About Chorrord Ishkhanutyun

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun was an opposition newspaper published in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, in Armenian. Its name translates as Fourth Estate or Fourth Power, a deliberate claim to the classic role of the press as the fourth power in the state, standing alongside the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. The European Journalism Centre's Media Landscapes survey of Armenia lists Chorrord Ishkhanutyun, rendered there as The Fourth Power, first among the country's most important opposition newspapers. Published by the Ogostos company, which was both its founder and a press distribution agency, and edited for many years by Shogher Matevosyan, the paper was known for sharp criticism of President Robert Kocharyan and his government, and its history in the 2000s is one of the most fully documented records of pressure on an Armenian newspaper: seizure of equipment, tax audits, the beating of its journalists, criminal charges against its editor, an explosion at its office, suspension during the 2008 state of emergency, and a court ban on its publication in 2009 that forced it to appear under a changed name.

A note on tense and status is required. The fullest documentation of Chorrord Ishkhanutyun comes from press-freedom reporting between 2001 and 2013, after which the international record consulted for this profile becomes sparse, and no verified account of the paper's final years or formal closure was available in those sources. This profile therefore describes the newspaper's documented history in the past tense where the record belongs to that period, and states openly at the end what cannot be verified, rather than presenting the paper as either certainly active or certainly closed on evidence that does not exist.

Origins and the Ogostos Company

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun was published in Yerevan by Ogostos, also rendered Ogostos Agency or Augustos in some reporting, a company that combined press distribution with publishing. The Committee to Protect Journalists records that in March 2001 Interior Ministry officers seized equipment that the newspaper had held since 1996, which establishes that the paper and its publisher were operating with that equipment from at least 1996, in the first decade of Armenian independence. The paper's editor was Shogher Matevosyan, whose name also appears as Shoger Matevosian. According to Committee to Protect Journalists sources of the period, Matevosyan was also president of the Shamiram party, a women's political party founded by former interior minister Vano Siradeghian, and the equipment seized in 2001 was said by an eyewitness, quoted in the daily Aravot, to have included items that were a gift from Siradeghian.

The paper's founding date is not precisely documented in the international sources consulted, and no date is invented here; its presence from the mid-1990s and its established position by 2001 are the verifiable facts. What is clear from the record is the kind of newspaper it was: a radically opposition title, in the Yerevan Press Club's description of its founder, aligned in the 2000s with the opposition movement around former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan and later described as a staunch supporter of the Armenian National Congress, the opposition alliance Ter-Petrosyan led, and known for harsh attacks on the government of President Serzh Sargsyan.

Editorial Stance

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun was, by every contemporary account, a stridently oppositional paper. The United States Embassy in Yerevan, in a cable later made public, described it as a radical, opposition newspaper, stridently pro-Ter-Petrosyan. The Committee to Protect Journalists described it in 2001 as well known for its sharp criticisms of President Robert Kocharyan and his government. Media Landscapes places it at the head of Armenia's opposition press. In the polarised Armenian market described by researchers, in which newspapers were divided between supporters of the authorities and the opposition press with no evident middle ground, Chorrord Ishkhanutyun occupied the most combative end of the opposition spectrum, a positioning reflected in its very name: the fourth power, asserting a right to judge the other three.

That stance shaped both its journalism and its troubles. Opposition dailies and weeklies in Kocharyan-era Armenia covered the government, the security services and the business-political elite from a position of open hostility, and relied on readers and political sympathisers rather than on advertising, which the state-influenced economy rarely directed to critical titles. Chorrord Ishkhanutyun's staff writers and freelancers covered opposition rallies and the policing of them at first hand, which repeatedly placed them in physical danger, as the record of attacks on its journalists shows.

