"WAR OF CLANS" IN STORE FOR ARMENIA

Hardly could anyone answer today when it came into vogue in the world to publish all those numerous ratings and hold rating surveys. And perhaps there are lots of strengths having the possibility today to make comparative ratings of countries and towns for practically basing on any indicators ranging from the number of pubs and bars per unit of area to sparrows to pet canaries ratio. There is only one problem: by far not all of such ratings could and should be trusted. 

Thus for instance, in May 2014, Armenian media happily announced: the Save the Children international organization has come up with a 2014 Maternity Index, a rating of the world's best countries for mothers and children. Specialists of that international NGO analysed five indicators: mothers' health, children's wellbeing, education standards, income level and political status (women's participation in government affairs) and resolved that, among 178 states of the world covered in the survey, Armenia placed 95th leaving behind other countries of the region. 

However, the rating authors did not specify the reason why, having such nice conditions for maternity, Armenia is going through a demographic disaster. One can find much more informative things. Back in early August, Armenian media circulated really shocking information: nearly one in every five children aged below five in Armenia have a decelerated growth rate caused by malnutrition and, according to health care experts, the situation is worsening. There is an explanation to this: even according to official data, nearly one in every three residents of Armenia lives in need. Moreover, international organizations working in Armenia are obviously unable at least to give some effective advice on how to get out of this situation. 

It is clear that poverty in Armenia is different from that in North Korea, for example. It is found side by side with overt and even somewhat ostentatious luxury. Suffice it to recall the pre-New-Year row in Yerevan media when one local department store offered its customers an unheard of delicacy such as smoked crocodiles priced about 1,000 dollars per piece. The verdict passed by Yerevan public opinion was unambiguous: only local oligarchs could afford to buy those delicacies. 

As poor housewives find it hard to make ends meet, the oligarchs are faced with another process that might be most accurately described as "shrinking space for business". This is quite predictable in a situation of economic collapse with diminishing spheres attractive for business. Naturally enough, this is stepping up "competition", so to speak, the way it is understood in Yerevan as struggle among different criminal and political clans. 

Perhaps an explanation is necessary here. Armenia certainly bears little likeness to Chechnya with its influential teyps [family clans], Afghanistan or Tajikistan. As a noticeable component, Armenians emerged on the ethnic palette of the South Caucasus only in the mid-19th century. Within that period, it was just impossible to form a full-scale "clan structure" with its ancestral elite. 

It is rather "territorial" groups that are coming to the political foreground in Armenia today. They are similar in some way to the Solntsevskaya and the Uralmash organized crime groups in Russia in the early 1990s. At the same time, the "criminal vertical hierarchy" reaches much higher. 

In the early years of Armenia's independence, one could single out three "groups" having their origins in Yerevan, Karabakh and Spurk, the Armenian diaspora abroad. 

Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia, born in Aleppo, Syria, was and is regarded by many experts as the Spurk group's leader. Nonetheless it was he that made an attempt back in the 1990s to limit the influence of the Armenian diaspora on political life in Armenia: he dared ban the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Dashnaktsutyun. Formally, the authorities thus responded to setting up Dro, a terrorist group under the Dashnak "umbrella" which was planning a forcible redistribution of power in Armenia. In reality, Ter-Petrosyan was already aware that it was much easier in Glendale or Marseille than in Yerevan to speculate on lofty matters, "the Armenian people's historical rights" and the "Armenian trial of Turkey" because one did not have to think there about the price that the quite real Armenia would have to pay for those geopolitical schemes. 

The "Karabakh clan" made itself known during the "creeping coup" in 1997-98. Robert Kocharyan was regarded as its leader at that time. That clan was not merely formed in conditions of invasive war. At issue was the unrecognized "state" which could not, for clear reasons, establish any legal contacts with the external world and had willy-nilly to resort to "black" schemes. The result was quite predictable. 

Azerbaijani press has more than once quoted the following comment published in the Aravot newspaper on the re-election of Robert Kocharyan for a new term in office in 2008. Nonetheless, let us recall it. "When Ambartsum Galstyan was leaving his post as head of the Yerevan city council in 1993, he voiced a noteworthy thought and its message boiled down to the following: 'I have no fears that Communists or Dashnaktsakans may come to power. The problem is that riffraff is coming to power'". It is possible that, being an historian, he could foresee something. In the opinion of Aravot, Kocharyan owes his re-election "neither to the people who did not elect him, nor to the parties supporting him whose campaigning was not worth a bean and not even to the power wielding structures which were playing a secondary part although assisting in falsifications. He owes his re-election precisely to the riffraff." 

The Karabakh clan that came to power in Armenia managed without special efforts to take leading positions in the economy leaving no manoeuvring space for the Yerevan group or the diaspora. People from Gyumri were the only exception in recent years. Their leader Vardan Ghukasyan is all but a home-grown Al Capone but even he surrendered voluntarily in the end. In 2008, the Karabakh clan succeeded without much effort in pushing Serzh Sargsyan into office despite obvious falsifications and even street resistance which ended in bloodshed on 1 March 2008.  It should be pointed out that, by that moment, a serious split had taken shape within the Karabakh clan itself. Robert Kocharyan was making clear his intention to come back to big politics. It was actively opposed by Serzh Sargsyan having a kind of "Zangezur clan" formed within his "narrow circle". The thing is that incumbent Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan was born in Karabakh but his father hailed from Zangezur and that circumstance played a part. Suren Khachatryan, also known as Liska, the governor of Sunik (the Armenian name of Zangezur) became a key figure in the new clan. The official theory has it that Liska took an active part in the war but, according to some statements, he was mainly doing "business" around the war.        

Liska's rapid rise stopped on 1 June 2013 when a shootout took place outside his home killing Avetik Budagyan, a former candidate for the mayor of Goris. His brother Artak Budagyan, the commander of one military unit, was admitted to a military hospital with a serious gunshot wound. Also hospitalized was Nikolay Abramyan, the governor's bodyguard who had been on the accident scene. According to many, the party that ended so tragically had been arranged in honour of "Nagornyy Karabakh President" Bako Saakyan. In actual fact though, that incident was nothing but a showdown arranged to distribute incomes from drug trafficking that has been thriving for a few years now in the occupied Azerbaijani territories. The scandal did not send Liska to prison but made him step down from his post as governor. 

The election of Hovik Abrahamyan as Armenian parliament speaker made people speak about the "Artashat group"…

In essence, an own "mini-clan" is formed around each more or less significant figure in Armenia. The "jackpot" in this war flaring up among clans may be getting structures providing control over financial flows related to a certain extent to Russia. In this context, quite remarkable is the situation around David Kocharyan representing the Prosperous Armenia party in parliament. The Aravot newspaper has written about a new scandal brewing against him. According to its data, "a dispute took place recently in Razdan Region's office of the Gazprom Armenia company between its director Gagik Piliposyan and David Kocharyan. The lawmaker with a group of persons in several cars mounted an "attack" on the office run by Piliposyan. There are rumours in Razdan that David Kocharyan wants to promote his brother to the post of director of Gazprom Armenia's regional branch. According to our source, the conflict was caused exactly by this. In general, local people say, the lawmaker not only wants to get his brother employed with this company but he is making attempts in a number of other lucrative areas." But there are obviously fewer such areas in Armenia than people willing to control them.