Of all the television channels operating in Armenia, Gyumri’s GALA (Gyumri Independent Journalists’ Channel) was the only one to broadcast Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s September 21 speech in its entirety. As a result, the television station is being subjected to all sorts of pressure from state organs to this day, has lost advertisers, and is being inspected closely by the State Tax Department (STD).

In 2000, Gyumri resident Vahan Khachatryan founded the Noyemi television company, which produced reports about the Shirak marz (provincial region), particularly Gyumri. They were broadcast every Sunday by the Armenian Second Channel. In 2005, Chap ltd., the founding company of the channel, won the rights to a frequency through a tender organized by the State Committee for Television and Radio and, starting from July 1 of the same year, GALA began broadcasting its programs in Gyumri. They were broadcast throughout nearly the entire Shirak region.

“Our policy has been the same from the very beginning - to cover all events objectively and from different angles, to provide both the authorities and the opposition with equal air time,” founder Vahan Khachatryan assured us.

Mesrop Harutyunyan of the Yerevan Press Club said the following based on the results of monitoring conducted for a number of television stations in Gyumri in the period before the parliamentary elections: “I can say that even in the most intense period of the election campaign, all visible political powers had the opportunity to express their views through the news and political primetime programming of GALA.”

“We had not had any serious problems until now. There were cases when some of our reports were not liked by mid-level regional officials. But there was no intervention from the highest state agencies on those occasions,” said Khachatryan and recalled that during the last parliamentary elections, a state official had asked him to prepare a report that portrayed Artur Baghdasaryan in a bad light, “Naturally, I refused and asked him not to come to me with such requests again.”

GALA TV presented Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s September 21 speech in great detail during its news programs as well as its analytical program, The Past Week. Later, on October 14, the channel broadcast the speech in its entirety. This was immediately followed by telephone calls from the President’s staff, the State Committee for Television and Radio (SCTR), and the National Security Service (NSS). The callers requested that the channel not cover that wing of the opposition and especially stay away from the upcoming October 26 demonstration organized by Ter-Petrosyan.

“The National Security Service issued direct threats that if this were to go on there would be inspections, then fines, that I would lose all I had and be forced to leave the country,” said the founder of GALA. On October 17, Grigor Amalyan, the President of the SCTR met with Khachatryan and personally relayed the same request. Amalyan later declared that the SCTR had not intervened in the independent work of television stations and had not put any pressure on GALA.

“When the committee intervenes in journalists’ work and tells them to do this or that, not only is that obvious pressure, it is also an abuse of power. It is a criminal offence,” said Ashot Melikyan, President of the Committee for the Protection of Free Speech.

In any case, GALA went on to cover the October 26 opposition demonstration in defiance of all requests and threats from officials. Moreover, the channel hosted Nikol Pashinyan, initiator of the Aylntrank (Alternative) socio-political movement during one of their political analysis programs.

“We have maintained our policy of equality. That same week, we invited representatives from the Republican Party and Prosperous Armenia,” Khachatryan said.

As a result of all this, a few workers from the State Tax Department (STD) arrived in Gyumri from Yerevan, and began an inspection of Khachatryan’s financial activities. But even before the inspections began, the daily Hayots Ashkharh wrote that irregularities had been discovered

“So this was a direct order and those people were obligated to find irregularities of some sort,” Khachatryan noted. In an interview with the very same Hayots Ashkharh, SCTR President Grigor Amalyan touched on the soap business run by the founder of GALA, while STD head Vahram Barseghyan that Chap ltd., the founding company behind GALA, had a number of illegal activities in its past, including the unlicensed production of a type of fireworks called sparklers.

“The business with the fireworks happened so long ago that I had forgotten and only recalled it after reading about it in the paper,” said Khachatryan, “It was around seven years ago; we tried to manufacture those sparklers and worked a month and half on them, but nothing came of it. Everything was legal. There cannot be anything illegal about the soap factory, either. It is not part of the company’s activities and has nothing to do with the TV station. The tax officers came to the factory first. They were doing all they could to keep from mentioning the name of the TV channel. They were more interested in finding something wrong in my personal business. They saw that there was nothing they could do at the factory and that it was not yet operational, so they moved on to GALA,” Khachatryan explained

Khatchatryan said that bought the factory in 2003 through an auction organized by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. “I changed everything and rebuilt it. I was supposed to make a transfer now so that the equipment would be shipped from India and, according to our plans, we would be able to start manufacturing soap in the winter. Because of these inspections, all work has come to a standstill,” he noted.

The founder of GALA assured us that whatever happened, the television company would not change its approach to work. “They are also sure of this. That is why they have issued special orders to other companies not to advertise on our channel. In the first two days alone, thirteen or fourteen companies withdrew. The rest held out for about another week. Today, only three of the original thirty companies who advertised remain with us. I’m going to have to let those people go too, because they are being forced to deal with enormous pressure.”

The television company has started to show clips with passages regarding freedom of speech from the Constitution, instead of having commercials. “We’ll survive without advertising as well, no problem,” said Khachatryan and added, “I don’t think they would be brazen enough to shut the station down. They’ll probably set up a court case against me and use that to get their way.”

According to Khachatryan, the police are involved in this case as well, and everyone who has had any contact with him over the past seven years was being interrogated. “They are trying to find something against me.”

It should also be noted that Chap ltd. had earlier never been inspected by the STD, even though Khachatryan had gone to that state agency on more than one occasion asking them to check their accounts. The head of the Gyumri STD in previous years, Lida Nanyan, is currently the governor of Shirak. She explained the lack of inspections in the past saying that the television company had been “a conscientious taxpayer and had made all payments on time.”

“Who doesn’t know why the inspections began only now? Or why it is that our own tax department isn’t conducting the inspection, but rather the people from Yerevan? It’s just that GALA shows the truth, and some people have a problem with that,” noted Gyumri local Artashes Torosyan.