During the 9th session of the Strategic/Technical Defense (STD) NGO, General/Major Arkadi Ter-Tadevosyan (also known as Commandos) was reelected as the president of the central board. The STD is Armenia’s largest NGO. It has 48 branches and 69,000 members. According to the organization’s charter, a session is held every two years. The deadline for the last session was December 21, 2005, after the preceding session in 2003. This means that the former president of the central board has finished his term on December 21, 2005 and a new president had to be elected before that. Basically, the board has worked illegally during the time between December 21 and February 3. The illegal board finally held a session yesterday, although a little late. At the moment, it is hard to say whether or not the illegal central board and the president will have the same authorization. That is probably not as important as the fact that the Ministry of Defense plans on paying each specialist in training 64000 drams instead of 47000 based on the contract. The Ministry provides the NGO with 2500 specialists yearly. As a matter of fact, last year, the leader of the “National Unity” political party Artashes Geghamyan claimed that he had heard someone listening to his phone calls on the other end. After checking the numbers listed on the device, the “National Unity” political party’s office had found out that the numbers are at the STD office. Basically, the person secretly listening to the phone calls has something to do with the NGO, or is simply in the building. Of course, A. Ter-Tadevosyan denied that his administration had anything to do with listening to the phone calls and A. Geghamyan’s announcement remained a mystery. Vice president of the “National Unity” political party Alexan Karapetyan said that the party had not followed up on revealing the secret listeners.
“We just informed that we know about that,” said Mr. Karapetypan.
According to our sources, there is a certain service in the NGO’s building and the service secretly listens to the calls. It goes by the name of “International Calls”.