By Susanna Petrosyan, Yerevan. Exclusively for Vestnik Kavkaza
The Yerevan Council of Elders set up a new payment system for street parking on August 1. One hour of parking on streets with red marking and signs costs 100 drams, one day costs 500 drams, one week 1000 drams (about $3), a year 12,000 drams ($30). Free parking is only allowed for 5 minutes. Exceeding this time will be punished with a fine of 5,000 drams.
Besides the special areas, parking in Yerevan was 90% free. The city’s authorities plan to form 20,000 fee-based parking lots with security cameras. The tender to organize the lots was won by Parking City Service that will receive 70% of the sum paid by drivers parking their vehicles. The program will improve the transport system, but such a high share for the Parking City Service has cast public doubts on the transparency of the deal. Some believe that the deal has a mechanism of “bribes” for the local authorities.
According to some observers, if the mayor’s office complies with a distribution of income at a rate of 30 to 70 for the company, then the Parking City Service must have something very powerful backing it up. They even name ex-member of parliament Alexander Sargsyan, brother of President Serzh Sargsyan.
To reflect the distrust towards the authorities, a new initiative was formed on social networks, entitled “We will not pay for illegal parking lots”. Its members promised to combat the new initiative of the mayor’s office. “The decision on fee-based parking lots is illegal and does not stem from public interests. Public territories should not be handed over to a private company that gets 70% of its income from parking lots. The private company acquired the data base of citizens with cars, the company will make video records, fine Armenian citizens, which is an outrageous violation of the Constitution of the country and of human rights,” the initiative says.
Recently, with the help of public initiatives, the decision of the Yerevan Mayor’s Office to increase fees for public transport by 50% was halted. The struggle of young activists against unlawful ecological projects was a success as well.
Such civil activism can only be welcomed, but the rising number of protests, despite some achievements, have not turned into a mass protest movement, although the country faces the needed socio-economic situation to provoke such events.
In general, the processes in Armenia have taken a cyclical form:
- elections at a certain level based on various technologies to reproduce the authorities
- protests of citizens against the elections
- the pointlessness of the struggle and the internal political tranquility that follows, supplemented by countless promises to improve the socio-economic situation that are not kept in most cases.
But the cycle remains incomplete, because the public outrage does not turn into an adequate-scale protest. The civil outcries are local, resulting in a partial solution of a problem, whether a natural disaster or social hardships of separate groups of people etc.
Perhaps, the cause of the incomplete cycle is a result of disappointment with lack of progress in the struggle. The social moods may have been affected by the refusal of oppositionist leaders Levon Ter-Petrosyan, head of the Armenian National Congress, and Gagik Tsarukyan, head of the Prosperous Armenia Party, to run for president.
Another reason is the passivity of the opposition, a lack of systemic recipes to fight, instead of separate protests against a certain problem.
As long as this does not happen, people will have to find solutions for the situation in the country themselves. One of them is migration. According to the National Statistical Service, 1.017 million Armenians left the country in January-June 2013 and only 922,000 arrived. The negative balance totals 123,000, exceeding the figure of the previous year by 30%. The negative balance will change as some migrants will return from seasonal work. But at such rate, it can be predicted that about 80,000 would emigrate from Armenia.
The emigration rate is growing catastrophically. According to data, about 200,000 people have emigrated from Armenia in the last 3 years.
