Corrupt Police Prey on Travellers

Leaving Armenia gets harder and harder. Every trip begins with at least one-hour security examination at Yerevan airport. I am not a criminal, but someone with the same name is wanted by police. Each time I know the same people will be checking me again next time.



All through it, I keep asking myself what I have done to deserve this. It feels like the KGB in the old days.



My latest trip to North Ossetia to take part in a workshop organised by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting turned into an adventure. My colleague from Internews NGO Gegham Vardanian, who accompanied me on the journey, was examined by airport security staff for more than an hour, just because as a journalist he had travelled to Azerbaijan ten years ago for an event run by an international organisation.



The plane to Minvody in southern Russia was delayed for a couple of hours by reported bad weather. It took some more hours of tedious waiting in line for almost 150 passengers – mainly Armenians - to get through passport control in Minvody airport.



We had plenty of time to go to the duty free to buy a few bottles of Ararat Armenian brandy to drink later with journalist colleagues. Gegham’s bottles in transparent bags attracted attention for some reason and security staff singled him out for inspection.



They started asking him questions like: What is the aim of your visit to Russia? Why do you travel to Georgia so often? (They saw the stamps in his passport) Why do you have clearance to enter the United States?



What did you write about? Do you speak English well? If all this hassle was meant to extract a bottle of brandy from us, it failed.



At Minvody airport, we were met by two men, Aslan and Chermen, who were hired to accompany us on the 200 kilometre journey. The trip took three hours including being stopped five times by traffic police, each time Chermen having to pay bribes demanded under various pretexts.



The most persistent traffic cop descended on us at the border of the Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Having found nothing wrong with our documents, he started examining the car boot and saw the bottles of brandy. It took us about 20 minutes to fend off his demands for a bottle despite his soothing insistence that he had never met a mean Armenian.



We spent the night in Vladikavkaz and later went on to our destination, Tsey ski resort at a height of 2,500 metres in the south of North Ossetia. I hoped in vain that the traffic police here would be friendlier – they are Caucasians after all – but I was wrong.



Their special technique for “earning” money was to say the road was dangerous and blocked by traffic because of the snow. The problems vanished mysteriously once they had pocketed a few notes.



When we finally reached the resort and joined our colleagues, the second day of the three-day workshop was nearly over.



The third part of our adventure began when we got back to Minvody airport. The weather was fine so we hoped to avoid any flight hold-ups.



But it was not the weather that caused the plane to Yerevan to be delayed for nearly eight hours but the fact that some wealthy “new Russians” had apparently had the plane diverted to Dubai. Someone decided the Armenians could wait.



Fortunately, they paid special attention to us at the airport because we were journalists, not least because we had been in Georgia to report on the Russian-Georgian war.