Official Documents in Turkish Language Found in Yerevan's Public Transport, Says Hakob Karapetyan

Hakob Karapetyan, a member of the team led by Mayor Hayk Marutyan, made a Facebook post stating, "Did you know that there are official documents in Turkish language on the public transport of Armenia's capital? I want to clarify that this is not a conspiracy, but rather incompetence, mishandling of responsibilities, and disregard for the state and the law.

To give you the information 'first-hand,' let me explain how we ended up in this situation. In 2021, when the city hall ordered 211 Zhongtong buses, Mayor Hayk Marutyan instructed that the purchase tender stipulate that all inscriptions on the new buses be in Armenian, English, and Russian (specifying the order should be with Armenian first and in larger font). The process was coordinated by Deputy Mayor Hrachya Sargsyan. As a result, when the first batch of buses arrived in Yerevan, we discovered that our Chinese partners had slightly mixed up the language inscriptions; instead of the Armenian language being in the first position, Russian was prominently featured. Furthermore, the Armenian inscriptions were poorly translated, and the Latin-script inscriptions turned out to be in an unfamiliar language. Through Google Translate, I found out that it was either Kazakh or Kyrgyz. Since Kazakhstan recently transitioned from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet, we concluded it was likely Kazakh.

Presumably, there was an order from Kazakhstan around that time, and the factory confused the Latin inscriptions. Regardless, these buses could not be put into operation with such inscriptions. Therefore, the responsible parties received comments, and I was assigned to develop appropriate inscriptions and change all bus inscriptions together with the transport administration, which were completed before the buses were put on the line. You can now see appropriate inscriptions in Armenian, English, and Russian on the first batch of buses.

However, as is well known, in December 2021, the ruling party, KPA, removed Mayor Marutyan, and after that, the changes were not made on the buses that followed. Maybe it was because there was no interest, or perhaps the new management did not consider it important, or for some other reason (feel free to suggest alternatives in the comments). By the way, when I first noticed this situation, I immediately informed Deputy Mayor Hrach Sargsyan, who is now serving as Deputy Minister of Defense, via private message. He thanked me for the heads-up, but, as it turns out, neither during his term nor that of his successors were these inscriptions changed. Let me reiterate, I do not see a conspiracy by Turkophiles here, but merely incompetence, poor management, and disregard for the state and laws.

P.S. By the way, these are the same buses that the members of KPA tried to cancel the purchase of, claiming they were of low quality, but after the removal of Marutyan, several hundred more of the same buses were ordered.