About Iravunk

Iravunk

Iravunk is an Armenian-language newspaper published in Yerevan, Armenia. Its name means Right or Rights in Armenian, a title that announces its concern with law, the constitution and the rights of citizens. Founded in 1989, on the eve of Armenian independence, Iravunk is among the oldest newspapers of the modern Armenian state and has been described by the speaker of the National Assembly as one of the founders of the modern Armenian press family. For most of its history it served as the party organ of the Constitutional Right Union, a small Armenian party, and for a period it had one of the largest circulations of any newspaper in the country.

Iravunk's history is unusually eventful even by the standards of Armenian journalism. Its editor was beaten in the street in 2006. A split inside its sponsoring party then split the newspaper itself, producing rival titles, litigation, a court-ordered restoration of its dismissed editor and director, and a suspension of publication in 2008 before the original team resumed control. The state later celebrated the newspaper's twenty-fifth anniversary with presidential medals for its leaders. In the 2010s the newspaper also became known internationally for a controversial editorial on gender and homosexuality that scholars have studied as a central text of Armenia's anti-gender mobilisation. This profile records those episodes as they are documented, including where they reflect poorly on the newspaper, because they are the substance of its public record.

Founding in 1989 and the Constitutional Right Union

Iravunk was founded in 1989. The date is fixed by the newspaper's twenty-fifth anniversary, celebrated in October 2014, and by the National Assembly speaker's anniversary message, which described Iravunk as a child of the period when the Armenian people had begun the struggle to live free and independent, calling the newspaper a guide of independence and to some extent one of its symbols. The newspaper became the organ of the Constitutional Right Union, abbreviated CRU, a small party in Armenia's political spectrum. Yerevan Press Club reporting consistently identifies Iravunk as the party organ of the Constitutional Right Union, and its leading figures were party figures: Hayk Babukhanyan, chairman of the newspaper's editorial board, was a leader of the party, and its editor Hovhannes Galajyan and director Gegham Grigoryan were caught up directly in the party's internal conflicts. Some general media guides have attributed other party affiliations to Iravunk, but the detailed Armenian record is unambiguous that its institutional home was the Constitutional Right Union.

Standing in the Armenian Press

In its stronger years Iravunk reached a readership few Armenian newspapers matched. A United States diplomatic cable of September 2006, later published by WikiLeaks, reported that Iravunk had one of the largest circulations of any print media in Armenia, about 9,000 copies, and described it as officially sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Party, which was then among the smaller parties in the opposition Justice Bloc. The Yerevan Press Club's Armenian Press Archive preserved Iravunk's issues from January 1998, recording it as published twice a week in that period. The National Assembly speaker's 2014 anniversary address credited the newspaper with having at one period the maximum circulation in the local press market, called the best expression of its readers' assessment, and described its pages as a chronicle of the establishment of modern Armenian statehood across politics, society, culture and education.

Hovhannes Galajyan and the 2006 Attack

Hovhannes Galajyan, also rendered Hovannes Galajian in English-language reporting, was Iravunk's editor-in-chief in the 2000s and 2010s and the newspaper's best-known figure. On the morning of 6 September 2006 he was attacked and beaten outside his home by two unidentified men. He told RFE/RL that two young men with shaven heads attacked him from behind, knocked him to the ground and kicked him, mainly aiming at his head, fleeing when other people came out of the building, and that the attackers said nothing at all. He reported the attack to the police and underwent forensic medical examination. Galajyan said he believed the attack was retaliation for critical articles published by Iravunk, but would not specify which reports might have angered influential individuals, saying the paper had trodden on many toes and the pool of suspects was large. A diplomatic account of the incident adds that he had received an anonymous threatening telephone call several days earlier and that his previous day's editorial had contained harsh criticism of defence minister Serzh Sargsyan, though Galajyan himself noted the paper had recently taken on a variety of political and social topics, and he said he would not be intimidated and would continue to publish as he saw fit.

The attack was recorded by Freedom House, Amnesty International and United States diplomats as part of a pattern of violence and intimidation against critical journalists in Armenia in 2006, alongside an arson attack on the offices of another opposition weekly. Galajyan had also been among the editors of leading Armenian newspapers who issued a joint statement in July 2006 expressing serious concern about growing harassment of journalists critical of the authorities.

The Party Split and the Battle for the Newspaper

In September 2006 a conflict inside the Constitutional Right Union, between its leaders Hrant Khachatrian and Hayk Babukhanyan, split not only the party but the editorial staff of its newspaper. Khachatrian, having restored his rights as chairman of the party board through the courts, dismissed Galajyan as editor and Gegham Grigoryan as director, and on 23 February 2007 Iravunk appeared with a new chief editor, Piruza Meliksetian. The dismissed team responded on 27 February by launching an alternative publication, Iskakan Iravunk, meaning Real Iravunk, and by suing for restoration. On 20 November 2007 the court of primary jurisdiction of the Center and Nork-Marash communities of Yerevan fully upheld their suit, ordering Galajyan and Grigoryan restored to their positions and compensated for every month of forced idleness at their average monthly salaries. The Civil Court of Appeals left the ruling unchanged in February 2008, but it was not executed.

