"OUTSTANDING" ECONOMIST SARGSYAN

In a rating list compiled by analysts of the Bloomberg agency, Armenia was among the top five most depraved countries in the world. The "Novosti Armeniya" agency reported this on 27 June. The country occupies no less "high" positions in other international ratings and indices. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, according to the latest poll "Global barometer of hope and despair", carried out by the Gallup International/WIN association, was among the ten happiest countries in the world. And these are the very latest appraisals given to Azerbaijan and Armenia at third hand.

However, back in 2008 the World Bank described Azerbaijan as reformer-country No 1, and later The Economist magazine declared the country second among 179 countries for rapid development of the economy. In a UN report on the Index of Human Development in 2011 Azerbaijan occupied 76th place among 187 countries, and in the Doing Business report of 2013 the country merited 67th position among 185 countries.

According to a report of the World Economic Forum, Azerbaijan has been included in a group of 50 countries with a competitive economy and for the fourth year running has kept its leading positions among the CIS countries.

In April of this year the international ratings agency Fitch Ratings confirmed Azerbaijan's long-term issuer default rating (IDR) in foreign and national currency at a level "BBB-" with a "stable" prediction, a short-term "F3" rating and a country ceiling of "BBB-".

A year earlier the international ratings agency Moody's Investors Service upgraded Azerbaijan's long-term rating in local and foreign currency to an investment level of "Baa3" from "Ba1". The prediction of the ratings was "stable", the agency's report noted. "This decision came about through two basic factors. First - the continuing strengthening of the state's financial position, which is reflected in the rapid increase in the foreign assets of the State Oil Fund and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan. The second - the strong development of the country's non-oil sector in recent years as a result of the state's investment activity and efforts to improve the business environment and the diversification of the economy," Moody's stresses.

But apparently not everyone agrees with such assessments by international organizations. The Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan, for example, has his own economic computations which are at odds with all the international ratings, indices and predictions. It will be recalled that Sargsyan, speaking at a session of the Armenian National Security Council…predicted an inevitable fiasco for Azerbaijan - by his calculations, within 2-3 years its citizens have been advised to prepare for a "new upheaval in the region". The Armenian president asserted that "within 3-4 years the picture in the region would change completely. We must be prepared for this. Experts are expecting an inevitable Azerbaijani fiasco within 2-3 years".

At the same time, of course, the Armenian president did not specify who were these secret, well-informed and qualified experts who should be trusted more than the international ratings agencies who are upgrading Azerbaijan's credit rating and international financial institutions of the level of the IMF and the WB, whose experts have a very high assessment of the prospects for the Azerbaijani economy. Instead, with great relish he held forth about how "in conditions of a chronic slump in oil and gas extraction the authorities of the neighbouring state continue to spend the funds they have accumulated" - in his opinion - "on single use" - for example "on major construction programmes and the funding of social expenditure" and, most important of all, "on throwing away billions in various corners of the world for the sake of one evening's applause".

To be honest, one can guess the kind of feelings aroused among the higher echelons of Armenian power by Azerbaijan's evident successes today - in the economy, the social sphere and - let's be frank - in the information war. The new wonders of futuristic architecture in Baku, the implementation of infrastructure projects, "Eurovision" and evenings of Azerbaijani culture which are being held in many countries under the patronage of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation - all this is a far cry from the reality of today's Armenia with its poverty and rampant crime. And the authorities in Armenia are reacting in roughly the same way as the Soviet propagandists of the times of the "cold war" with their forecasts of "moribund capitalism".

Here is another significant thing. Yerevan makes no secret of the fact that Serzh Sargsyan used his apocalyptic predictions in an attempt to respond to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev's speech to mark Republic Day on 28 May. Things reached the point where the Armenian Radio Liberty service thought it necessary to quote extracts from the Azerbaijani president's speech: "We must continue to isolate Armenia from all international projects. Our strategy is an effective one. According to the official statistics, 80-100 thousand people are abandoning Armenia every year, and these people are leaving Armenia for good, reducing to zero the prospects for the country's regeneration." By all accounts, the mention of the disastrous rate of migration from Armenia caused a very nervous reaction from Serzh Sargsyan.

Incidentally, the question of the population exodus from Armenia is being perceived in just as distressing a manner in other echelons of Armenian power. And the age-old subject of "who's to blame?" is preventing an answer to the question "what can be done?" For example, an attempt to discuss in the Armenian parliament a report on the implementation of the state budget in 2012 developed into an unexpected debate: the head of the opposition ANC faction in parliament, Levon Zurabyan, said that so long as Ter-Petrosyan was President of Armenia there would be no catastrophic migration. In other words, of course, there was but only during a period of active hostilities. And it was mainly ethnic Armenians, who had moved earlier from Azerbaijan, who had abandoned the country. What they are saying is they weren't counted when they came in but they were when they left. The pro-government media takes exception to this: according to a sociological survey carried out with the participation of the European office of the OSCE, in the 1990s almost a million people left the country.

Meanwhile, experts are warning that the catastrophic migration from Armenia can in no way be described as "fabrications of malicious Azerbaijani propaganda", but is an irrefutable fact. And they feel it is better not to refer to such events of the past: in autumn 2012, at Yerevan's insistence, the Russian "Compatriots" programme was terminated.

Let us explain: with the aid of this programme, which was to be carried out by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Federal Migration Service, citizens of the former USSR could - by observing certain conditions - return to their permanent place of residence in the Russian Federation. The programme was due to start in 2006, and in 2008 Russian diplomats in Armenia were pleased to announce its success.

