OPPOSITION CANDIDATES CHALLENGE PM IN REPUBLICAN

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 05 YEREVAN 000086 SIPDIS SIPDIS DEPT FOR EUR/CARC E.O. 12958: DECL: 02/04/2018 TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM AM SUBJECT: OPPOSITION CANDIDATES CHALLENGE PM IN REPUBLICAN STRONGHOLD OF GYUMRI REF: 07 YEREVAN 1362 Classified By: CDA Joseph Pennington, Reasons 1.4 (b,d). ¶1. (C) SUMMARY: The major opposition representatives in Gyumri allege that biased media coverage, vote-buying, and use of administrative resources by the ruling regime puts them at an inherent disadvantage. All three party chairs consulted say they stand by the embattled independent GALA TV channel, the only one they claim offers candidates unbiased coverage. All three parties agreed that the main issues for Gyumri voters are unemployment, housing for earthquake victims, and reconstruction of both the disaster zone and the city's industrial base. That said, the opposition parties are fighting on, arguing that Gyumri's voters have little reason to admire the government record and may be ready to vote for change. Gyumri is considered Armenia's "second city" and is a Republican stronghold, though opposition Orinats Yerkir also has a strong base there. END SUMMARY -------------- OPPOSITION CHALLENGES REPUBLICAN STRONGHOLD -------------- ¶2. (C) Gyumri -- regional capital of Armenia's Shirak region, that was virtually destroyed in a massive 1988 earthquake -- is Armenia's most prominent northern city, cherishing a self-image as a cultural/intellectual center. EmbOffs visited Gyumri January 29-30 to review election campaign developments there. In the May 2007 parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsian's Republican Party of Armenia (RPA),won a decisive victory, garnering 30 percent of the vote throughout the Shirak region. Second place went to the opposition Orinats Yerkir (OY) party, led by former Parliament Speaker Artur Baghdasarian, which got 13 percent. ¶3. (C) In spite of the ruling regime and Republican party's stronghold in the region, three of the leading presidential candidates are mounting active campaigns: former president Levon Ter-Petrossian (Armenian National Movement),former parliament speaker Artur Baghdasarian (OY),and current deputy speaker Vahan Hovanissian (ARF-Dashnaks). OY has opened ten offices in the city for the presidential campaign, Ter-Petrossian's campaign has opened seven, and the ARF two. -------------- "IF THE VOTE WERE FREE AND FAIR" -------------- ¶4. (C) Despite their partisan differences, all three parties' campaign chairs in the city were united in trashing front-runner Sargsian, each predicting that their party,s candidate could win the election outright "if the vote were free and fair." Member of Parliament Hovik Margarian, Orinats Yerkir's campaign chair in Gyumri, told Poloff that in a truly fair election his party's candidate, Artur Baghdasarian, and ex-President Levon Ter-Petrossian (LTP) would advance to the second round, and not front-runner Sargsian. He emphatically stated that only "two percent" of "people in the street" will say they are voting for Sargsian, with the remaining majority saying they will vote "for anyone but" the sitting prime minister. Murad Grigorian, LTP's campaign chair in Gyumri, gauged LTP's support at 40 percent throughout the country (in spite of recent polls that continue to show high negative ratings for the former president). Artak Avetissian, Dashnak party chair in Gyumri, said his candidate's ratings continued to climb, and are around 16 percent nationwide according to his party's polling data. All three said their campaign,s main challenge was to overcome what they allege was the use of administrative resources and electoral fraud by the ruling regime. -------------- YEREVAN 00000086 002 OF 005 ELECTORAL FRAUD: EXCEL SPREADSHEETS -------------- ¶5. (C) Levon Barseghian, director of Gyumri's Asparez Journalists Club and prominent (opposition- tilted) civil society activist, told Poloff he was astounded to learn of the recent dissemination of an Excel spreadsheet by directors of state-run agencies in the Shirak region to school directors and other public servants used to collect voting information and signatures of citizens pledging their support for Prime Minister Sargsian. Poloff saw a copy of the spreadsheet in question at the Orinats Yerkir headquarters in Gyumri. The campaign chair said he had recently and confidentially received the spreadsheet from a businessman who said he had been instructed to gather voting pledges and data from a dozen voters. The OY campaign chairman echoed what Barseghian told Poloff, alleging that the region's director of schools and tax service were disseminating the form to public servants and businesses, pressuring them to fill in the blanks. (Note: The spreadsheet,s column headings called for name of voter; address of voter's residence registration; passport number; name of employer; voter's precinct number; voter's identification number; and voter's signature. There was no way to confirm, of course, the actual provenance of the spreadsheet, which anyone could have created. End note.) The campaign chair vowed to make the spreadsheet public, which he did on February 1. -------------- AND OTHER ALLEGED CAMPAIGN VIOLATIONS -------------- ¶6. (C) Other alleged campaign violations raised by the party chairs and other interlocutors included vote-buying, impeded access to poster space in public areas, pressure on landlords not to rent campaign space to their parties, and dismissal from public sector posts because of one's political affiliation. Barseghian said he received a telephone call on January 29 claiming that vote buying was taking place