After being home for a couple of weeks this winter, I realized (not surprisingly) that Armenia isn’t usually the highlight of the news, especially during the election season. I wanted to share some interesting articles I’ve been reading about Armenia and the political situation that might shed some light on what Armenia is like on the international political and economic level (which isn’t something I have direct contact with, so I don’t usually write about).
The first is from BBC, and is about the recent sell-off of a large number of utilities, the rail network, etc. to Russian companies. The obvious effects are that Armenia now owns few of the resources it can be used to become an independent power, and it is falling back towards many of its Soviet ways, despite the progress we’re seeing on a local level.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia and his Armenian counterpart, Robert Kocharian, talked of “the truly allied character of the Russian-Armenian relationship” at a meeting in August 2007.
But critics in Armenia accuse President Kocharian and his ministers of accumulating vast personal wealth while selling off the country’s most precious assets to Moscow.
“The Russians own what is the economic backbone of Armenia,” says an opposition newspaper.
“Moscow is in control of virtually all our strategic resources.”.
The second article is on the Nogorno-Karabakh conflict, which has been in a 13 year stalemate with Azerbaijan (it’s the reason why our Azeri and Turkish borders are closed). An excerpt:
IT MAY be the most combustible place in Europe. Were it to reignite, the effects could be dire. Yet the world takes little interest in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous enclave disputed by Armenians and Azerbaijanis, preferring to see it as just another “frozen conflict”. The fear is that it may be thawing.
It’s a really interesting article, which you can read at Economist.com. Enjoy!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.