In its annual worldwide survey on the media, Freedom House has once again categorized Armenia as “not free,” a situation which has been the case since 2002 when the pro-opposition A1 Plus TV station was taken off the air. A huge question mark then hung over the future of the company as many of its staff left to work elsewhere.

The Council of Europe and international media watchdogs decried the move seen by many as a precursor to later attempts to silence the press in the run-up to the presidential election held less than a year later. However, demands to let A1 Plus return to the air fell on deaf ears.

In June last year, the European Court of Human Rights even ruled in the station’s favour in an action against the government, but the victory was only symbolic. The station still remains without a broadcasting frequency. Instead, and undaunted by attempts to silence its voice, A1 Plus went online.

Also using blogs and YouTube, especially during last year’s contraversial presidential election, its web site is probably the most visited online news source in Armenia, with around 10,000 visits per day. That might not seem much, but in a country where Internet penetration stood at 5.7 percent in 2007, it’s quite something.

Now, in an effort to expand its reach, the banned station this week turned its attention to an estimated 1.9 million mobile phone subscribers in the country, offering short video headlines for users to download. True, the news is hardly extensive, but it does represent another attempt to take on governmental control of the broadcast media.

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The full post where comments can be left is available on the Frontline Club blog.

Now that the post-election situation is dying down, I’m starting to pitch story ideas to various regional, international and Diaspora-based publications. Of course, I’m also interested in finding other outlets for my work as well, especially as interest in Armenia still remains quite small. Nevertheless, there are a few key areas which I want to focus on now and I’m interested in commissions for writing or photojournalist work in Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. Until then, it’s probably worth highlighting some of the work that has been published in the last two years.

First up is a continuation of my work on Yezidis and Kurds in Armenia and Turkey, and specifically the continuing division within the former community here. Although considered by most ethnologists to be ethnic Kurds, Armenia’s small Yezidi community is riven by debate over their origin. Even so, as I wrote for Geographical, the community is of specific interest to academics the world over.

Nestled at the foot of Mount Aragats, Armenia’s highest peak, the villages of Riya Taza and Alagyaz hardly merit more than a passing glance from motorists heading north towards the border with Georgia. Elderly women dressed in colourful garb nonetheless line the road, while children play nearby among rusting abandoned vehicles and farmers herd their cattle in the surrounding pastures. Few stop at the makeshift shacks selling basic groceries and provisions on the roadside. In fact, nobody pays much attention at all.

But for academics from as far away as the UK, France, Germany and Japan, these small, impoverished villages are a dream come true. Located 60 kilometres from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Riya Taza, Alagyaz and other villages interconnected by pockmarked roads are home to one of the biggest concentrations of Yezidis in the country.

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What makes the Yezidis so interesting to the academic community is the fact that they are considered to be ethnic Kurds who resisted pressure to convert to Islam. Speaking Kurmanji, the dialect of Kurdish spoken in Turkey, Armenia’s Yezidis are considered by many Kurdologists to represent the purest form of Kurdish culture in the region.

The full post is available on The Caucasus Knot.

ArmeniaNow has published my article based around the recent BarCamp held in Tbilisi and attended by bloggers, journalists and new media specialists from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The article also examines the emergence of blogging as a tool for change.

The idea of over a hundred people from the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe gathering at an open air event held in the grounds of an ethnographical museum in the capital of the Republic of Georgia with no fixed agenda might at first sound like a recipe for disaster, but the concept of BarCamps is fast becoming popular the world over. An international network of participant-generated conferences – or “unconferences” usually focusing on the Internet and New Media – had come to the Caucasus.

The first ever BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, three years ago and over 30 have since been held worldwide. The Tbilisi event staged on 7-8 June was the first in the Caucasus and Azerbaijan will be staging its own at the end of August. Elsewhere in the former Soviet space, BarCamps have been held in the Baltic Republics, Ukraine and Belarus while Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia will hold their own later this year.

