Armenia: Free Speech Under Assault in Yerevan

Journalists in Armenia, both opposition and pro-government in orientation, indicate that they are increasingly wary of trying to fulfill the press' traditional role of government watchdog.

"It is really dangerous to work as a journalist in Armenia," commented Ashot Melikian, head of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression. The Committee has recorded four attacks already for 2009, compared with seven for all of 2003, a presidential election year. The pace of attacks against journalists have not only increased, but have become "crueler," said Avetik Ishkhanian, chairman of the Helsinki Committee of Armenia, a human rights organization.

The most brutal incident so far this year occurred on April 30, when three men armed with bats attacked Argishti Kivirian, editor-in-chief of the Armenia Today and Bagin.info news agencies, in the entrance of his apartment building. Kivirian has been released from a Yerevan hospital, but remains under medical supervision. Kivirian's wife, Lusine Sahakian, is a prominent attorney defending several opposition members in controversial prosecutions tied to the political violence in Yerevan that occurred in March of 2008. Kivirian has not discussed any aspects of his work that could be linked to the attack. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

But reporters with opposition ties are not the sole victims. On May 6, unknown assailants beat TV talk show host Nver Mnatsakanian, who works for the pro-government station Shant TV. Local journalists contend that the attack was connected with Mnatsakanian's work.

The violence is unlikely to help Armenia's standing in international rights rankings. A May 1 report by Freedom House, a Washington-based democratization watchdog group, gave Armenia a "not free" ranking, placing the country 151st place among the 195 countries surveyed. That was seven notches lower than Armenia's 2007 ranking. Meanwhile, the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Armenia 102nd out of 173 countries in its 2008 survey on media freedom. The ranking was a 25-place slide from its 2007 status.

Local non-governmental organizations and international structures blame the violence on a sense that perpetrators can operate beyond the reach of the law. One senior police official, Hovhannes Tamamian, head of the Armenian police's criminal investigations department, disputed the notion that authorities are turning a blind eye to some misdeeds. He insisted that apprehending the perpetrators of the recent attacks on journalists was "the number one issue in our routine work." Nonetheless, that did not stop Tamamiam from proposing that journalists carry guns to protect themselves.

"Yes, I support the idea of an educated, intelligent person having a weapon. Why not?" Tamamian asserted in reference to journalists, at a May 8 news conference. "Let the criminal know that a girl like you might have a weapon with her, and that she might also use the weapon if there is a need to do it."

Tamamiam's proposal was greeted with derision by many journalists in Yerevan. To deter future attacks, a group of 11 non-governmental organizations and media organizations issued a statement calling for greater attention to police investigations and to bringing suspected assailants to trial. "Solving problems by means of beatings and violence is turning into a serious threat to society, but state organs do not take proper measures to prevent it. That those attacking journalists have not faced court so far is vivid proof of that," the group's April 30 statement read.

But confidence that police are up to the task of investigating assaults does not run deep. One well-known investigative journalist is carrying out his own investigation to pinpoint his assailants' identities. "We will soon make the results public," said Edik Baghdasarian, editor-in-chief of the online investigative newspaper Hetq. Baghdasarian was badly beaten in November 2008. "And they are in total discrepancy with the official investigation results. They would solve the case if they had wanted to. It's not that hard."

Baghdasarian claimed that his evidence suggests the involvement of one high-ranking government official who was named in an earlier series of the journalist's articles about Armenia's mining industry. He did not elaborate.

Eduard Sharmazanov, spokesperson for the governing Republican Party of Armenia, asserts that the government does want to solve cases of violence against journalists, but that "time" is required. Presidential spokesperson Samvel Farmanian also lamented the violence, telling EurasiaNet that "each of these incidents hurts us all equally."