THE "ARMENIAN TRACE" IN A BRITISH SCANDAL

A major scandal has hit Britain. The fact that the deputy speaker of the House of Commons, Nigel Evans, has been arrested on a charge of raping two men is no laughing matter. Although he was released on bail until 19 July, this is a major scandal.

As reported in the media, the incidents which led to Evans' arrest apparently occurred some time between July 2009 and March 2013 in Pendleton, Lancashire. There are no other details but journalists were reminded that it was back in 2010 that Evans came out about his unconventional sexual orientation.

At the moment experts are finding it difficult to predict how the trial will develop and what its political consequences might be. However, the Russian paper "Kommersant" was able to clarify immediately after the arrest that Evans had been considered a likely candidate for the office of Speaker of the House of Commons. That said, the scandal is a serious blow to the standing of the British government.

Meanwhile, in the South Caucasus attention is being focused on another matter. Nigel Evans is an active member of the inter-parliamentary "Armenia - Great Britain" friendship group and a no less consistent supporter of the recognition of the "genocide of the Armenians", something which certainly did not prevent him from once heading an observers mission at elections in Armenia he so loves.

That said, what is unpleasant for Armenia is the fact that this is not the first scandal in which well-known and active Armenian lobbyists have played a leading role.

Many experts are of the opinion that the biggest scandal around the "Armenian lobby" blew up in the autumn of 1996 in the US, in the small town of Bedford, Ohio, which has a population of a little over 15,000. Here, on 13 September 1996, the manager of a warehouse rental company situated in the outskirts of the town, sick to the extreme because one of his customers first took far too long to pay for his lease and then completely disappeared from the radar, broke the lock of his garage…and called the police. Indeed, he had every reason to be horrified: the police and the investigators from the bureau for the control of drugs, tobacco and firearms reported the existence in the warehouse of about 50 kilos of explosives with detonators, 18 pieces of firearms, including automatic pistols, hunting rifles and revolvers. The dynamite was particularly dangerous: it had been manufactured over 15 years ago and this explosive could not be kept for more than a year: when this time expires the dynamite starts to give off nitro-glycerine which becomes dangerous and unstable and could spontaneously explode without any obvious external influence. And next door was a creche, a petrol station and a school…

It very soon became clear that the owner of the "garage bomb" was…Murad Topalyan, a perfectly decent and respected citizen and one of the leading Armenian lobbyists in the US. At the time of his arrest he headed the "Armenian National Committee of America", one of the leading lobbyist structures in the US. Topalyan was well known in Congress and had been invited to receptions and "tea parties" at the White House…As the investigation revealed, back in the 1980s Topalyan had been closely linked with a dangerous Armenian terrorist group - the "Commandos of Justice for the Armenian Genocide", which was responsible for a number of murders of Turkish diplomats and an explosion outside the Turkish mission at the UN in New York. Topalyan, according to the investigation, was also involved in sending young ethnic Armenians from the USA to the Middle East to undergo military training. The investigators caught up with many of those who had been dragged into the orbit of terror. These people, who had already sown their wild oats, settled down and got their own houses, preferring to forget the "pranks of youth", now "broke down" and wept under questioning.

His sentence, however, turned out to be surprisingly lenient - not 31 years in gaol, which the prosecution insisted on, but 37 months. The court took into account the fact that Topalyan had not tried to use the "arsenal" hidden in his garage "for its "designated purpose".

The next blow to the positions of the Armenian lobby in the USA was struck in 2010 when the "Pzo affair" broke out here. Let us remind you of it: in October 2010 over 40 members of a crime syndicate, the key members of which were immigrants from Armenia or citizens of that country, were arrested in New York and Los Angeles. They were accused of stealing the personal data of thousands of doctors and patients. The criminals used this secret information to pump millions of dollars out of the "Medicare" system which was designed to provide medical aid for the elderly, federal prosecutor Preet Bharara said at a press conference in New York. Charges were also made against suspects in Ohio, New Mexico and Georgia. The organizer of this fraudulent scheme was named by the special services as Armen Kazaryan, 46, an Armenian "mobster", better known in criminal circles by the nickname Pzo.

But much more significant details emerged later. The funds that had been criminally acquired in the USA - the "Pzo" gang dealt in racketeering, arms trading and diamond smuggling - were then "laundered" in Armenia, with the participation - or more precisely, co-participation - of people from Serzh Sargsyan's "closest circle", specifically, his brother, Aleksandr (Sashik) Sargsyan, who was found to have a business in the USA as well - a construction company "Glendale Hills". As the Armenian media claimed, Serzh Azatovich gathered together his closest friends at a restaurant in Yerevan and literally cried his heart out: well, do something! At least find some Turkish roots in this investigator! 

