Armenian opposition encouraged by support from West in organizing march events

YEREVAN, January 19. /ARKA/. The support from the West encouraged Armenian opposition to organize the March events, Shushan Khatlamajan, political analyst and coordinator at the Institute for Civil Society and Regional Development, said Monday answering ARKA News Agency’s question at a press conference in Novosti Press Center.

Armenian opposition headed by former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who lost the election, staged protests saying the election was fraudulent and the results were rigged. The rallies ended in clashes between protesters and law enforcements.

As a result, ten were killed and 200 injured. Many were arrested.

“The bias western institutions and organizations display while commenting on elections in the three South-Caucasian republics leads to some deformation in public perception and particular political processes”, Khatlamajan said.

She said it is difficult to assume what would happen in Azerbaijan and Georgia, if these countries’ opposition received such a support.

“For example, not only administrative, but also budget means were used in Georgian parliamentary and presidential elections for backing Saakashvili’s team. And if the same happened with Armenia, we would be eaten alive”, she said.

The political analyst said that, as a rule, European emissaries and representatives of European organizations coming to Azerbaijan and Georgia do little more than meet once or twice with the opposition and promise to take due steps. And that’s all.

“In Armenia everything goes otherwise, and this can be understood in two ways”, Khatlamajan said.

Commenting on the reports of international organizations Freedom House and Human Rights Watch, she expressed discontent at some aspects. She said the organizations put special emphases on certain problems and play down the progress reached by Armenia.

“If the reports were unbiased, balance of how much the society is concerned about the levels of civil and political rights in the country would be described differently”, she said.

Freedom House, a U.S.-based international non-governmental organization, in the findings from the latest edition of “Freedom in the World - 2009”, the annual survey of global political rights and civil liberties, said that democracy level in Armenia has lowered, just as in many former soviet republics.

Armenia is listed among partly free countries, as a year earlier.

Armenia, along with Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, lowered its 2008 political rights rank from 4 to 6 on a seven-point scale because of post-election violence that took lives of ten people.

Human Rights Watch Organization says in its World Report-2009 that “Armenia experienced one of its most serious civil and political rights crises since independence when security forces used excessive force on March 1 against opposition demonstrators protesting the results of the February 2008 presidential election”. -0--