Inspired by the peaceful street revolution in next-door Georgia last year
that toppled the country’s longtime president, Armenia’s newly united political
opposition set out to duplicate it here. They took to the streets this spring by
the thousands, denouncing Armenian President Robert Kocharian and vote fraud in
elections last year.
But as spring has given way to the sweltering Yerevan summer, it has become
increasingly apparent that there will be no Armenian revolution — at least not
this time. The opposition in recent weeks has called its forces off the streets
and retreated to closed-door strategy sessions. Kocharian taunted them in a
speech in France for failing to realize that his police, unlike those in
Georgia, were ready and able to "maintain public order."
Instead of creating a peaceful uprising, according to several independent
observers, Western diplomats and Yerevan residents interviewed here last week,
the protest proved to be an object lesson in the powerful inertia of post-Soviet
politics. Georgia, it turns out, was more likely the exception than the model.
In the case of Armenia, Kocharian held onto power despite many signs of
widespread dissatisfaction with the course of this small and struggling mountain
country in the volatile South Caucasus region. And he did so using the
authoritarian tactics increasingly favored across the states of the former
Soviet Union, including willingness to use force against protesters, elimination
of independent television news broadcasts and mass detentions of opposition
activists.
"Of course, they tried to imitate" the Georgian revolution, Kocharian said in
an interview at his presidential palace last week. His rivals failed, he said,
because the Armenian opposition had "nothing in common" with the pro-Western
protesters who triggered the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia
and instead is "trying to sing an aria from one opera in a completely different
one."
Kocharian called his opponents poor losers interested only in competing for
power among themselves and said he had no choice but to use police force to
break up a demonstration they staged on April 12 and 13 because it constituted a
"threat" to the state. "The government has to protect the society from political
extremism," he said.
Kocharian’s crackdown drew immediate condemnation from international
organizations and foreign governments. Human Rights Watch, in a report titled
"Cycle of Repression," found that 300 or more protesters had been temporarily
detained, several journalists attacked, and dozens of protesters injured by
security forces that used "excessive force," including stun grenades and water
cannons, to break up the crowd.
Shortly afterward, authorities ransacked the headquarters of the three
largest opposition parties and several protesters have since received harsh
sentences. Edgar Arakelian, for instance, was given an 18-month jail term for
throwing an empty plastic water bottle at a police officer.
"Kocharian is moving the country toward a police state," said Mikael
Danielyan, a human rights activist who was assaulted March 30 by four men and
hospitalized for days. Danielyan said it was the first such attack on a human
rights activist in Armenia since the Soviet collapse. "When they beat me, the
government tries to show they can do whatever they want; they have all the
power."
In the interview, Kocharian denied any systematic violations of the sort that
international election observers and human rights groups complained about. While
acknowledging that Armenia has "an imperfect election system," he argued that
even if election monitors were correct about violations, there would have been
no change in the outcome of the 2003 race, in which he was reelected in a
second-round runoff with 67 percent of the vote. "You would need a sick
imagination to have doubts about my election," said Kocharian, who was first
elected in 1998.
He also claimed that just 17 opposition protesters were arrested, not
hundreds, and that of those, only a few appealed their convictions. "If they
treated them unfairly, hundreds could have appealed," he said.
The effort to duplicate what Georgians call the "rose revolution" began in
earnest in February, when two leading opposition factions — the Justice
alliance of nine smaller parties and the National Unity Party — teamed up and
walked out of the Armenian parliament.
Armenia’s Constitutional Court in a ruling last year had appeared to sanction
concerns about violations in the presidential race. In a passage whose meaning
is still hotly disputed by Armenia’s political factions, the court either
ordered or recommended a national referendum of confidence in Kocharian by this
April to assuage those concerns. When Kocharian’s allies refused to act on a
referendum, the opposition opted for the parliamentary boycott and a campaign of
street rallies.
Almost from the start, opposition leaders said they believed that the
Georgian revolution had convinced Kocharian that it was necessary to take tough
steps against them — unlike Shevardnadze, who wavered on ordering troops to
break up the protests that triggered his resignation last November.
"They were really terrorizing people here — they didn’t have this in
Georgia," said Stepan Demirchian, a leader of the Justice coalition and son of a
Kocharian rival killed in 1999 when gunmen invaded parliament and shot several
prominent politicians. "Here, the authorities are prepared to do everything to
keep their power."
But their critics said the opposition had just as much to do with why their
revolution failed as did Kocharian. Several analysts said opposition leaders are
skilled at using the language of Western-oriented democracy but are in fact
better characterized as Russian-leaning professional politicians interested in
seizing power themselves. Ordinary Armenians, these critics added, simply never
believed that the opposition could topple Kocharian and improve the situation.
"It’s a very weak opposition unable to come up with any sort of vision or
positive program and unable to unite about anything other than opposition to
Kocharian," said a senior foreign diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity
in keeping with diplomatic practice.
"They are not really opposition — they are people who didn’t get power,"
said Danielyan.
Another key difference between Armenia and Georgia has been the lesser role
played here by foreign-funded nongovernmental groups, such as investor George
Soros’s Open Society Institute. Independent television — which helped draw
thousands into the streets supporting Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili —
hasn’t existed in Armenia since the government yanked the broadcast license of
the network called A1+ two years ago.
In Georgia, "civil society is very strong, grass-roots groups are very strong
there, the media are quite strong there," and they participated in mobilizing
activists who helped move along events during the revolution, said Larisa
Minasyan, executive director of the Open Society Institute here. "In Armenia,
genuine civil society has quite distanced itself from the two political forces
in this standoff."
For now, the anti-presidential forces are on a break, unsure of how to
proceed besides promising "new elements," as Demirchian put it, in their
campaign against Kocharian. "The only place we have left is the street," said
Aram Sarkisian, another Justice leader. "There’s no other way to continue our
struggle, but they don’t like to let us out on the streets, either."
Hrayr Tovmasyan, an independent political analyst, said that "the two sides
are deadlocked and now the government and the opposition are repeating the same
moves over and over, like a long-running soap opera. The opposition has no new
moves left; they can’t arrange protests anymore. This could be their death.
"The authorities don’t have any new moves, either, and won’t even think about
compromise, which could lead to their death," he said. "It’s just a dead end."
He and other experts here say they worry that the Armenian political unrest
might turn into not only a case study in the difficulty of challenging power in
the former Soviet Union but a longer-term threat to the country’s development.
Closed borders have cut off Armenia economically from its neighbors Turkey
and Azerbaijan; Armenia fought a war in the 1990s with Azerbaijan over the
disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. It does not have a wealth of natural
resources available. And now, Georgia has seized what international attention
there was on the South Caucasus region with its experiment in democracy.
"This standoff could last for years," Tovmasyan said. "At the same time,
Georgia has grabbed the flag of democracy in the region and will get investments
there as a result, and Azerbaijan can count on billions of dollars for its
budget from oil. What future is there for Armenia? It’s hard to say."
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