"Keep Us in the News"   

Journalist Vagram Agadzhanyan went into self-imposed exile in Armenia after being freed from jail in Nagorno-Karabakh. He was photographed at the Hotel Armenia overlooking the main square of the capital, Yerevan.

In this backward corner of the globe, journalists are making a stubborn stand for press freedom against ruthless state officials hell-bent on keeping control. Vagram Agadzhanyan and his colleagues were the magnetic lure for taking a grueling seven-hour journey to an obscure province deep inside the former Soviet Union.

"Mountainous Karabakh," as the locals call it, is a region plagued by years of brutal warfare, abject poverty and bitter ethnic divide.

There was another draw to the story: the poignant image of a grief-stricken mother making a deathbed plea to her son's tormentors. "Stop persecuting my family," Agadzhanyan's 70-year-old mother, Roza, begged in a letter to Nagorno-Karabakh officials during the spring of 2000. She begged them to set Vagram free.

He was, after all, a journalist, not a murderer or a thief or a traitor to the struggle for independence in this disputed enclave fought over by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

During this time, Agadzhanyan, now 37, languished in a dank prison cell, shivering with dread as screams of torture victims filled the night. Through a peephole in the door, he watched as his captors dragged swollen and bloodied prisoners back and forth. "I was waiting for my turn," he recalled during an interview in June.

Charged with libel and branded a criminal by prosecutors, the reporter was bound in chains during court appearances, his head shaven as a sign of humiliation. For 20 days he was held in solitary confinement. Eventually, he was moved in with a convicted murderer and thieves.

On one occasion, men in masks, carrying assault rifles, burst into the cell, handcuffed him, pulled a hood over his head and dragged him away. When interrogators demanded to know if Agadzhanyan owned any weapons, he defiantly pulled a pen out of his pocket and displayed it to them.

A funny thing happened on the way to bludgeoning the Fourth Estate in this desolate Caucasus region, where communists and despots long have ruled. The government's effort to silence Agadzhanyan and paralyze local journalists backfired.

His imprisonment unleashed a torrent of protest among the media in nearby Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Word quickly spread to international watchdogs like the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, which weighed in with condemnation. Amnesty International labeled Agadzhanyan "a prisoner of conscience." Moscow's Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and Radio Free Europe were among those that spread the word of his plight.

Overnight, an obscure reporter was thrust into the global limelight, creating a powerful symbol for press freedom in a region where democratic reforms hung by the slenderest of threads. In a show of solidarity, newspaper editors in nearby Armenia reprinted the stories that got Agadzhanyan in trouble, taunting government censors to arrest them, too. It was a bold act since officials in Armenia and Karabakh maintain close ties.

The journalist's crime was writing articles critical of Karabakh authorities, including the prime minister, who failed to keep promises of financial assistance to villagers who settled in the battle-scarred region. The arrest in March 2000 was his fourth in seven years.

"The last time was the high point. They were trying to break me," says Agadzhanyan, who lives in self-imposed exile in Armenia. "Instead, it was the authorities in Karabakh who were broken."

Under pressure, the Karabakh Supreme Court changed his one-year prison sentence to three years' probation. The reporter was freed the day the decision was handed down. He credits the global spotlight and vociferous protests by local journalists for keeping thuggish guards from bloodying him as they did other prisoners.

Today, typing his name into Google on the Internet or an electronic library like Lexis-Nexis brings up dozens of hits, including excerpts of his stories about drug deals and official corruption, run by BBC Worldwide Monitoring among others. Accounts of his mother's unwavering support and her death shortly after his release have become part of media folklore in a region where journalists have had little positive to commemorate.

Since the split from Russia in 1991, the development of the independent press has progressed microscopically in countries that, for the most part, are not household names in the West. Today, instead of being arrested, journalists say that they are more likely to be "inconvenienced" for offending state officials. The police might pull them over more often for bogus traffic violations. Or the journalists might return to their cars to find the tires slashed. Tax authorities are used to intimidate; electrical power to newsrooms sometimes mysteriously disappears; sometimes men in dark suits show up to interrogate relatives and neighbors.

The average salary for reporters in Armenia is about $100 to $150 a month. It is far less in Karabakh, where privately owned publications face extinction. Some reporters sheepishly admit they take money from sources in exchange for covering certain stories or ignoring damaging information. Advertising revenue is slim, and most publications rarely distribute more than a few thousand copies.

Most media outlets depend on "sponsors" for survival--political parties or businessmen with their own agendas. Those who push to make it on their own are likely to face government interference. In April, when a regulatory commission refused to renew the license for a popular independent TV station called A1+ in Armenia, about 5,000 protesters took to the streets of Yerevan, the capital.

American Ambassador John Ordway publicly condemned the move, characterizing the closure as a setback for democracy in the country. A story on Radio Free Europe called the closing "a severe blow to media freedom" and a wake-up call to those who hoped the country was making progress.

