{"id":7988,"date":"2017-04-20T21:59:24","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T21:59:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/media-battle-v-corruption-media-alerted-from-behind-bars\/"},"modified":"2017-04-20T21:59:24","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T21:59:24","slug":"media-battle-v-corruption-media-alerted-from-behind-bars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/critique\/2017\/04\/20\/7988\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Battle v. Corruption: Media Alerted from Behind Bars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Mediamart<\/em> (Media Battle) is a digital game developed by the Media Initiatives Center [also responsible for this site] for journalism enthusiasts. Independent Armenia\u2019s media already has more than a quarter of a century of history, but media coverage of corruption (the fight against corruption) is more like a game in terms of effectiveness.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>2. Media Alerted from Behind Bars<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>On April 5, prisoner Hrachya Gevorgyan died at the Armavir correctional facility. He had become known to the public with a letter that he conveyed to or rather, threw at journalists on July 7, 2016, in court.<\/p>\n<p>He had written in detail about the \u201cdirt\u201d on the prison\u2019s former and current wardens. How each floor \u201chas its <em>oper<\/em> [prison officer] and <em>rezhimnik<\/em> [disciplinary officer]; at the end of every month, each cell gives 100 thousand to the <em>oper<\/em>, 100 thousand to the <em>rezhimnik<\/em>.\u201d That \u201cevery cell gives 20\u201330 thousand dram a week to those who do the searches and a fake broken telephone to go and hand in for show\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gevorgyan had alerted the press that to silence him they are injecting him with drugs, as a result of which he\u2019s unable to walk or talk; they\u2019re starving him to death; later he complained also of physical assault. Neither the letter nor the complaint had no consequence. Now criminal proceedings have been launched with suspected medical negligence, on occasion of this prisoner\u2019s death, who feared \u201conly God.\u201d According to the official version, he died suddenly.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Gevorgyan\u2019s case is one among news of prisoners\u2019 deaths circulating in the media. The media reports, which contain disclosures on the causes of death, are very few. But, say, the title of the video \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2016\/03\/29\/armenian-prisoner-died-two-days-before-release-widow-rules-out-suicide.html\">Prisoner \u2018Committed Suicide\u2019 Two Days Before Release<\/a>\u201d (Epress.am, March 28, 2016) speaks to the chilling illogic of the claim that it was a natural death.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rtecenter\" dir=\"ltr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZtE_mVg3zkY\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Prisons had a bad reputation even under the communist regime, as evidenced by the article titled \u201cLooting Behind the Barbed Wire\u201d (1990, issue #11\u201312, author: Carlos Yeghiazaryan) printed in the weekly <em>Munetik<\/em> at the dawn of post-Soviet Armenian press: \u201cIf you want to be released early and you\u2019ve naively put your hopes merely on the rights granted to you by law, then that\u2019s how you\u2019ll remain until the end of your prison sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou want to be released early on parole? Rejoice\u2026\u201d This is a <a href=\"http:\/\/lurer.com\/?p=227080&amp;l=am\">news story<\/a> published a quarter of a century later: this and many other forms of corruption persist till today.<\/p>\n<p>In the news story \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/armtimes.com\/hy\/article\/17388\">The Conundrum of Prisoners\u2019 Rights<\/a>\u201d MP Nikol Pashinyan, who spent about three years in different prisons, writes that the Nubarashen prison \u201cwarden\u2019s position is valued at around one million dollars\u201d (<em>Haykakan Zhamanak<\/em> [Armenian Times], Sept. 28, 2010, \u201cPrison Diaries\u201d).<\/p>\n<p class=\"rtecenter\" dir=\"ltr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OJU_A3R7Wsc\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">While political activist Vardges Gaspari, who also had the misfortune of ending up in prison, describes in detail what this \u201cbusiness\u201d comprises, how the money is generated that can raise the \u201cprice\u201d of the prison warden\u2019s position to one million dollars (\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/epress.am\/2016\/04\/07\/%D5%AF%D5%A1%D5%AC%D5%A1%D5%B6%D5%A1%D5%BE%D5%B8%D6%80-%D5%BA%D5%A1%D5%B0%D5%A5%D5%AC%D5%A8-%D5%B7%D5%A1%D5%B0%D5%B8%D6%82%D5%A9%D5%A1%D5%A2%D5%A5%D6%80-%D5%A3%D5%B8%D6%80%D5%AE-%D5%A7.html\">Keeping Prisoners is Lucrative Work<\/a>,\u201d Epress.am, April 7, 2016).