Excuse me; have you ever personally taken a bribe? My question is for school principals, heads of clinics, top-ranking soldiers, government officials, ministers and the president of Armenia and, in general, to each one of us. It is rare to find one principal who will answer ‘yes, I have taken a 200 dollar bribe from the parent of a student so that he will not need to attend class during his last year in school’, or ‘yes, I have taken a 5,000 dollar bribe to agree with having a young doctor get accepted in the pediatric and gynecologic department of the hospital’, or ‘yes, I took a bribe from the parents of a soldier so that they wouldn’t send him to Karabakh’, or ‘yes, I took a bribe (and I do that time after time) from the directors of the companies of the field I am in charge of’. Nobody will say such a thing because each person thinks that everybody else takes bribes as well. But personally receiving an envelope with money is exclusively a show of gratitude and if anybody dares to say that what you took is a bribe, then you will be ready to execute that person for tarnishing his good reputation. However, in that case, why do they discuss the lowering of morals of the masses of society and selling their votes for a couple of thousand drams after the elections, especially after these past parliamentary elections when this mechanism of “gratitude” went down from the elite to the masses and was given the name electoral bribe? In other words, the fact remains that the people were bought. That is the way it is and was, especially during the 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections when produce and money were set as the basis for electoral bribes.
Do you remember when everybody, starting with the school principals, was doing unbelievable falsifications for the benefit of Robert Kocharyan when he was reelected president four years ago? Then we had the callous evaluations of the OSCE and PACE observers and the cold-hearted congratulations of the primary political figures of the great powers. At the time Defense Minister Serge Sargsyan qualified those evaluations as sentimental outbursts and argued that the European observers were not familiar with the delicacies of the temperaments of Armenians and the ways of showing it. Neither the cold evaluations nor the wave of national protest were of any value because after that, the technique of electoral bribes was perfected and there were more people who began to falsify based on their capriciousness.
A majority of the Armenian people perceive the elections as a small yet stable source of income. Now, when the villager living in a distant village, cut off from the world, realized how important his vote is in order to have a “democratic” country and that that vote is also expressed by the material equivalent (3,000 drams and more), he is now impatiently waiting until the presidential elections that he has longed for. For some reason, politicians, intellectuals, in other words, the “elite” were shocked to see that the people were bought without any severe resistance. The reasons for such sharp perceptions, I think, were more psychological. The problem is that giving and taking bribes is strictly personal, where three’s a crowd and nobody besides the two should be part of that truly symbolic ritual. Literally, once a month, if not every day, there are occasions in the lives of top-ranking government officials when somebody in the office (or neutral zone) out of nowhere places an envelope on the desk during the conversation and pushes that envelope with his fingers to the addressee, just like Bender pushed the cigar box full of money to Coreico in a familiar Russian movie. The presence of the envelope on the desk doesn’t presuppose the end of the conversation. The top-ranking functionary, for example the minister, doesn’t even look in the direction of the envelope and simply slides it in his drawer with a slight move. It all ends with one or two more gestures of kindness. But these violent and rude villagers dishonored the ritual of taking bribes – everything is immodestly out in the open.
During post-election week, it was interesting to follow-up on the evaluations of the political parties and candidates that didn’t get elected in the parliamentary elections. Particularly, secretary of the Union of Writers of Armenia Levon Ananyan’s resentment is noteworthy. The villagers of Noyemberyan preferred the son of businessman Hrant Vardanyan over Ananyan-the Armenian writer and intellectual. Ananyan was saying that values are so marred that people prefer the prepaid electoral bribe over the perspective of a good life. Yes, those poor villagers took the electoral bribe. Who said that taking electoral bribes is pleasing for only a small group of people who, in fact, have given a mitigating name for bribery-“corruption”-and like to push the virtual struggle against it just like the Dashnaks did during the pre-election period. The Dashnaks were handing out children’s backpacks with skittles and balls to voters. “ARF” was written on the ball and on each skittle there was the name of a shortcoming for society, let’s say, “corruption” and the child had to try to hit “corruption” with his ball through the means of the ARF. As a rule, the ball didn’t serve its purpose.
When businessman Hrant Vardanyan was handing out fifty dollars to each of the academics of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, the academics, if I am not mistaken, took the money. On the contrary, they were expressing their gratitude to the benefactor and fitting the money in their pockets at the same time. It was pre-election year – the 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections were still ahead. The same businessman distributed fifty dollars to each of the Armenian writers and nobody refused to take the money there either. In that case, with what logic do we expect the average citizen to refuse to take the bribe? The delicacy of bribes is that they are given to those on whom something is depended. As a rule, the ordinary people have always been giving bribes and have realized that nothing depends on them besides the needs of their families. The reader must agree that it is hard not to be tempted when people like Serge Sargsyan or Gagik Tsarukyan personally knock your door and ask you to join their political party, emphasizing that the role of the Armenian Republican Party or, let’s say, “Prosperous Armenia”, is irreplaceable. The lower levels of society don’t really understand why intellectuals, political figures and political parties during the post-election period talk disgustedly about the huge decline of the people who sell their votes for produce or a prepaid amount, in other words, are bribed. Nobody denies the fact that a substantial number of Armenians took electoral bribes during these elections because those Armenians were sick and tired of playing the role of giving bribes (to minor government workers to get things done in their everyday lives), and have never seen one government official who will refuse bribes.
So, the political and intellectual sectors of Armenian society still haven’t created honest, non-corrupt precedents. Thus, it is senseless to expect any precedents from below – the people. We simply have to wait for the time when the people will actually feel the same pleasure of taking power as with taking bribes, and then one day, before some future election, the people will try to take not the money, rather the power.