Seizures, Audits and Early Pressure

The documented pressure on Chorrord Ishkhanutyun began in 2001. On 28 March 2001, representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs deprived the newspaper of possessions it had held since 1996, announcing that the equipment belonged to the ministry. The Yerevan Press Club's account lists what was taken: three carpets, two refrigerators, telephones, a fax machine, a video recorder, a walkie-talkie set and other items. In May 2001 tax police conducted an audit of the Ogostos Agency without the written order from the Ministry of State Revenues that the law required, seizing a large number of documents; the official order was issued two days later and a further audit began on 23 May. The ministry subsequently demanded payment of 8 million drams, over 14,000 dollars, for violations it said the revisions had revealed.

Ogostos challenged the demand in court, arguing that the financial revision had been conducted with legal infringements, a position the Yerevan Press Club records was confirmed by an appraising document of the General Prosecutor's Office. On 22 February 2002 the Court of Cassation declined the ministry's challenge to a Commercial Court decision in Ogostos's favour, and the tax demand was discarded as ungrounded. The episode is an early, well-documented example of the technique that Armenian press-freedom monitors described throughout the decade: financial and administrative instruments, audits, tax demands and property claims, applied to an opposition publisher in ways that the courts themselves sometimes found unlawful.

Attacks on Its Journalists

Journalists working for Chorrord Ishkhanutyun were attacked on the record at least three times in the 2000s. On 30 April 2003, Mher Ghalechian, a journalist with the paper, was violently attacked in Yerevan, an assault condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists. On 13 April 2004, during the dispersal of an opposition rally, Ghalechian was beaten by police and detained for some 16 hours; in his published account and in a letter to the General Prosecutor he described how his bag was taken and not returned, containing a recorder, a photo camera belonging to the paper's editor, 300,000 drams, the round seal of the Ogostos agency and documents of the Shamiram public organisation, and he demanded that the head of police of Yerevan's Centre community be held accountable for impeding a journalist's work and for illegal detention.

In July 2006, Gagik Shamshian, a freelance correspondent writing for Chorrord Ishkhanutyun and for the independent daily Aravot, was assaulted in the Nubarashen district of Yerevan by relatives and associates of the district's mayor, Mher Hovhannisian, after his reporting on the district; he was threatened, subsequently faced charges of his own, and in June 2007 received a suspended sentence of two and a half years for fraud in a case many observers believed was politically motivated, according to Freedom House. The pattern across these cases, violence or prosecution following reporting on officials, made the paper a recurring entry in the annual reporting of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House and the Yerevan Press Club.

Charges Against the Editor and the 2007 Explosion

In October 2007, police filed criminal charges against Shogher Matevosyan, together with Nikol Pashinyan of Haykakan Zhamanak, after the two editors participated in an opposition march in Yerevan on 23 October that was broken up by riot police. Both were detained and released the following day, then informed that they would be prosecuted under articles of the criminal code for disturbing the peace and violence against an official, charges carrying up to a month in prison and a fine. Reporters Without Borders condemned the arrests and called on the Armenian authorities to drop the charges and allow journalists, including opposition journalists, to do their job.

Weeks later the paper's office was attacked directly. At about 4.30 in the morning on 13 December 2007, an explosion shattered the office door and windows of Chorrord Ishkhanutyun; nobody was injured. Editor-in-chief Shogher Matevosyan said she believed the attack was the work of figures who objected to the paper's reporting of the distribution of gifts by district officials. The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Miklos Haraszti, condemned the attack in a statement on 21 December 2007. The United States Embassy reported that the editor suggested the authorities had masterminded the bombing, claiming the paper had received two recent threats over its portrayals of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan; the police opened an investigation, and Freedom House records that no perpetrators were identified or arrested.

The March 2008 State of Emergency

Following the disputed presidential election of February 2008 and the violent clashes of 1 March in Yerevan, in which ten people died, a 20-day state of emergency was declared. The emergency decree restricted media publication on state and internal political issues to official information, and in practice, as the Yerevan Press Club documented, pre-emptive censorship was applied across the country. Chorrord Ishkhanutyun was among the opposition papers whose publication was stopped during the emergency, a fact recorded by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and by Human Rights Watch's reporting on the period. For a paper that existed to oppose the government, the emergency regime, which permitted only official information on political questions, made lawful publication of its normal content impossible, and its suspension became part of the standard account of the March 2008 crackdown on the Armenian opposition press.