However, in October 2012, Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisyan was forthright: Yerevan was unhappy about Russia's attempts to "press the Armenians into coming". "Our political position is this: the implementation of the 'Compatriots' programme of the Russian Federal Migration Service is unacceptable to us in the format in which it is being carried out in other countries," - was how the Russian "Vzglyad" newspaper quoted him. Tigran Sarkisyan stressed that Armenia had never given its consent to the implementation of the programme (true, it is not clear why they only started talking about this six years after it started). "The question was discussed at all levels, and our Russian counterparts were informed of our position. This question will also be discussed at a session of the Armenian-Russian inter-governmental commission on 12 October," the premier said. 

A year earlier, Russia's ambassador to Yerevan Vyacheslav Kovalenko, in an interview with a correspondent of the Armenian editorial team of Radio "Liberty", totally rejected the charges that Russia "was driving Armenians out of Armenia". "Who is driving the Armenians out of here? If an Armenian doesn't want to leave his country, why is he going? If he has a good life in his own country, why should he want to go anywhere else? No-one is driving anyone away. People are leaving of their own accord, - the diplomat stressed, asking that not too much of a drama should be made out of the situation: - "There are people who want to earn political capital. This is a waste of time. Everything will be fine, and if people are leaving temporarily, they're going not to get rich, but to ensure that those left behind have a good life."

Nevertheless, in the autumn of 2012 the "Compatriots" programme was terminated in Armenia. This in itself was an unprecedented step: according to international law, a country may regulate its own exit procedures, but on no account can it dictate to another state who can be accepted, who cannot be accepted, who can be invited and who can be told to turn back.

However, as we have come to expect, the programme was terminated but this did not have a particular impact on the rate of migration. This spring, an MP from the Armenian National Congress faction, former Armenian Prime Minister Grant Bagratyan, described on his page in the Facebook social network his impressions of a visit to the north of Armenia by an Armenian-Georgian group where he saw how "hundreds of thousands of Armenians were leaving Armenia on foot. The level of migration has indeed increased in recent years, but I had never seen anything like that." Bagratyan noted that he had been given a shocking figure - on 21 April 6,000 people crossed the border via the Bagratashen control point. The publisher of "Granta" magazine, Sigrid Rausing, who shared his impressions on the pages of the British Guardian newspaper about a trip to Armenia and Georgia to meet with a human rights group, also described the depressing scene: "On the Armenian border we saw a river, old rubbish was almost indistinguishable from the brown water and grey cliffs. Every village we went through was half empty. Whole families are leaving if they can, otherwise the women and children stay behind and the men join up with labour migrants in Russia and send home a pittance. I know there are children in these villages because sometimes washing - the only colour in this drab world - was hanging on lines, drying out in the still twilight. We saw no shops or any other vehicles."

The reasons which are forcing people to seek happiness outside their own country are understandable. At this same session of the National Security Council Serzh Sargsyan even tried to give an assurance that the Armenian economy was growing, but he was forced to admit that the country had still not been able to reach the pre-crisis level. The ongoing atmosphere of lawlessness also plays a significant role. In any event, commenting on an incident in the home of the now former governor of Zangazur ("Syunik") Suren Khachatryan, where a party ended in a shoot-out, the death of the Goris mayoral candidate Avetik Budagyan and serious injuries to his brother, the commander of a military unit, Artak Budagyan, the singer and composer Vaan Artsruni said: "There is a loss of values everywhere and at the end of the day it can drive the population towards giving up on the government and the state." "How long can we stay silent when crimes are being committed?" the musician said angrily. He went on: "This is a most difficult task which the vast mass of our compatriots are finding very hard to deal with, so they are packing their bags."

"According to official figures, which many Armenians treat with suspicion, in 2012 49,660 people left Armenia for their permanent place of residence, and this figure remains virtually unchanged compared with 2011," Eurasianet.org writes in an article: "Armenia: Will the embraces of the European Union be strong?". "According to the National Statistical Service, in the period from 2005 to 2012 204,000 people left Armenia for good. This figure comprises just under 10% of the country's population of 2.97 million as of 2012. But in the opinion of observers, the real number of ?migr?s from the country is significantly higher than the official figure," the article says.

According to the Gallup International association, out of the 12 post-Soviet republics the people of Armenia are the most inclined towards migration: about 40% of the respondents said they wanted to move and live in other countries.

And a poll of the Association of Armenian Sociologists showed that almost half the residents of Yerevan are potential migrants. As the Regnum agency reports, 46% of the people of Yerevan who took part in a public opinion poll from 15 to 25 May this year, said they wanted to leave Armenia.

"Clearly, not all of the people who expressed a wish to leave the country will in fact do so. But the rate of migration is increasing, and that's a fact. Even by official figures the number of people leaving the country in the first four months of the current year is over 10,000 more than the same figure for 2012. The main reason given by potential migrants boils down to four "lacks": the lack of work, prospects, justice and a decent way of life," the chairman of the Sociologists Association Gevork Pogosyan noted.

Pogosyan added that more than half (52.4%) of those questioned clearly expressed the wish that their children grow up not in Armenia but abroad. Generally speaking, Pogosyan believes, what is happening in Armenia is not migration but depopulation. "According to the latest UN figures, there are about 250 million migrants in the world, which is equal to about 3% of the world's population. In the case with Armenia, this figure is 30%, which cannot be called migration. This phenomenon is called 'depopulation'", Pogosyan remarked.

So what we have here is two countries, two presidents and two positions. But it is not so much a question of the difference in these positions as their relevance to objective realities. And whereas behind every statement by Ilham Aliyev about Armenia there is a real picture and the confirmation of the foreign media and international organizations, the statements and predictions of Serzh Sargsyan about Azerbaijan are sharply at odds with both realities and the assessments of international structures.