downtown, with offers of 30,000 drams (roughly USD $100) for copies of voters' passports. The Dashnak party chair also noted that his party had received reports of similar offers from party members in the region's villages. ¶7. (C) Both LTP's and the Orinats Yerkir's campaign chairs alleged that landlords were being pressured not to rent campaign space to their parties. Orinats Yerkir responded by opening their offices in party members' homes and businesses. Poloff met with the party's chair in his home, which appeared to be a hive of campaign activity compared with LTP's drab headquarters manned by a motley group of 50-something supporters, and with the spartan, less frequented Dashnak office. Orinats Yerkir's chair also echoed a claim by Seyran Martirosian, head of the Shirak branch of the Sakharov Armenian Human Rights Protection Center, that parties were having trouble placing their posters in public spaces and getting access to commercial billboards. Martirosian said intimidation was being used to dissuade the posting of rival posters in both private and public spaces. ¶8. (C) Orinats Yerkir's campaign chair said he was encountering the same type of resistance in gaining access to billboards that he had in the May 2007 parliamentary elections. He was proud that he had succeeded in renting billboard space around the city, including a billboard in front of the regional governor's office. He attributed his success to the fact that he was an MP with immunity who could not be intimidated by the regime. (Note: In contrast with Yerevan earlier in the week, where Prime Minister Sargsian's were the only campaign billboards, there appeared to be a more equitable billboard battle taking place in Gyumri, with Orinats Yerkir almost matching the Prime Minister in billboard ads. LTP's camp had a few billboards, and the Dashnaks had posted a lot of posters around YEREVAN 00000086 003 OF 005 the city center. End note.) The Dashnak party chair charged that Sargsian's billboard dominance stemmed from the fact that his brother Sashik owned a company that operated a significant bulk of billboard advertising throughout Armenia. -------------- DISTORTED MEDIA AND JOB FIRINGS ALLEGED -------------- ¶9. (C) With the exception of Gyumri's mayor, a Republican Party member, nearly all interlocutors commented that media coverage on Armenian television stations was distorted. They acknowledged that air time had become more equal after the start of the campaign on January 21, with daily coverage of the nine presidential candidates. But all save the mayor said the coverage by government-controlled or Government-allied TV stations (which represent nearly all of the major TV outlets) continue to be one-Sided in favor of Prime Minister Sargsian. The coverage, they claim, includes editorial voice-over of audio footage that puts a negative spin on what the candidate says, and selected video footage that diminishes the numbers of supporters at their campaign events. ¶10. (C) Margarita Minasyan, owner of Gyumri's independent Tsayg TV and Radio station, told Poloff that coverage of the campaign by Armenia's H1 public TV station -- which has the largest broadcasting reach and viewership in the country -- was "shameful." Minasyan said she compared her station's coverage of LTP's visit to the neighboring Aragatsotn region on January 27 with the coverage that H1 had devoted to it, and sarcastically stated that "viewers would think they were two totally different events." Barseghian dryly noted that although air time was more equal, the last five years of "media violence" inflicted on Armenian viewers in the form of one-sided coverage of the ruling regime could not be reversed in 25 days of the current presidential campaign. ¶11. (C) Artak Avetissian, Dashnak party chair in Gyumri, alleged that 16 Dashnak party members had been recently dismissed from their public sector jobs because of their political affiliation. Claiming that the government was "beginning to fear us," Avetissian said he was one of the 16 who had lost his job as the director of the largest secondary school in the Shirak region. He said directors of three hospitals, directors of seven schools, and six heads of various state agencies had been dismissed by the regional governor in the last month. When asked what his party planned in response, Avetissian said they had decided not to go to the courts given that the firings were politically motivated, and courts would not provide redress in such cases. -------------- OSCE LTOS ON ELECTION ENVIRONMENT -------------- ¶12. (C) EmbOffs also met with the four long-term observers of the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission assigned to Gyumri, two of whom had prior experience as monitors in Armenia. In separate meetings, the two teams made similar points, noting that Armenia was making progress in its election administration. An American LTO said she had the initial impression that staff capacities had increased in the few voting precinct offices she had visited so far. All four shared that they had heard the same charges of election violations from opposition parties that Emboffs had heard. One of the LTOs with previous Armenia experience said he found it very encouraging that he had been invited to attend the live TV interview of one of Gyumri's two Territorial Election Commission heads, noting that the live call-in session they programmed was a rare occurrence in other ex-Soviet countries he had observed. -------------- GYUMRI VOTER ISSUES YEREVAN 00000086 004 OF 005 -------------- ¶11. (C) All interlocutors agreed that the main issues on Gyumri voters' minds were unemployment, housing for the 4,000 victims of the 1988 earthquake still living in temporary