The 2009 Court Ban and Chorrord Inknishkhanutyun

In November 2009 Chorrord Ishkhanutyun was banned from publishing by court order. The Gind printing house, which printed the newspaper, sued its founder Ogostos over alleged unpaid bills, initially put at some 5 million drams; a Yerevan court ordered publication stopped until the case ended, and officers of the Service for Mandatory Execution of Judicial Acts visited the paper's offices on 9 November to enforce the ban. On 10 November the paper did not appear under its own name. Instead, some 5,200 copies were published under the name Chorrord Inknishkhanutyun, Fourth Self-Rule, a title identical in design and content, printed at another printing house, using the opportunities provided by the law on mass communication. On 16 November the court upheld the ban, ruling that Ogostos must pay Gind about 2.6 million drams, roughly 7,000 dollars, and that the paper could not publish until the alleged debt was repaid; parliament also cancelled the accreditations of the paper's parliamentary journalists.

The Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression and partner organisations issued a statement the day the ban took effect, calling it an infringement of the right to free dissemination of information, contrary to Article 27 of Armenia's constitution and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and demanding that the decision be called off and the dispute resolved on a purely financial basis. Aravot reported the paper's side of the dispute: that Gind had unilaterally and secretly raised its printing tariff, bypassing its agreement with Ogostos. Independent media experts cited in monitoring of the affair warned that whatever the merits of the debt claim, a dangerous precedent of court persecution and banning of an opposition publication had been set. The episode remains one of the clearest Armenian examples of a commercial dispute functioning, in effect, as a suspension of an opposition newspaper.

Later Record and Legal Disputes

The documented record continues into the following decade in thinner form. In 2013 the paper was sued for defamation over coverage criticised by a pro-government blogger, one of the many defamation actions that Armenian monitoring organisations recorded against opposition titles in a period when civil libel suits, with heavy damages claims, had become a principal legal pressure on the press after the decriminalisation of libel. Chorrord Ishkhanutyun's name also continued to appear in the collective life of the Armenian press: its editor was among the heads of media who signed joint statements on press-freedom cases, including the March 2009 statement by ten outlets on the refusal of early release to Zhamanak editor Arman Babajanyan.

After the early 2010s, the sources consulted for this profile, which include the reporting of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom House, the Yerevan Press Club, the OSCE and the European Journalism Centre, yield no further verifiable milestones for the newspaper: no documented closure announcement, no recorded change of editor, and no reliable account of its final publication pattern. This profile therefore does not assert a closure date. The honest summary is that Chorrord Ishkhanutyun is richly documented as a leading opposition newspaper of the 2000s and sparsely documented thereafter.

Significance

Chorrord Ishkhanutyun's significance lies less in its circulation, for which no verified figure is available, than in the completeness with which its treatment illustrates the pressures on Armenia's opposition print press in the Kocharyan and early Sargsyan years. Almost every instrument catalogued by press-freedom monitors appears in its file: seizure of property, tax audits later found ungrounded, beatings of reporters, prosecution of its editor, an unsolved explosion at its office, suspension under emergency rule, a court ban arising from a printing debt, and defamation litigation. That the paper survived most of these episodes for years, reappearing even under a substitute title the day after its ban, also illustrates the resilience strategies of the Armenian opposition press, which relied on legal improvisation, collective solidarity among editors and international attention to continue publishing.

For the directory reader, Chorrord Ishkhanutyun should be recorded as a Yerevan, Armenian-language opposition newspaper published by Ogostos and edited by Shogher Matevosyan, active from at least 1996, listed among Armenia's most important opposition titles, and documented in detail through 2013, with its later status unverified in international sources. Its name, Fourth Estate, stated its programme; its history shows what asserting that programme cost in the Armenia of its time.