We hadn’t heard something like this throughout the 15-year history of the third republic of Armenia. An election is going on, and nobody wants to take on the responsibility of counting the number of votes. We saw that happen though just yesterday.
Armenian NGOs were the heroes of the day. Yes, the NGOs. But of course, we aren’t that democratic yet to rely on each other to take care of such important things. Their decision has its motives. But let’s take things one step at a time.
At the end of March, Armenia and the U.S. finally signed the “Millennium Challenges” contract, according to which the U.S. will provide Armenia with 236,000,000 dollars (at least for the first phase). Before the Armenian delegation returned from Washington, many were waiting impatiently for the contract and Armenian NGOs were among the many that were also included in the program. But not every NGO will get the privilege of participating in the program; only the “chosen” ones, literally speaking.
Every election has a campaign and this one is no exception. In fact, the campaign kicked off just a couple of months ago when some NGOs had hosted a press conference to, as they say, discuss the scandalous epistolary of Vartan Oskanyan and John Danilovich. During the press conference, it became clear that the main goal of the NGOs was to show themselves off, not only to the public, but also to international organizations in order to get the “rating”…
According to the “Millennium Challenges” program, a Project Coordination and investors’ council must be formed. Out of the eleven members of the council, five will be representatives of the society, including NGOs, funds, unions, etc. They will be the delegates of the Project Coordination council and will coordinate projects along with 6 state officials. The NGOs must choose the five, but until then they must form an electoral commission. With that purpose, nearly 50 NGOs had gathered at the Ministry of Finance yesterday to decide who will be part of the commission.
First, the NGOs discussed the voting, they made some corrections (by vote), then they went on to discuss the main topic-forming the electoral commission. This is when the most interesting thing happened-what we mentioned earlier on. It turned out that the majority of NGOs didn’t want to nominate anyone of their members to be part of the electoral commission. At first, this may seem awkward, but it’s clear and simple. The NGO that has a representative as a member of the electoral commission will not be able to nominate its candidate for the investors’ council (this was confirmed during the first part of the meeting by the NGOs). Now is it clear as to why the NGOs didn’t want to become members of the electoral commission? More than 1000 registered NGOs of Armenia had come to the Ministry of Finances and only the most active organizations, which are aimed towards being in the “top five”. Why should they give this up? As member of the secretarial office Levon Barsegyan said, they hoped that some of the thousand NGOs would agree to work in the electoral commission for the sake of the others. But it turned out that finding 7 “willing” people is not easy. However, they made a solution in the end: some of the NGOs started nominating one another. It’s not clear as to whether they were doing this as a good deed or with bad intentions. The nominees agreed, but what we don’t know is whether this was because they were ashamed, or if there had been an agreement beforehand, or perhaps other reasons.
In any case, the local and international NGOs in Armenia, funds and unions must present their applications to the Ministry of Finance by April 26th if they want to get the right to vote. The election will be on May 2nd. So, the most active and well-known NGOs have some time to convince their colleagues, who are only colleagues by documents, to get out there and vote for them. The pre-election struggle has gone on to the decisive stage.
As I saw these NGOs, funds and unions actively discussing the voting standards, the number of voters, as well as other issues, a question came up in my mind: where were these grandiosely named NGOs when the votes of the Armenian people were not being counted during the elections? Perhaps they were thinking like Vazgen Manukyan, that if they complained, then they would probably not get the 236 million.
It is worth mentioning that neither “168 Hours” nor the reader would find out about all of this if it weren’t for head of the “Farmers’ Movement” NGO Sargis Sedrakyan to give us the information. Sedrakyan complained about the voting standards and the members of the electoral commission. He believes that everything is being done so that the people chosen beforehand get to be members of the investors’ council.
One more thing I must bring up. While checking out the Armenian web site of the “Millennium Challenges” program, I found out that Mr. Sedrakyan had been one of the nominees of the secretarial office, but he didn’t have enough votes. Three members of NGOs won, including Julieta Yeremyants (“Alert” NGO), Levon Barseghyan (“Asbarez” journalists’ club), and Jemma Hasratyan (“University educated women’s union”).
We don’t know how this made Mr. Sedrakyan decide to gather his journalists for a meeting, but one thing is clear: the NGO always point out transparency when talking about the “Millennium Challenges” program, but for some reason, after they received the money, they forgot about the mass media and only let them be present at the conference yesterday with “their consent”.
P.S. The list of NGOs that have turned in applications for voting will be ready on April 27. There’s no doubt that the NGOs with “big goals” will do everything they can to make that list long.