Yesterday during his interview to the Radio Liberty Geert Ahrens, head of the long-term observer mission deployed in Armenia by the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said the following regarding their preliminary positive statement, “There are people, who advert to our preliminary report and state that our estimation was wonderful on elections. It is not so. I would say ‘largely’ is 80 percent to 90 percent, while ‘mostly’ can be 51 percent or 75 percent but not more,” he said. This preliminary statement clearly says that the overall quality of these elections was not so good as the one held a year ago,” stated Ahrens. “When we say ‘mostly,’ this is not a compliment. The conduct of elections mostly conformed to the requirements of international and democratic standards,” he said. The German diplomat also echoed the U.S. concerns about the post-election crackdown on the opposition. “We do observe all these events and we are discussing this with the authorities, including the public prosecutor,” he said. “Our legal analyst is following these procedures very closely. We would not do this if we had no concern.” “We monitor in many countries and I should say that we have witnessed all kind of other cases. There are countries, where we have seen how the police is beating people. We haven’t seen that in Armenia,” he said.
