonymous due to the atmosphere of overall fear reigning in the country. At the same time, there were people ready to sell their votes for a definite amount of money. For instance, she mentioned a call by a woman who plead a public organization to help her get a 15,000 AMD bribe as, in her words, “the bribe came short when it was her turn to get it.” “Thus, although politicians speak of democratic values and free and transparent election, in reality, we become witnesses of their quite-opposite behavior,” A. Kostanyan said.

According to a sociological poll conducted by Transparency International Center for Anti-corruption Research and Initiatives, the election system in Armenia was the most corrupted in 2006, 73.9% of respondents say. They mentioned imperfect legislation, lack of punishment mechanisms and public tolerance to this phenomenon as main reasons of wide-spread corruption.

Anyway, all of the Diasporan observers I’ve spoken to so far don’t seem to agree with CRD-TI Armenia, and nor does IYC itself. Anyway, if bribes were distributed and I think they were, people took them quite gladly and willingly went to the polls to vote. As most observers say that the polling stations were calm I don’t think this argument about an “atmosphere of fear” stands up too well. Only in one polling station I visited was the situation tense.

Of course, it’s still a violation of the electoral code and also means that the percentages of the vote for the other parties are far less than they should be, but I do believe people who took the bribes wouldn’t have voted for the opposition or at all without them. Now all I can hope for is that Orinats Yerkir and Heritage become the viable opposition that any country needs for its democratization. They don’t have many seats, of course, but I hope that they can use their positions to help restore the trust of the population in the political system.

Let’s see.