<\/p>\n<p class=\"rtecenter\" dir=\"ltr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/n3bhU7vinKI\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cBusiness\u201d is \u201cbusiness,\u201d but it\u2019s not just the money. Here is one of the services of the prison administration that destroyed human destinies. The deputy prison warden \u201corganized and implemented the visit of Alla K., Luiza Ch., and Dianna M., [all women] engaged in prostitution, with prisoners who didn\u2019t have such a right at the time, including a prisoner suffering from a serious immune deficiency, HIV\/AIDS\u201d (\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/news.am\/arm\/news\/360298.html\">Former Deputy Prison Warden Arrested: He Brought Prostitutes<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>During the Soviet years, people were imprisoned just for having currency, and now <a href=\"http:\/\/armlur.am\/353645\/\">the news<\/a> in 2015 informs us that \u201cprisoner Vardan H. of the Nubarashen penitentiary reported to the RA Ministry of Justice that between 5 and 6 p.m. on March 11, 2015, the employees of the aforementioned penitentiary searched the cell, after which he discovered that the US$1,000 belonging to him disappeared from his personal drawer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The innovation of our time is the mobile phone, which supposedly is prohibited to keep in the cell, but Hrachya Gevorgyan\u2019s testimony confirms a tragicomic case \u2014 it\u2019s a stable source of bribes for prison staff. Among other media, <em>Hraparak<\/em> daily newspaper reported what the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.hraparak.am\/?p=36623&amp;l=am\/xardaxutyun+haykakan+exanakov\">Armenian way of fraud<\/a>\u201d means:<\/p>\n<p>The Hrazdan penitentiary \u201cprisoners, led by Hamlet Ghazaryan, called the <em>marzpetner<\/em> [regional governors] and village mayors, and identifying themselves as their superiors, they extorted large sums of money. The fraud lasted about one month, and during that time, the group had embezzled quite a large amount of money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Village mayors, deputy regional governors, regional governors\u2026 all had given money to an unfamiliar taxi driver, all because another stranger had called and made the demand on behalf of the management\u2026 If Gogol\u2019s <em>The Government Inspector<\/em> hadn\u2019t been written, I, as a writer, wouldn\u2019t be able to resist the temptation, and I would dedicate a novel or novella to the resourceful detainees and their just-as-foolish officials, the pillars of the corruption pyramid.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Despite this series of eloquent evidence, the bulk of media reports are law enforcement agencies\u2019 press releases \u2014 the prison system remains for journalists a difficult to access if not a closed area. According to Pashinyan, to report on the state of prisons, you \u201cmust be inside\u201d (and that can\u2019t be done voluntarily); on the other hand, journalists have never tried to become familiar with and to \u201ccoordinate\u201d the information this opposition politician and MP has \u2014 right up to and including the video interview above done for the Lratun program.<\/p>\n<p>This fact, that the media doesn\u2019t properly pursue developing and making public the scarce information available, is the main reason that isolated in the news story on the coverage of bribery in the law enforcement system were the penitentiaries.<\/p>\n<p>The continuation of this article series will present the coverage of the state of the entire system.<\/p>\n<p>The start of the article series here: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/media.am\/en\/lratun-corruption-1\">The Illusion of Choice<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rteright\"><strong>Vahram Martirosyan<br \/>\nHead of the Media Initiatives Center\u2019s Lratun media museum project<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mediamart (Media Battle) is a digital game developed by the Media Initiatives Center [also responsible for this site] for journalism enthusiasts. Independent Armenia\u2019s media already has more than a quarter of a century of history, but media coverage of corruption (the fight against corruption) is more like a game in terms of effectiveness.&nbsp; 2. Media<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/critique\/2017\/04\/20\/7988\/\"> Read the full article&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7978,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique","author_posts-vahram-martirosyan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}