The Armenian Observer Journal

Despite rapid political developments and political campaign pouring onto the Armenian voter from all sides, many people haven't yet made up their mind about which presidential candidate to support. The situation is similar offline - that is to say in real life, as well as online - in the virtual reality of Internet diaries. «Which is the right thing - having a stance, or not?», Christina is asking in her «One day...» blog, further explaining:

I can't decide on my stance for the upcoming presidential elections. I want a change - but I don't see anyone, who could show me - a regular person with mediocre abilities and feelings, the way to those changes.

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For strange and mysterious reasons, despite years of existence of a very lively Armenian blogging community, the predominant languages of Armenian bloggers have been Russian and English, rather then native Armenian. The picture has started to change over the recent month however, a range of blogs writing in Armenian have sprang up, and one can now get a variety and diversity of opinion and information reading only Armenian language Armenian blogs. Needless to say, that I’m very happy to see such a development, and want to present here a number of links to some really excellent Armenian Language Blogs. Read them, comment them, encourage them:

• A1plus blog
• Armenian newspapers & magazines digest
• Artak Kirakosyan’s Blog
• F5blog - free flow of ideas and opinion
• Samvel Martirosyan’s Blog
• Vardan Jaloyan’s Blog
• The Official ICHD Blog
• Freedom Fighter
• One Day
• Local Life in Armenia

Originally posted at The Armenian Observer Blog

The week was eventful, and while the traditional media in Armenia are pondering their adequate response, so as to avoid "unnecessary complications", the Armenian Internet community were discussing the comings and goings of the current political scene full speed. ( Read more... )

The week concluded with the appearance of the Levonator and Serzhadevil (see photos posted at the start of this article), which completely frustrated some of the more balanced Bloggers. Ogostos being one of them called for Bloggers to stop making fun of the photos of candidates and return to a more acceptable level of debates.

Last week, the main topics discussed in the Armenian blogosphere were the election manifesto of former president Levon Ter-Petrossian and the presidential election in neighboring Georgia. It's no wonder that many are now wondering, including bloggers themselves, if politics isn't the driving force behind blogs in Armenia.

“Before the last parliamentary election, the Armenian blogosphere gained serious strength and politics became the driving force behind blogs,” wrote local analyst Samvel Martirosyan on his new Armenian-language blog [ARM]. The blogger is already widely known for his Russian language blog, Kornelij Glas [RUS].

On the one hand, the upcoming elections had the same effect on the Armenian network. On the other, the development of blogs introduced a fresh (for Armenia), but not pleasant “novelty.”

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This post was originally published at Echannel and crossposted at the GlobalVoicesOnline.org.

Opposition Rally, Liberty Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian/Oneworld Multimedia 2007

Vigorous politicisation of the Armenian section of Internet is observed as the February 19 Presidential elections draw near. A number of official websites endorsing different candidates have been launched. Already there are websites for Levon Ter-Petrossian, Vazgen Manukyan, Vahan Hovhannisyan, Artur Baghdasaryan and Serge Sargsyan (sorted in the order I found out about them, many thanks to Onnik Krikoryan for pointing me to these sites). Sections related to the elections have appeared in the websites of Republican Party of Armenia, Prosperous Armenia/ Bargavach Hayastan and United Liberal National Party/MIAK parties.

Passport and invitations department at RA police has presented the list of Armenian voters based on polling stations to the Central Electoral Commission, which has been placed in the Central Electoral Commission’s website, and as was the case with the previous elections, every Internet connected voter may check their names in the list and find out which polling station they will be voting, and where that particular station is located. By the way, 2 311 917 voters were registered this time, which is 5 983 less then the previous - May 12, 2007 Parliamentary elections.