In Yerevan, foreign correspondents must obtain special government permission for a visa to cross the border into Karabakh. That means more documentation, including a letter from an editor back home, more time spent waiting outside gloomy offices and a greater vulnerability to the whim of somber-faced officials. The only other choice is to slip in under the guise of "tourist," which seemed a better alternative than dealing with the bureaucracy.

"It is risky. If you are discovered, you could be arrested," I was warned before embarking on a dizzying drive along steep, narrow roads with hairpin curves, past dusty villages that provide snapshots of life in these remote mountains as it must have been a century ago.

The greatest violence ignited when Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnic Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, voted for independence in 1991. A full-scale armed conflict raged until a shaky 1994 cease-fire, which left Karabakh's fate unresolved. The provincial government has declared its independence but remains unrecognized by any country.

Today, the first stark signs of warfare appear near the Karabakh border: farmhouses gutted by shellfire; twisted piles of rusty steel and tank traps; pitiful makeshift shelters for those left homeless by the violence. Entire blocks of the capital of Stepanakert remain destroyed by heavy shelling.

Eight years ago, when the fighting paused, a dictatorship, described by critics as a "clear-cut authoritarian regime," fell into place.

It was in this chilling environment that Agadzhanyan made his stand. The soft-spoken reporter, whose work now appears in the Armenian newspaper Iravunk, shakes off any notion of hero status. "I had a lot of friends who raised a lot of noise. Once the protests started, the authorities backed off," he says. The rallying of journalists at home and abroad "might have saved my life."

Chief among those he counts as staunch supporters is Gegham Baghdassarian, chairman of the Stepanakert Press Club, founded in 1998. On a rainy June morning, the former editor led visitors into a crumbling building, up dingy stairwells into a dark hallway. He turned a key in a steel grated door and suddenly there appeared a tiny ray of hope in the downtrodden Karabakh capital.

A small cluttered room with computers, a fax machine, a printer and an antiquated telephone, all supplied by private donors, has become a haven for local journalists. They wander in and out all day, checking e-mail or searching the Internet. Sometimes there are impromptu strategy sessions.

"Under our present conditions of poverty, minimal circulation and no advertising market, we cannot maintain a newspaper without help from the outside," Baghdassarian explained. He displayed a proposal requesting aid from a foreign donor in Germany.

There are other hurdles. "The people inside Karabakh cannot support an opposition newspaper without taking personal risk," says the journalist, who once edited an upstart newspaper that was forced to close. He has weathered arrests for publishing "subversive" articles and survived conscription into the military during wartime in Karabakh.

Authorities "hoped I would be killed," Baghdassarian adds with a shrug. No surprise: Most of his colleagues have been targets of intimidation, fines and bogus prosecutions.

There are glimmers of progress not far away in Yerevan.

In a dimly lit back-alley office, Edik Baghdasaryan and Shushan Doydoyan run the Association of Investigative Journalists of Armenia, with 31 members countrywide. Last year, they organized a Freedom of Information Center. The goal, says Baghdasaryan, is to "establish real journalism that operates according to professional standards." This summer, in an effort to further that cause, they joined Investigative Reporters and Editors in the United States.

Among their first local projects were probing alleged violations during the privatization of ArmenTel, a powerful telecommunications monopoly in Armenia, and investigating instances of HIV infection at the National Blood Center.

Across town, the Caucasus Media Institute, funded by Swiss money, is developing skills-oriented courses for midcareer media professionals and offering mentors to neophytes. It is another sign of progress, says Doydoyan, who views Vagram Agadzhanyan's stand against oppression as a pivotal point for press freedom in the region. "He was a journalist, but they shaved his head and put him in chains like a common criminal. We had to protest," she says. "Now there is a solidarity among us that we didn't have before."

On a warm June evening, Agadzhanyan arrives at a suite in the Armenia Hotel on Yerevan's stately main square. The reporter wears a stylish black suit, sunglasses and a designer tie splashed with red. He settles onto a couch and, in grand European style, pulls a silver-and-white cigarette holder from his pocket and lights up.

He ceremoniously unfolds a faded newspaper clipping and points to a photo of his mother, accompanied by the letter she wrote on his behalf shortly before her heart gave out. Years before, "Our apartment [in Stepanakert] was like a hotel for journalists.... She encouraged me to keep reporting on the government despite the hardships it brought on our family," he says, staring at her photo.

How safe are journalists now? Some, like Agadzhanyan, speculate that Armenia and Karabakh suffer from what they call "small country syndrome," a phenomenon that might offer protection to those who challenge authoritarian regimes.

"Any mention of these governments in any prestigious publication in the U.S. or Europe is an event here. Officials pay attention because they don't want to look bad," Agadzhanyan says as he folds the clipping and carefully tucks it into a briefcase.

"What can outsiders do to help? Keep us in the news."