Armenia mulls its options

Published: Saturday November 10, 2007

Armenia is expected to hold presidential elections in February 2008. Armenians and the international community will be looking carefully at the field of candidates as well as the conduct of the elections - and that encompasses not just Election Day, but also the months leading to it.

The candidate of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia is Prime Minister Serge ­Sargsian. He is President Robert Kocharian's endorsed successor, but his victory at the polls is by no means a foregone conclusion. Unlike some former Soviet republics, Armenia holds elections, not coronations.

The opposition in Armenia faces a tough challenge. Two parties supporting Mr. Sargsian's candidacy, the Republican Party of Armenia and the Prosperous Armenia Party, together won 47.5 percent of the party vote in the parliamentary elections in May. The prime minister thus enters the race with strong support. This is confirmed by a recent poll.

If no candidate wins over 50 percent of the vote in February, there will be a runoff election among the top two vote getters.

Of the parties not supporting Mr. Sargsian's candidacy, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutiun) won the largest portion of the May vote, 12.7 percent. It will be running a presidential candidate, either Vahan Hovannessian or Armen Rustamian.

Next came the Country of Laws Party, at 6.8 percent. Its leader, Artur Baghdasarian has declared his candidacy. The Heritage Party, which won 5.8 percent of the May vote, has not yet declared its presidential intentions.

The smaller opposition parties have generally acknowledged that they have no chance of prevailing in first- or second-round balloting unless they coalesce around a single, joint candidate.

Enter Levon Ter-Petrossian, the former president, who recently broke 10 years of public silence. Respected as an effective orator and debater, and a learned and intelligent man, he is also blamed for the collapse of Armenia's economy and the energy crisis in the early 1990s and the attendant misery, and for allowing the political cronyism and corruption he now criticizes.

Speaking in Freedom Square - the very venue in which he won the trust of the Armenian people in mass rallies in 1988 and 1989 and emerged as a leader of the Armenian democracy movement - Mr. Ter-Petrossian launched a sharp attack on Mr. Kocharian and Mr. Sargsian.

Some of the criticism offered by Mr. Ter-Petrossian (reported in last week's edition of this newspaper) rang true: official corruption is indeed widespread; some people do live in opulence, and while a growing segment of the population enjoy the benefits of Armenia's extended economic boom, a majority do still live in or near poverty.

In his denunciation of Mr. Kocharian and the Kocharian administration, he makes the same arguments and allegations as those made by the various radical opposition parties over recent years. What Mr. Ter-Petrossian offers that has been absent from recent political discourse is his perspective on the Karabakh conflict. And this perspective appears to encompass his vision for the future.

Mr. Ter-Petrossian insists today, as he did 10 years ago as president, that Armenia cannot prosper without the formal resolution of the Karabakh conflict. Asserting that an increasingly wealthy Azerbaijan will be progressively more unwilling to compromise, Mr. Ter-Petrossian advocates making concessions resisted by Mr. Kocharian and his administration.

The argument that Armenia cannot prosper has become harder to make in the light of over six years of very rapid growth. The former president claims the growth is not real, making the surprising claim that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund treat the "real" state of affairs as a closely guarded secret.

Like almost everyone else, Mr. Ter-Petrossian argues that Armenia's exclusion from several regional transportation and energy projects is bad for Armenia. But, unlike most others, he surmises that with the formal resolution of the Karabakh conflict, surely Armenia will no longer be excluded from such programs.

It's an old story. Gerard Libaridian, one of Mr. Ter-Petrossian's top advisors as president, argued back in 1998 that Mr. Ter-Petrossian had introduced a "revolution in Armenian political thought." The crux of this revolution was an effort to establish "normal relations with Turkey without preconditions" and a willingness to settle for the people of Karabakh having "their individual, collective, and territorial rights respected," without necessarily having independence.

However, the absence of malice on Armenia's part does not automatically engender an absence of malice on the part of Turkey and Azerbaijan.

During Mr. Ter-Petrossian's presidency, as today, Turkey refused to establish diplomatic relations with Armenia, and Azerbaijan refused to compromise in Karabakh. "Ter-Petrossian had nothing to show for the revolutionary thinking he had displayed," Mr. Libaridian acknowledged. (See http://www.gomidas.org/forum/af2c.htm)

This thinking is now back on Armenia's political stage. It remains to be seen whether the various political groups that share Mr. Ter-Petrossian's antipathy for the current governing circle will embrace his vision for Karabakh and foreign relations.

The return of the first president of Armenia to active politics and his reemergence as a presidential candidate has naturally generated a great deal of attention. He is certainly not the only significant opposition candidate, and currently not the most popular one.

As the various candidates' campaigns continue, there will be rallies, speeches, pamphlets, and more. This is a healthy and important part of the democratic process and must be embraced.

Some recent phenomena around this campaign are cause for concern. Publicly funded tele­vision has been blatantly campaigning against Mr. Ter-Petrossian, with constant reminders of cruel living conditions during his presidency. Police have clashed with a group of opposition campaigners, and there are credible allegations of police brutality. Tax inspectors have appeared suddenly at the businesses of the most prominent entrepreneur among Mr. Ter-Petrossian's supporters, and there's no indication that this is part of a broader crackdown on tax fraud.