structures, and reconstruction of both the earthquake disaster zone and the city's industrial base. The mayor himself noted that while emigration of jobless citizens to Russia had abated since its high tide in the late nineties, the city still boasted only 5,000 permanent jobs -- down from 90,000 in the pre-earthquake era. ¶12. (C) Orinats Yerkir and the Dashnaks heaped bitter scorn on the national and city government for their gross neglect of Gyumri in the two decades since the earthquake. Orinats Yerkir's campaign director scoffed that the ruling regime in the last five years had spent more money on fishery research in Lake Sevan, and endangered species studies elsewhere, than on Gyumri's struggling population. ¶13. (C) The Dashnaks' campaign director spoke disparagingly about the abandonment of Gyumri by the ruling regime, saying the Armenian government had done nothing to help the city. He noted that the only help had come from the Lincy Foundation, funded by billionaire Armenian-American Kirk Kirkorian, which had built new housing in a section of the city between 2002-2004. He said PM Sargsian and the Republican Party had only now begun paying attention to the city and making campaign promises for its revival. ¶14. (C) A pensioner Poloff spoke with in the street said that while he lamented the lack of post- earthquake reconstruction, he and other pensioners he knew were going to vote for PM Sargsian now that they had begun receiving pensions that were increased 60 percent as of January 1, 2008. (Note: One of PM Sargsian's key campaign promises is the doubling of pensions in the next five years. End note.) -------------- GALA TV: STILL ALIVE AND BROADCASTING -------------- ¶15. (C) While in Gyumri, Poloff made his third trip to GALA TV since the independent regional TV station had fallen out of favor with the authorities for its mid-October airing of an LTP speech blasting the ruling regime (reftel). Its owner, Vahan Khachatrian, said he was keeping the station afloat financially by dipping into his investment savings from another enterprise he owns. Legal proceedings against GALA have been in abeyance over the holidays, which has allowed the station to continue broadcasting. He said two businesses had recently returned to the station with orders for new ads, and that he had even received an offer -- through intermediaries -- to sell the station to an unspecified pro-government entity, which he refused. He predicted, as did other interlocutors, that the authorities would "lie low" until after the election to renew their harassment of the station. Notably, Martirosian and Barseghian told Poloff they thought the Embassy's visit during the tax inspection in November contributed to the abrupt end of the inspection a day after the visit. (Note: CDA also raised the issue with PM Sargsian at that time. End Note.) ¶16. (C) All three parties challenging the Republicans in Gyumri said they continued to stand by GALA, and stated it was the only regional TV station in Armenia providing their candidates fair coverage. GALA's owner confirmed that he was airing footage of all three parties, but that contacts from the Republican Party had ceased. GALA is reportedly one of a handful of regional TV companies in the country that has decided to provide paid political advertising to political parties during the campaign. Its owner says he YEREVAN 00000086 005 OF 005 has yet to be approached by parties for such advertising, but predicts orders will be forthcoming in the week preceding the election. The Orinats Yerkir campaign chair said he publicly supported GALA at the December 19 rally organized by Barseghian, and thought GALA had a chance of riding out the storm. He and Seyran Martirosian of the Sakharov Human Rights Protection Center said the TV station's "counter-attack" had woken citizens up to the fact that they had to fight for freedom of expression under the current regime. (Comment: The GALA situation is not entirely black and white. We have strong indications that GALA has played fast and loose with its legal obligations over the years, and a USG-funded media assistance implementer has told us privately he considers GALA TV's management unabashed liars and cheats. However, the timing of authorities' multi- agency actions against GALA cannot be anything but selective enforcement for reasons of political retaliation. End Comment.) -------------- COMMENT -------------- ¶13. (C) COMMENT: Objectivity is hard to come by in the current climate, as Gyumri NGOs and journalists -- as in many other parts of Armenia -- tend to have decidedly partisan leanings. The various opposition activists and the media and civil society groups that align with them tend to repeat the same allegations to each other and to us, with none having concrete evidence to show. Voter intimidation and vote buying charges are easy allegations to make, and devilishly hard either to prove or disprove. For example, the oft-repeated claim that voters are being offered 30,000 AMD bribes seems improbably high; if extrapolated nationwide, it would imply that nationwide the ruling party is prepared to pay some USD 50-100 million on voter bribes alone -- not inconceivable but a whole lot of money to spend on the questionable premise that voters will "stay bought" once in the voting booth. We do believe, however, and are hearing all across the country, that vote buying, intimidation, misuse of public sector resources, and biased media coverage are factors in the current campaign. The opposition campaigns in Gyumri are not conceding without a fight, however. All think they can tap into the long-simmering frustration of a citizenry that has yet to fully recover from the 1988 earthquake. End comment. PENNINGTON