I remember quite well that the expensive drugs a few days after the 1988 earthquake, on which it was written “Aid forArmenia, not for sale”, were sold in pharmacies of Yerevan, certainly, at high prices. By the way, it is yet another proof that the system that exists inArmeniatoday was created not 10 or 20 years ago, but much earlier. Those who have nostalgia for that distant past or those who full-heartedly exclaim “it wasn’t that way in our times”, may relax it was always so, since the creator of that system are not regimes or even powers that be, but all of us.
They help us now too. Fortunately, the humanitarian aid has finished. Fortunately, because those who should have distributed that aid got rich through it. There is so-called technical aid, seminars, trainings, coffee breaks etc. A foreign lecturer, who doesn’t know anything about our reality, comes, reads his lecture taken from textbooks, reiterating truisms, gets a salary for two days’ work that is as much as a professor of aYerevanuniversity makes per year and returns home. Both the lecturer and the local NGO that has got the grant are happy. However, it is just a very innocent waste of money. The consequences of more substantial, material aid are sadder. Imagine a village, the culture house of which, built in Soviet times, has become a pigpen. Well-doers come, completely renovate that building, cut the ribbon, organize a concert and go away. The mission accomplished, they may inquire what goes on in the renovated building for another year, after that, the grant runs out and they are not to deal with that anymore and that building gradually becomes a pigpen again in the following years. Who is to blame, partially the well-doers who don’t know for whom they do what and why, on the other hand, the community and first of all the village headman who, as it turns out, doesn’t need that culture house. But he needs irrigation water, doesn’t he? However, in this instance, the community literally takes a laissez-faire attitude; the pipes rot or are stolen.
What is the “antivenin” of it? Will you be surprised, if I say democracy? If that village headman is really elected by the villagers and not appointed from above, he will be held accountable for his uneconomical activities, to say the least. But since the headman is basically appointed from above and then “works” for the establishment during general elections, they turn a blind eye to all his “sins.”
Is clear now why one of the preconditions for the US Millennium Challenge Corporation aid project is “fair governance”?
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
