Persons arriving into Armenia for permanent residence may import their personal property without paying customs duties; this is stated in article 105 of Armenia’s customs code.  On the surface this appears like a simple code similar to the ones American and European countries have for those moving to their countries.

However, the details that Armenia’s code leaves out and the process of Armenia’s heavily bureaucratic custom agency, geared for maximum bribe making, creates a nightmare scenario for the repatriate where weeks are lost simply trying to obtain the goods and use them. In this article I will try to detail the disastrous process a repatriate typically goes through based on my experience and that of several other repatriates I’ve spoken to.

In order to bring in your personal goods to Armenia duty free, you must register your Armenia address in your 10-year Armenian passport and only within the first 6 months of your address registration are you allowed to import your personal items duty free. At Armenian embassies abroad, Diaspora Armenians can obtain a 10-year Armenian passport issued by OVIR (Administration Department for Passports and Visas) with one exception, the Diasporan’s Armenian names are butchered and foreign spelled names given in the Armenian passport.

OVIR has a policy to disregard the true and original spelling of Armenian names; instead they transfer the foreign spelled Armenian names directly into an Armenian passport. For example, if you were born in Armenia but moved to the United States and took citizenship there, and your name has Armenian letters which doesn’t exist in the English alphabet, then you would get a different name if you repatriate back to Armenia than the one you were born with in Armenia. In order to get your address registered in the passport, you must go to OVIR’s infamous 5 story Soviet building in Yerevan which has dozens of doors on each floor and not a single door sign to indicate the purpose of each office, nor a single receptionist or a sign in the lobby to guide a person to the right place. You will be lucky if you find one unbitter employee who knows and is willing to show you the right office door and even luckier if that person in the right door explains the registration process to you without yelling at you to go to “a police station to get an address confirmation and then come back”.  

Needless to say you will need at least two weeks and four times of going back and forward to OVIR in order to get your address registered in your passport. Once you have a 10-year passport with your address registered inside, you must wait until your items arrive to Armenia and then apply for your duty free right under article 105.  If you apply before your items arrive so that you can retrieve your items quickly upon arrival, your application will be rejected. When your items do arrive, you must then present a hand-written application (dimum) for Article 105 at the main customs office on Khorenatsi Street.  It takes about one week for the customs agent to call you in for a response. Meanwhile, you will not be able to retrieve your personal goods until a response. And although you can retrieve your car upon arrival, you do not get a license plate number but are allowed   days to drive without plate numbers for ten days. This means you will constantly be pulled over by the police for driving without plate numbers. Upon response from customs regarding your Article 105 application, you will be very fortunate if they approve you right away without any problems.  In my case, after being questioned by the custom agent regarding my background and the validity of my Armenian passport , where I was treated more like a criminal rather than someone repatriating from America to live in his homeland, my application was neither rejected nor accepted.  Instead I was given a “30 day temporary import right” until they conducted “further research with OVIR regarding the passport”. Simply stated, a “30 day temporary import right” means the bureaucratic nightmare work doubles.

Meanwhile you are not allowed to drive the car for 30 days until the customs agent doing his “research” gives a final answer to your Article 105 application. In essence, for one month you will be running around from one custom agency to another custom agency (all about 20-40 minutes apart and 1-6 hours spent at each location), while missing papers or stamps, missing digits or inaccurate wording in handwritten documents will force delays, further going back and forward and the opportunity by custom agents to take bribes in order to gloss over any “errors”.

Moreover, with regards to the personal items sent, you must remember in what country each product was made, how much they weigh, what size they are and what material they’re made of, in order for the broker you hire to fill out the forms correctly and have your items released. If, for example, in your application you incorrectly name the country where your 5 year-old computer or printer was made, that item will not be released to you from Abovian customs storage; unless of course you give a bribe or go back to the Araratyan customs agency to redo your application.

To make a long story short, my car and personal items arrived in Armenia on May 27, 2009 (see Is Armenia’s custom’s agency for real or a comedy show?). It took a total of 20 visits to four different custom agencies, a lot of complaints with customs agents, Armenia’s migration agency and Diaspora Ministry, until I received my personal items on June 6, the article 105 approval on June 22 and the right to drive the car on June 24.  Below are the reasons for each of the 20 visits to the four various custom agencies. 6 visits to Khorenatsi Customs  - 1st time to apply “dimum” for article 105 before items arrived, 2nd time to “dimum” for article 105 when car and items arrived, 3rd time for interview, 4th time to pick up temporary approval document, 5th time to “dimum” for final approval of article 105, 6th time to pick up final approved document 5 visits to Noragavit Cusotms   - 1st time to pickup car upon arrival, 2nd time for temporary import right clearance by hiring a broker, 3rd time for final import clearance (but I was sent back because mailed documents from main custom house on Khorenatsi had not arrived), 4th time for final import clearance by hiring broker again, 5th time to fix error in wording description for type of car and three digits missing in car model number according to Armenia’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or “Guyee”. 5 visits to Abovian Customs - 1st time to pick-up list of personal items to take to Arartatyan agency, 2nd time to submit paperwork from Araratyan agency and pay storage fee,  3rd time to pick up items eight days after arrival and pay for more storage fees, 4th time to pickup missing paper they had forgotten to give but was requested by Araratyan agency, 5th time to deliver final article 105 approval papers. 4 visits to Arartayan Customs  - 1st time to apply “dimum” for personal item storage rights at the Abovian customs storage, 2nd time to hire broker to create paperwork for temporary release of personal items stored at Abovian, 3rd time to hire broker to create paperwork for final release approval, 4th time to bring missing document from Abovian customs and to pickup final approval forms.

Whether the problem is plain stupidity, iron curtain Soviet mentality, or money making opportunity for customs agents/brokers which are causing Armenia’s laws and its implementation to be so backward, the result is that it is preventing this country from moving forward and becoming a stronger/efficient nation.

For a country that has more of its people living outside than inside, Armenia cannot afford to create road blocks for people’s rights to their own names or simple access to their belongings in and out of the country.

The solution to make Armenia a place where more Armenians want to live is simple - get rid of laws and the implementation of laws that torture people, and implement common sense laws that make people’s lives easy and efficient. After all, the job of every government is to make the lives of its citizens better, and not the opposite, as it currently is in Armenia.

Dro Tsarukyan