The BarCamp in Tbilisi was followed by a two-day workshop funded by the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the National Endowment for Democracy on new media and blogging. The training by the Prague-based Transitions Online for participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia is part of the online publication’s continued interest in promoting blogging in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

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In a matter of a few hours at time of writing, Georgians will go to the polls to vote in a presidential election called prematurely after a state of emergency followed opposition protests in Tbilisi at the beginning of November. After Mikhail Saakashvili came to power when street protests forced his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, to resign during the so-called “Rose Revolution,” things have improved significantly in Georgia.

However, many Georgians are quite openly critical of Saakashvili. While still believing in the premise of the 2003 revolution and still convinced of the need for reform, many consider him mentally unstable and even question the official account of the circumstances surrounding prime minister Zurab Zhvania’s untimely death in 2005. Even so, despite some setbacks, Georgia was considered a beacon of relative democracy in the South Caucasus.

Until November 2007, that is. When riot police used excessive force, tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse an opposition rally in downtown Tbilisi, concerns about democracy in Georgia came to the fore. Today, the former Soviet republic’s democratic credentials will again be put to the test. However, the BBC reports that the opposition are already crying foul.

The main opposition candidate in Georgia’s snap presidential election has accused the authorities of preparing to rig Saturday’s vote.

“What is currently happening in Georgia is not a free election,” Levan Gachechiladze said in a statement broadcast on Georgian television.

[…]

Mr Gachechiladze complained that “we cannot use media outlets or promotional means”.

He added that a “smear campaign” was being staged against the opposition in the media.

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In the interest of transparency given the tendency for many sites to inflate the number of readers, with some confusing hits and page views with the number of actual accesses, Google Analytics reports the following in terms of statistics for this blog in 2007:

Visitors:	94,404
Absolute Unique Visitors:	58,742
Page views	176,175

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When I moved to Armenia in 1998 I have to admit that I wasn’t prepared for the high level of corruption to be found in almost every sphere from international organizations to the public sector. In fact, it didn’t take long to discover at all, but what struck me most was how politics and the economy were pretty much simply a battle between competing clans with the population ostracized from anything remotely resembling an albeit embryonic democratic system.

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With 2008 almost upon us, it’s time once again for me to wish readers a Happy New Year. Under normal circumstances I’d also announce that the number of posts will be less as a result, but with the presidential election in Georgia a matter of days away, that hardly seems likely. On the other hand, with parliamentary elections held in Armenia in May earlier this year and the unofficial pre-election campaign starting at the end of 2006, perhaps the situation is not too dissimilar to that this blog found itself in a year ago when the situation was almost as hectic as it is now.

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Yezidis, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998

My feature article and photographs for Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, were meant to be published in the January 2008 edition, but now it looks like it’s already been published in the December issue. Unfortunately, the full text of the article is not available online yet, but when it is I’ll post another link and an excerpt. Until then, this is what Geographical has for now.

A people divided

Armenia’s Yezidi people practise one of the purest versions of Kurdish culture, but, as Onnik Krikorian discovers, outside forces have riven the small community.

My last published article on Yezidis in Armenia was for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and can be read online here, and many of the transcripts of the interviews I’ve done since 1998 are here. Also, until the full Geographical article can be read online, there’s plenty of posts and links to previous articles on Yezidis in Armenia and Georgia under the relevant category.

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Myrthe from The Armenian Odar has a new blog, The Armenian Odar Reads, and as I just picked up accesses coming from her latest post I decided to take a look. Anyway, a little surprising given that the new site is a book review one, but after reading about Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes I discovered why. About a week ago I gave her a copy of Armenia: Poverty, Transition & Democracy by yours truly, and she has indeed taken a look. Not really a review, but it’s always nice to read such nice words even if they are from a friend.

After finishing Sherlock Holmes, I got up, did some chores in the house and then sat down again to read. This time I read Armenia: Poverty, Transition & Democracy by Onnik Krikorian. He is a friend of mine who works as a freelance photographer and journalist here in Armenia. His blog is in my opinion the best English language blog on Armenia and one of the best sources of news on Armenia (and no, I am not saying that because I happen to know the guy). He runs another blog here covering the run-up to the presidential elections in Armenia on February 19 next year. Onnik’s book consists of several articles on Armenia accompanied by his pictures. His website and blogs are well worth a look and a read.

