Parliamentary elections are scheduled in Georgia for October 26, the results of which will be important not only for the country itself but also for the entire region. In light of this, I decided to share a story that happened 20 years ago.

From October 22 to 23, 2004, the President of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan, was on an official visit to Georgia, and I was in the press pool.

On the first day of the visit Robert Kocharyan and Mikheil Saakashvili discussed the coordination of efforts of the two countries within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy.



On the following day, at a meeting with Georgian Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze, Kocharyan noted that Armenia and Georgia could set up a joint task force to work out a document on the two countries’ priorities under the European Union’s European Neighbourhood Policy. The Armenian president remarked that the EU was not ready to formulate proposals and “we can use this moment to express our expectations more actively.”

However, at the Kocharyan-Burjanadze meeting a much more interesting dialogue unfolded. How do I know this, you may ask?

Usually, during visits, journalists are present at the beginning of official meetings and after the protocol photos they are invited out. That time it was the same, but when we left the meeting room, we were asked to wait in the reception area instead of the hallway. This, though, was not the only unusual aspect. A loudspeaker had been installed in the reception area, broadcasting the conversation between Kocharyan and Burjanadze (they spoke in Russian). We asked the staff several times if that was normal. They gave a positive answer with rather indifferent faces, and we started eagerly writing and recording. Although I can’t say that they spoke very sensational things, but, for example, Nino Burjanadze was openly complaining about the Russians, and Robert Kocharyan about the bias of the OSCE observers.

The meeting ended, we enthusiastically returned to the hotel to write the materials and send them to Yerevan. Everything was nearly ready when Hasmik Petrosyan, the head of the press service of the president’s office, reached out to all the journalists in our group and said that, in fact, the broadcast had been the result of a technical error, therefore, we could not make the content of the closed meeting public. So, we were left “empty-handed.”

Ara Tadevosyan is the Director of Mediamax.