A range of information websites dedicated to the upcoming elections have been launched, including the http://elections.a1plus.am/ of A1plus, http://www.echannel.am - by Internews Armenia and http://www.elections2008.am - by MediaMax News Agency. Nearly all news, information and interactive web portals offer Internet polls of various integrity and very contradictory results. It seems that the biggest number of voters have taken part in the Online Poll at the Persons.am, with Levon Ter-Petrossian leading by 52%, followed by Vahan Hovhannisyan at 16% and Serge Sargsyan with 15%. This poll however most likely grossly falsified, because I was able to vote for my favourite candidate - Vahan Hovhannisyan at least 4 times, with no obvious difficulty. A more secure online poll carried out at Uzogh’s blog has revealed, that of 136 bloggers taking part at the vote, majority are supporting Vazgen Manukyan - holding 32% of the voter sympathy.

Armenian blogs and the Armenian section of the video-sharing service YouTube present a special case. One can discuss, curse and blackmail any presidential candidate or all of them at once. As veteran-bloger Samvel Martirosyan has rightly noted, one can even conduct virtual rallies and demonstrations on the blogosphere. A range of agitational blogs have been registered in the LiveJournal section of the Armenian blogosphere, who are carrying out a rather rough and inefficient electoral campaigns among the bloggers in favor of their preferred candidates - Levon Ter-Petrossian and Serge Sargsyan, but doing it in such a dumb manner, that their efforts are triggering general discontent and anger of the already established bloggers, rather then achieving anything.

One thing however remains a puzzle for me looking at all this internetised electoral campaign - with Internet usage among the general population in Armenia remaining much too low to have any substantial impact, what, why and for whom are all these internet resources created? What are all these efforts for? It is really hard for me to imagine, that an average statistical voter would bother to check, if Artur Baghdasaryan or Vahan Hovhannisyan have already uploaded their campaign manifesto on their nice new pre-election websites or no…

Armenian Bloggers kept following the developments around US Congress Resolution 106 last week. However, unlike the posts following immediately after the adoption of this House Committee resolution, the skeptical attitude prevailed this time. The main motive is that of blaming the United States and especially G. W. Bush in hypocrisy, while the most commonly sounded idea was, in various alterations and combinations that: Turks will remain Turks (with all the negative connotation attached to the name Turk accumulated in the course of the past 100+ years following the first mass killings of Armenians in the days of the Bloody Sultan - Sultan Hamid and passing on to the First Genocide of the 20th Century).

Here are again in more or less chronological order, extracts from some of the more prominent Armenian Bloggers in Armenian, English and Russian. At that - I have to draw special attention at the coverage of the developments by Onnik Krikoryan at his blog, as well as his first post at the Global Voices Online. He has undoubtedly provided the fullest coverage, bringing updates and opinions not only from the world news headlines, Armenian information sources, but also from blogospheres in US, Turkey and Armenia. As to the other Bloggers, we have seen once again, that if there is any single issue that can unite all Armenians - it is the Armenian Genocide and it is the pain, that lives in all of us down to the levels of subconscious and genome.

I found this announcement today on the YouTube - a user called romamerda1 who seems to have joined the YouTube especially for the purpose of uploading this video has entitled it:"26 October 07 - the meeting for the future of Armenia" and has concluded the video description with the words: "FOR THE LIBERTY OF ARMENIA !!!"

For those who can't see the video it says: "26 October, Friday, 17:00, Azatutyan Hraparak. First president Levon Ter-Petrosyan's meeting. Speeches also from Stepan Demirchyan and Aram Z. Sargsyan."

I can state, that this is the first time ever that a video announcement about opposition rally is going on YouTube - and that means that opposition is really taking the Internet seriously.

This potentially means, that the happy days of freedom of speech for bloggers in Armenia are drawing to a close, because it is easy to conclude, that the RA State Security Services, who have so far only limited themselves by paying some people to stay online and participate in various forums, blogs, video sharing sites, will now be forced to take more serious action - and we can only guess what that action implies.

