We have often said, stability in Georgia is as important as Armenia’s own stability. And the consistently unpredictable situation there raises alarm and poses questions.

Most of the issues related to the situation in Georgia are very apparent, very obvious, very over-reported, and quite under-explained. There is no need to talk about good guys and bad guys, bullies and victims. The ingredients causing friction, contestation and conflict are basically questions of legitimacy, geopolitics in a historic context, geopolitics in the current dynamic, and a global game reminiscent of the Cold War.

Event On May 3, Armenia, along with the rest of the world, celebrated World Press Freedom Day. Two days earlier, Freedom House, the New-York based NGO which promotes freedom around the world, released a list of countries ranked by the degree of media freedom in each. Armenia is included among the “Not Free” countries, and ranks 151, along with Singapore. In a previous Freedom House report, Armenia was in 144th place, near Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, the Maldives, Moldova and Pakistan.

Event March 22 marked the deadline for political parties to register to compete in Yerevan’s first direct popular elections for Yerevan City Council. The election will take place on May 31. The leader of the victorious party will become the mayor of Yerevan. Six political parties registered: The Republican Party, the Prosperous Armenia party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation – Dashnaktsutyun, the Rule of Law party, the People’s Party, and the Socialist Labor Party, as did the Armenian National Congress, the assembly of several political parties, led by former president, Levon Ter-Petrossian. The only opposition party represented in Parliament, led by Raffi Hovannisian, chose not to participate, following long and quasi-public negotiations with the Ter-Petrossian team.

The Event Daily flights between Tbilisi and Yerevan are to begin March 16. This welcome news in relations between the two countries was followed by a surprisingly public spat between the offices of the two presidents. The verbal exchange is in sharp contrast to the warm talk that took place during the February visit of two senior Georgian officials – Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze and Parliament Speaker Davit Bakradze -- paid official two-day visits to Yerevan late last month. While public statements played up positive trends in bilateral relations, both sides made the point that there are no problems that cannot be resolved jointly through "constructive dialogue" -- a tacit admission that problems do indeed exist, and that past pledges to resolve them may not always have been sincere or systematically implemented.

Event As a result of the last discussion on the situation in Armenia, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) did not impose sanctions, but Armenia ‘gained’ one more resolution.

Background In December 2008, the PACE Monitoring Group decided that at the PACE winter session in January 2009, PACE should discuss whether to deprive the Armenian delegation of its right to vote, since Armenia had not registered any substantive progress in implementing the provisions of PACE resolutions 1609 and 1620 that negatively assessed the political situation in the wake of the March 1 post-election crackdown. One day before the scheduled discussion, however, the   rapporteurs proposed that the issue not be raised in the plenary session of PACE, basing that recommendation on their visit to Armenia in mid-January. Instead, the session adopted yet another resolution -- number 1643 -- extending until the April PACE session the deadline for the Armenian authorities to comply with the demands contained in the two earlier resolutions.