Certainly, one can pay no attention to the report of the US Department of State on the condition of human rights in various countries, including Armenia. One can say that the State Department is not a politburo, one can also respond in the manner of the Soviet propaganda of 1960, “And your country represses Negroes.” However, all that is small consolation; the country that has achieved much greater success in terms of politics and economics than we has a right to have its standards and to state whether we are in line with those standards or not. Again, we can say that we don’t accept those standards, that we have our “own,” “national” standards. Those who think so can stop reading this article. To the rest, I must say that the part of the report that concerns Armenia is rather objective in my opinion: courts are not independent; prisons are overcrowded; the government’s activities are not transparent. Is there any honest man who will deny it? The same thing applies to the self-censorship of the mass media and Tigran Arakelyan. Why were the protesters who clashed with the police on April 9 fined 50 000 drams, and the Armenian National Congress (ANC) activist was condemned to 6 years in prison. It testifies to a. the authorities’ faintheartedness and b. to the fact that Tigran really is a prisoner of conscious. However, let us come back to the most controversial point in the report. In the section “Respect for Civil Liberties,” the authors of the report talk about freedom of speech, among other things and state that during the year 2012, the government did not always uphold the right to freedom of speech and as an example of violating that fundamental principle, they point out the frustration of the initiative to hold an Azerbaijani film festival in the towns of Gyumri and Vanadzor. “On April 12, organizers of an Azerbaijani film festival in the town of Gyumri canceled the event after dozens of protesters blocked the festival venue. Protesters also blocked a subsequent effort to hold the festival in Vanadzor, in the office of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly-Vanadzor. On April 16, protesters in Vanadzor threw eggs and stones at the office, breaking some windows. Authorities declined to open a criminal case against those responsible for the vandalism,” the report reads. I by no means like holding an Azerbaijani film festival in that manner; an Armenian film festival should have been organized in Azerbaijan in parallel. Furthermore, it seems to me that those who organized that event last year aimed at appearing in such a report. However, the fact that I or
thousands of other Armenians don’t like this kind of festival doesn’t mean at all that it had to be frustrated in Gyumri and Vanadzor. One can talk and write against it, one can silently stand with a condemning poster “at the scene,” but preventing the event – probably to show one’s boundless patriotism – is wrong and illegal. It really was a breach of the freedom of speech, and although unacceptable, although alien this expression of our fellow citizens should have been ensured by the state. Therefore, this criticism made by the Department of State was also appropriate.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
