Gina out of Armenia, as questions loom

16 April 2007
Malta Star
By David Vella

Gina Khachatryan, the asylum seeker who was deported from England to Armenia via Malta last week, has managed to once again leave her homeland and is now “in a place of safety”, according to her friends in the UK.

But while human rights groups are relieved that she is not in danger of persecution, journalists in Armenia are casting doubts on whether or not Gina’s story of her hardships before leaving the country are actually true.

Khachatryan made headlines in numerous British and Maltese newspapers, including this e-newspaper, when she appealed for help to prevent her deportation, since this would have put her, her husband, and their five year old daughter at risk of political persecution. The family had been living in the UK as asylum seekers since 2003. But the British Home Office never granted them refugee status, and last week the family was taken to a detention centre to be deported.

But human rights groups in the UK, along with a number of journalists and journalist associations, started rallying against the deportation. Gina had fled her country after exposing a case of electoral fraud in 2003. She even spent 40 days in prison before managing to escape Armenia, or so she claimed.

maltastar.com had talked to Gina herself, hours before she boarded an Air Malta plane from London to Malta last Friday. She had explained that she is afraid of going back to her country “because they will arrest us immediately”.

Unable to track down Gina’s story

But during the weekend, at least two journalists working in Armenia, confirmed that they did not manage to find any details on Gina’s experience back in 2003. On a blog hosted on the website of ‘The Guardian’ newspaper, where Gina’s case was first mentioned, Roy Greenslade wrote that a friend of his in Armenia “was unable to find anyone at the Yerevan press club or the Investigative Journalists of Armenia who knew of her or the incident she described. Furthermore, [he] asked people in the newsroom of Armenia's public TV company, where Gina claims to have worked, and no-one there remembered her”.

At the same time, in response to these doubts, the editor of an Armenian newspaper wrote “we, too, have tried to validate Ms Khachatryan's claims, but so far found them unsubstantiated”.

But, as Greenslade wrote in his blog, this does not necessarily mean that her story was not true. “None of this is, of course, conclusive proof that Gina has lied, but Armenian journalists - and journalists everywhere - will be unhappy if she has pretended to be a journalist in order to stay illegally in Britain... The truth is that there was so little time to act after hearing about Gina's detention that none of us had time to check her story. On the other hand, we still don't know the truth. The whole thing remains a mystery”.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.