The standoff then stopped the newspaper altogether. On 4 April 2008 Iravunk did not appear: the publishing house refused to take it for publication in connection with an order of the Service of Compulsory Execution implementing the court ruling. Publication resumed only on 3 June 2008, with Galajyan and Grigoryan again heading the newspaper and Babukhanyan again chairman of its editorial board. On the same day the displaced editor launched a separate private newspaper, Iravunk de Facto, edited by Piruza Meliksetian and published by Tesaket LLC twice a week in eight A3 pages with a print run of 3,500 copies, with no party affiliation. The episode is a compact illustration of how party ownership could destabilise an Armenian newspaper: the title, the staff and the readership all became objects of litigation when the sponsoring party divided.

Anniversary Honours in 2014

On 25 October 2014 President Serzh Sargsyan attended the event dedicated to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Iravunk at the Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall in Yerevan. He awarded Hayk Babukhanyan the Medal of Movses Khorenatsi for his great personal contribution to the success of the newspaper, and awarded editor-in-chief Hovhannes Galajyan and director Gegham Grigoryan the Medal of Gratitude for their contribution, many years of devotion and fruitful work. In his congratulatory remarks the president described Iravunk as one of the witnesses of Armenia's twenty-five years of independent history and predicted that historians would restore the road the country had covered through the materials of Iravunk among other sources. The honours marked how far the newspaper's leadership had travelled from the street attack and court battles of 2006-2008 into official recognition.

The 2014 Editorial Controversy

In the same year Iravunk was at the centre of a controversy of a different kind. On 17 May 2014 Galajyan published an article presenting a so-called black list of public figures he accused of serving an international homosexual lobby, with links to their Facebook pages. The named plaintiffs brought a class action against the newspaper's founder, Iravunk Media LLC, and Galajyan, demanding refutation and five million Armenian drams in compensation for libel and insult. On 30 October 2014 the Court of General Jurisdiction of Kentron and Nork-Marash dismissed the lawsuit and ordered the plaintiffs to reimburse 300,000 drams of the defendants' lawyer fees. Sixteen non-governmental organisations addressed an open letter to the Human Rights Defender expressing concern about the piece and about the court's rejection of the suit, and a subsequent statement by thirty Armenian NGOs found both the hate speech and the judiciary's reaction unacceptable, warning that the decision put citizens' safety and privacy at risk. Academic research at Central European University has analysed Iravunk's coverage of gender as a principal case in the anti-gender mobilisation that followed Armenia's 2013 law on equal rights, describing the newspaper as widely known for anti-gender and anti-feminist positions. Any honest profile of Iravunk must include this record alongside its press-freedom history; the two are both part of what the newspaper has been.

Print, Digital Publishing and Frequency

Iravunk has appeared at varying frequency across its history: the Yerevan Press Club archive described it as a twice-weekly in the late 1990s, United States reporting in 2006 called it a bi-weekly with one of the country's largest circulations, and later listings have described it among Armenia's daily newspapers. Its current digital home is iravunk.com, which carries the newspaper's Armenian-language journalism online. The variation in its frequency over the years reflects the economics of Armenian print, in which titles have repeatedly adjusted their schedules to survive, rather than any change in the newspaper's identity or base in Yerevan.

Place in Armenian Media

Iravunk's significance is threefold. It is a survivor from 1989, part of the founding generation of the modern Armenian press, older than the constitution whose language of rights its name invokes. It is the clearest Armenian example of the strengths and fragilities of the party newspaper model: the party gave it identity, audience and protection, and the party's split nearly destroyed it. And its editors have stood at the centre of Armenian arguments on every side of the question of free expression, as victims of violence, as litigants restored by the courts, as recipients of presidential honours, and as defendants whose own publication many civil-society organisations condemned. Few newspapers anywhere carry all of those roles in one documented history.

Assessment

Iravunk today is a long-established Yerevan newspaper whose historical importance exceeds its current measurable reach, for which verified circulation and financial data are not publicly available. Its name, its 1989 founding, its Constitutional Right Union affiliation, and the documented episodes of 2006, 2008 and 2014 make it an essential entry in any directory of Armenian media. Readers who follow Iravunk encounter a conservative, party-born strand of Armenian journalism that has chronicled the republic since before independence was declared, and whose own turbulent story mirrors the republic's.