According to information from Yerevan sources, in connection with the investigation into the "Pzo case", Armenia's prosecutor-general Agvan Ovsepyan went to the USA in December 2010 and when he came back to retire Justice Minister Gevorg Danielyan was sent. But leading Armenian lobbyists in the US Congress "played down" their contact with representatives of the authorities of independent Armenia so that tomorrow they would not have to feel ashamed at such inappropriate contacts.

An "Armenian scandal" also erupted in France. In January 2012 a member of the French Senate, the mayor of Clamart, Philippe Kaltenbach, another committed Armenian lobbyist who had visited in Armenia a memorial commemorating the so-called "genocide of the Armenians", and had also done everything possible for the adoption of a draft law on making denial of the "Armenian genocide" a criminal offence, fell for a common bribe. As Milli.Az points out, quoting the Turkish newspaper "Hurriyet", Kaltenbach, having taken from a friend a bribe of 1,000 euros, promised to provide him in exchange an apartment in a house built for the needy.

Finally, Baroness Cox, a colleague of Evans' in the friendship group with Armenia and deputy speaker of the House of Lords, found herself mixed up in an unpleasant scandal. The charity organization "Christian Solidarity", of which she is head, operates not only in Nagornyy Karabakh. It was actively involved, among other things, in buying slaves in Sudan. The scheme was an extremely simple one: first donations were collected in European countries which were used - as "running costs" - by the baroness' close associates when they set off for West Africa. There, they bought up slaves from the local traders who, as a rule, had been captured during raids on Christian villages (among the slave traders in Sudan, according to Cox, Muslims comprise the majority, and the slaves are forcibly converted to Islam), and then they set them free. Along with releasing slaves they arranged trips to the countries of the "Golden Billion" and even press conferences. One such press conference took place in Ottawa, Canada: the journalists were regaled with heart-rending stories about how the baroness herself set off for the savannah, how she secretly met with a local slave trader posing as a mediator in deals of some kind…But there followed some very unpleasant questions.

Baroness Cox's "charity" was regarded as investing in the slave trade. Her present system, experts stress, amounts to a kind of "chain" at the beginning of which there are detachments of cut-throats who are directly involved in capturing the slaves, the intermediaries are comprised of slave-trade middlemen, and finally there are the "buyers". But it is precisely because of the money obtained from them that all the rest exists, and especially the bandits who seize the slaves. And here it is no longer important who pays the slave traders and why and what words are spoken later at press conferences. The more searching experts pointed out that for the same reason it is not customary to pay terrorists a ransom for their hostages. And the experts cited historical facts on this subject: before the Civil War between the North and South in the USA activists of the abolitionist movement, i.e. the supporters of the abolition of slavery, never tried to buy slaves, considering this immoral. They chose a different means, which was as painful as possible for the slave-owners: enabling the slaves to escape from the South to those states where there was no longer slavery. According to the American justice system, in that case it was already impossible to arrest and "demand back" a white slave.

Of course, with some political imagination all this could be described as "no more than a chain of circumstances". However, experts mention something else, too. The well-known truth "Tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are" has long since been given a new interpretation: "Tell me who your lobbyists are and I'll tell you what you are worth". Indeed, lobbyism itself is unpunishable.  And many people have lobbyists. But it is one thing if one is talking about support, say, for the route of a pipeline that promises Europe greater energy independence, or speeches in favour of the development of ties with a state, cooperation with which fully complies with the interests of Washington, London, Paris or Brussels… It is quite a different thing when, to the accompaniment of conversations in the direct sense of the world made centuries ago, one has to plant a mine under NATO's southern flank, "to promote" an idea, creating grounds for territorial claims against the same Turkey, or else "protect" terrorists like Topalyan or lobby a law that violates the basic norms of democracy and pluralism, as was the case recently in France, counting on obtaining in exchange contributions to the pre-election funds and X number of votes of the ethnic Armenians at the polls. Clearly, this is not simply an incongruent moral aspect of the affair or different kinds of lobbyist technology. These are a different kind of "lobbyists" - and everything that goes with them.

And so the Evans scandal is hardly the last in the series of woes for the Armenian lobby.