Nikol Pashinyan’s rule has been in place for 6 years. The incumbent Armenian Prime Minister took power by promising to defeat corruption. Yet, instead of delivering the promised golden mountains, he deprived the Armenian world of some very real ones – the Artsakh Mountain Range, Ishkhanasar and, finally, he took a swing at the eternal symbol of Armenia – Mount Ararat. The irony of Pashinyan’s and his time-servers’ reign is that having promised to eliminate corruption as Armenia’s biggest issue, they have driven the country and society to a state in which corruption appears to be the least of the evils.
This provides them with an opportunity, firstly, to engage in it on a much larger scale, and secondly, to avoid punishing corrupt officials, even those from the previous governments. Well, what can they do. There was the coronavirus, there was the war, there’re the ‘sabotaging exes’ (former officials). That is a very convenient position, given that they have drained everything that was still alive in the political realm, and that the civil society that was so vigorously opposed to corruption has either joined their ranks or become marginalised, while the opposition’ will sacrifice a lot for the sake of parliamentary immunity needed due to the lack of that very integrity in the past.
The purpose of this piece is not to compare who was more or less corrupt or to recount all the corrupt deeds of the current Armenian government and its minions. Let’s leave it to the law enforcement system and investigative journalists. In our contributions, we identify the symptoms of Armenian immunodeficiency, while the ways to overcome it are a red thread throughout our publications and Doctrine.
However, here is one telling, though not the most notorious example. At one time, there was an ‘Armenian National Interest Fund’ (ANIF) with a rather suggestive name for our times. It was founded in 2019 and constantly proliferated through even less transparent ‘subsidiaries’, with millions of dollars from the Armenian national budget channelled into it. Not only the name of this fund was ‘state-oriented’ only in its appearance, but so were its operations. In 2021, the Foundation, in partnership with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) airline, Air Arabia, launched a long-awaited Armenian national carrier, FlyArna. The enterprise offered the impression of the first successful and genuine Armenian carrier after many years, although the share of ANIF, and therefore of the Republic of Armenia, amounted to only 49 per cent.
Due to calamitous management, FlyArna carried out flights for less than 1.5 years and subsequently was denied its Armenian air transport licence. Later, prompted by revelations of even more terrible management of the Fund itself, the Government resolved to dissolve it. Such an event has led to Air Arabia’s decision to instigate legal action against the Republic of Armenia, and put into jeopardy the future of another large-scale joint Armenian-Emirati project – the installation of solar panels by the renowned Masdar Company.
As a matter of fact, both projects were endorsed owing to the efforts of the then President of Armenia – Armen Sarkissian – to forge closer co-operation with the rising giants – the Arab monarchies of the Middle East. So, who was in command of the miserable ‘ “National Interest” Fund’, you might ask? Well, here is the answer: it was one of Nikol Pashinyan’s Young Janissaries, none of which can be allowed to be near anything representing national or public interest, the current city manager of at least the 12th Armenian capital, Tigran Avinyan. He has deprived us of a rare chance to gain a national carrier (which is especially important for a vulnerable country that is virtually connected to the outer world only by air) and shattered our image and investment reputation, whereas we will ‘heroically’ reimburse our former partners out of our own pocket.
We can record what truly happened to corruption under Nikol Pashinyan. Firstly, like all other vices, it has almost become a socially endorsed act. No matter the thunder or the deluge, as long as ‘there is no war’ and ‘the exes do not return’, even though virtually nobody from the former ruling circles has borne the promised retribution. Second, the imitation of the campaign against corruption in the first months of Pashinyan’s administration only resulted in the increase of the scale of bribes and the strengthening of the importance of personal connections, since small bribes are not worth the risk.
Raising the salaries and bonuses of civil servants was also supposed to help ‘combat’ corruption, but eventually it only whetted their appetite and eliminated any motivation to work, as it is obvious that the only thing that is valued in this system is loyalty to the ‘breadwinner’. Considering that most of Nikol Pashinyan’s current personnel are utterly incompetitive on the labour market, whereas mortgages on houses bought and under construction need to be paid off, holding on to each other and to Pashinyan is their only winning strategy.
Meanwhile, it is apparent that no one is fully assured a place in the sun, so sitting tight is not enough – it is critical to prove one’s loyalty by deeds, as well as to get involved in criminal schemes and therefore serve as a valuable eyewitness to the authorities. Pashinyan has already begun playing the autocrats’ favourite game – punishing petty thieves for minor plunder to divert attention from the major robbery. In this game, he embraces the worst practices of Stalinism and, for one, encourages citizens to post photos of officials smoking in public places in the comments section of his official page. There are almost no untouchables left anymore, except for the verbally hated ‘exes’.
It is no coincidence that ‘corruption’ in its original Latin root and in modern English denotes, among other things, decay and decomposition. Bread and circuses, the lack of discerning between good and evil and between what is one’s own and someone else’s are the key symptoms of the total moral decomposition of the current Armenian ‘statehood’.
Previously, we have already written about the failure of all Armenian ‘revolutions’ and its main reason. That is, in order to destroy the system and build a new, revolutionary one, it requires the old system. The Third Republic never had one. That is why when the Armenian Robespierre promised justice and redistribution, and then later began flirting with quite right-wing economic policies, laying the responsibility of saving the drowning on the very drowning (and, of course, on the ‘exes’ with no expiry date and no statute of limitations), few people bothered to ask who would get the assets seized from corrupt officials and according to what scheme the seizure and redistribution would take place. The thing is, without the fundamentals of statehood, such a vicious circle, where only the range of oligarchs changes (and only partly), will be eternal. Perhaps that is why Pashinyan has raised the expectations of the Armenian world so much: so that it will never entertain dreams of fundamental change again. Like no other, he knew how rare such public mobilisation is and how difficult it would be to get a second chance like this to build a healthy, self-conscious, and competitive nation and state.
Still, corruption is always more than just misappropriated money. Thus, the security and now the peace that was or is ‘ensured’ in spite of corruption is a priori deceptive. Corruption cannot co-exist with the power of the worthy and competent. Corruption takes lives: lack of medical equipment literally kills people, so do corrupt driver’s licences, poor quality pavement, mining in breach of environmental standards, lack of proper control over the food industry and, finally, snatched military equipment, flimsy building structures, etc. The list could go on endlessly. Each luma stolen cost us torn and unborn souls. Every luma of bonuses to Pashinyan’s bums adds to the debt that our descendants will have to face, if, of course, the Republic of Armenia remains a member of the United Nations. Since the mid-1990s, the time-servers in the Armenian government with their bank accounts and assets outside Armenia have been relentlessly proving to the world community that they have no such plans. Meanwhile, we would be very lucky if the payback for their unworthy rule was only in monetary terms and not in blood, tears, and pieces of the Motherland.