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PanArmenian.Net reports that Armenian bloggers have protested the opening of the Days of Azerbaijan posted earlier. Well, it’s fair to say that they don’t represent Armenian bloggers as a group, but it is interesting to see the use of the word blog in a headline or story. Usually local publications here take news from time to time off blogs, but fail to quote the source while the rest of the world’s media see no problem in doing so at all.

Anyway, the group of bloggers do not speak for all of us, and it’s interesting to note that such an event could not have taken place without the permission of the Ministry of Education and Science (I assume). Certainly, those coming from Azerbaijan would have had to receive visas, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have welcomed the initiative as well, so perhaps this group of bloggers should have instead sent bars of soap there too, but anyway.

What is interesting, however, is that this protest appears to have been staged before RFE/RL published its story so why wasn’t it mentioned? On the other hand, this PanArmenian.Net article is hardly objective either, but at least doesn’t leave out a significant incident which RFE/RL appears to have done.

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ A group of Armenian bloggers handed a symbolic present – a peace of soap - to Georgy Vanyan, the initiator of “Days of Azerbaijan” in Yerevan. The present was handed with a wish “for better work.”

The measure had for an object to teach the organizers of the so-called Days of Azerbaijan a good lesson.

December 17, a rather strange event titled “Days of Azerbaijan” took place in Yerevan. The event was organized by well known director of Mkhitar Sabastatsi educational complex Ashot Bleyan and his assistant Georgy Vanyan, who represents a Caucasus center of peace sponsored by the UK Embassy. Not to mention absurdity of the event jointly with a state which tries to justify Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh’s blockade in the eyes of the world community, it’s noteworthy that such an initiative could hardly occur in Azerbaijan.

The RA Armenian Ministry of Science and Education did not react.

Armenian schoolchildren were offered to write a composition with a title “Open letter to my peer”, “How I see Azerbaijan”, “Armenia-Azerbaijan: the future.”

Comments are unnecessary, but taking into account the writings of the schoolchildren who are being filled with the ideas that “Baku and Ankara are Armenia’s best friends and the evil comes from Diaspora and Dashnaks, who keep on speaking of a genocide.” No one wants war, especially Armenians. But there is a difference between desire for peace and treason. Unfortunately, Bleyan and Vanyan are not the people to understand this.

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LVB.net has an interesting post on the impact of blogging on society and politics based on a moderated working group on the same subject which was part of the European Bloggers (Un)Conference. Interestingly, E-Channel’s Gegham Vardanyan and TOL Georgia’s Irakli Jibladze were present at the event and some points are worth republishing here.

1. In the UK, an Ipsos Mori poll found that only 16% of people trust journalists. It’s not as much because of what they write, but also because what they don’t write. While public broadcasters depend from politics for funding, commercial media depend from advertizing and profits. Because of their individual perspective, bloggers are seen as more independent and honest. Still, bloggers can learn some things from professional journalists in fields like writing style, clarity and efficiency.

2. Does this mean that bloggers have to be objective? Not at all. The new age is an age of opinion, not of facts. In order to be credible, honesty is more important than neutrality or objectivity.

3. Political campaigns are already changing into a more participatory way as a result of web 2.0 and blogs. However, this effect is still superficial and its impact on political programs is still low. Especially in the US we see that web 2.0 are effective for fundraising. But blogging and web 2.0 are not just about politics, it’s about society. They are transforming society by giving a voice to individuals and groups. Ideas are now also flowing from the bottom to the top instead of exclusively top down.

4. In countries without free media, bloggers usually get in trouble only when they start to have a real impact. But for these bloggers it is difficult to get a real impact, as their blogs are not picked up by the mainstream media. Sometimes the impact can be indirect, through world opinion and foreign media. Check out globalvoicesonline.org for news about censorship and freedom of expression.

5. How can bloggers measure their impact? Counters and statistics only tell one part of the story. It’s not the quantity that counts, but the quality of your readership. A few opinion makers as readers can have a greater impact than thousands of other readers. Surveys can be useful to discover who is reading your blog.

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