Update: the same video is also available from the user levonforpresident

Several days ago JLiving Notes was speculating, that the 106 resolution on Armenian Genocide adopted by the House Committee, will remain the focal point of many blog discussions for the days to come, saying he wants to believe, that for once historical justice will win (asking sceptically - if there is such thing at all). The British Times have been digging their archives and come up with more "hard" facts to support the Congress decision - the full text of this report from October 8, 1995 has already circulated through a large number of Armenian blogs, with the HayBlog and Kornelij Glas among the first to come up with the story.

To one who remembers the rejoicings which welcomed the bloodless Turkish Revolution of 1908, the fraternization of Moslem and Christian, the confidence in a better future for the Armenians which survived even the Adana massacre of 1909, the story of the systematic persecution of the Armenians of Turkey is a bitter tale to tell. Talaat Bey and his extremist allies have out-Hamided Abdul Hamid. They have even shocked their German friends, thus attaining eminence in “frightfulness” to which the “Red Sultan” never soared.

Meanwhile, Blogian says "Democrats Prostituting Under Turkish Sword", and quotes the report by the New York Times, saying that "Over a dozen democrats have dropped their support for the Armenian Genocide resolution in the last 24 hours".

Uzogh is not impressed though, this is "democracy in action" he says, pointing to this list of Congressmen supporting the resolution at the moment, and noting, that while the number has dropped from 226 to 218, there is still enough support to pass the resolution in the 435 seat Congresss.

Uzogh has been working on creating an Armenian rating system for blogs, making use of the already existing Yandex.ru rating system for LiveJournal. The table I am publishing below has been derived from Uzogh's second beta test of the service. Although this rating system does not include any Armenian blogs outside the LiveJournal blogging community, the results are already very intersting, especially if we concider the fact, that the most active Armenian blogosphere is undoubtedly currently based in LiveJournal, where we do have very many interesting blogs which attract the highest number of readers. I have only added links to the top 10 blogs. For the rest, just use the name you see and add .livejournal.com. For example, if you want to see angry-root's livejournal (which is my LiveJournal blog) , use http://angry-root.livejournal.com to see the blog it represents. Good job so far, Uzogh, waiting for further improvements.

#	The Place in Yandex Rating
1	irukan	389
2	kornelij	562
3	ahousekeeper	575
4	pigh	1845
5	comte-de-varand	2067
6	ogostos	2205
7	apmeh	2717
8	lesgustoy	2720
9	markgrigorian	3644
10	saramarabu	4045
	END OF TOP TEN

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There were so many posts about the Resolution 106 passed by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, that I find it impossible to translate it, and have just provided links to some of them with extracts of the most intersting or relevant sections from their posts. If and when I have time this mess may turn into a more coherent post. Before then - go, read, comment!

Armenia Blog - By the way, this story is the top story on BBC right now. Obviously Bush knows how close it is to getting passed and is doing everything he can to prevent that from happening.

Oneworld Multimedia - President George W. Bush has urged the House Foreign Affairs Committee not to pass a resolution that would recognize the mass killing and deportation of Armenians living in Ottoman Turkey...

JLiving Notes - Интересно, все же, работает в США законодательная власть. Но, аргументы все больше "Турция нужна нам как союзник в борьбе с терроризмом", "можем ли мы ставить под угрозу безопасность наших солдат в Турции и Ираке". Что бы делала администрация Буша и республиканцы не будь терроризма? Наверное придумали бы его. А может это они и придумали?
Хорошие аргументы сторонников. Один ссылается на то, что признание геноцида армян Россией никак не повлияло на отношения между странами, чему подтверждение рост товарооборота, а ЕС практически ставит перед потенциальным, хоть и в далекой перспективе, членом Евросоюза задачу о признании геноцида. Подкованный мужик, конгрессмен этот из Калифорнии :)

Blogian - House Resolution 106, formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide as such, passed a minute ago in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. Congress. [] The Chairman, who voted yes on the resolution, also said the next markup would be a resolution introduced by him reaffirming Turkey’s and America’s friendship.