Translated material
The revolution has no end
The Armenian opposition held its first sanctioned rally
Yesterday in Yerevan, a rally of thousands of people took place, led by the first president of this country, Levon Ter-Petrosyan. The opposition is seeking the resignation of President Serzh Sargsyan, elected on February 19 of this year , who replaced Robert Kocharyan in this post. Both constitutional terms of Mr. Kocharyan's presidency expired this spring.The opposition believes that the elections were held with colossal violations and Levon Ter-Petrosyan should be considered the true winner, whose official result was only 21% of the votes against Serzh Sargsyan’s 52%. The “Armenian National Congress” created by Ter-Petrosyan, which united a whole bunch of opposition parties and movements after the police crushed a permanent mass protest in Yerevan on March 1, is now seeking the resignation of Serzh Sargsyan and the calling of new presidential elections.
If we project the latest Russian history onto Armenia, the arrangement of figures would look something like this: Levon Ter-Petrosyan seems to be playing the role of Boris Yeltsin, who, if he were alive, would suddenly put forward his candidacy against Dmitry Medvedev in March 2008. True, the Armenian Vladimir Putin - Robert Kocharyan, who replaced Ter-Petrosyan, who left early, did not move, unlike his Russian counterpart, to the country's government, although, according to experts, he retains great influence within the ruling elite.
In the first ten days after the February elections, the opposition rallied around the clock on Freedom Square, and, in the end, on the morning of March 1, Saturday, when it became clear that Ter-Petrosyan’s supporters from the provinces could increase the number of participants in the rally to a critical level, the police dispersed the tent city . In response, people gathered several blocks from Freedom Square. During the dispersal, the police began shooting; in response, the protesters used stones, rebar and a Molotov cocktail. Ten people (mostly protesters) were killed and more than 250 were injured. Levon Ter-Petrosyan found himself under virtual house arrest for several weeks, dozens of opposition leaders were imprisoned, and a state of emergency was declared in Yerevan.
Nevertheless, the opposition held the first rally after the defeat on the day of the fortieth commemoration of the victims on March 1, which, by an evil irony of fate, coincided with the day of Serzh Sargsyan’s inauguration. After this, Mr. Ter-Petrosyan, not without pressure from the European Union and the United States, managed to overcome the forced seclusion, and over the summer the opposition held mass rallies three times, organized marches around the city and organized a sit-in on one of the central streets of the capital. None of the actions have so far been sanctioned by the authorities; yesterday's rally is the first since February for which official permission was received from the Yerevan mayor's office.
“We planned to hold a rally on September 5,” Levon Zurabyan, head of the headquarters of the Armenian National Congress, told Vremya Novostey. - But the authorities, in connection with the visit of Turkish President Abdullah Gul on September 6, introduced a special security regime for several days. We postponed the meeting for a week, to the 12th, but it turned out that from the 11th to the 13th on the steps of the Matenadaran (the repository of ancient manuscripts where Mr. Ter-Petrosyan worked after he ceased to be president. -- Ed. ) there is a celebration dedicated to the book. And if we decided to hold an action, it would turn out that we were disturbing people and deliberately disturbing public peace. Therefore, we postponed the rally until September 15 and now enjoy all the benefits of full legality, although the day is not particularly convenient: Monday is All Souls Day in Armenia, it is a day off, but it is usually dedicated to visiting the graves of ancestors.”
According to police estimates, at least 5 thousand people gathered on the steps of the Matenadaran, but there were clearly more people. People occupied the entire Matenadaran staircase and adjacent areas. Mr. Zurabyan told Vremya Novostey that the rally, of course, does not live up to the gigantic meetings in February, but it is at least 20% larger than the previous one - and this inspires optimism in the opposition. A large number of police were concentrated around Matenadaran and water cannons were seen. At the very beginning of the action, high-ranking police officers approached the organizers and warned that only a rally was authorized, and processions and attempts to move the event to Freedom Square would be suppressed. Levon Ter-Petrosyan once again followed his principle of acting strictly within the law: there was no procession, although even unsanctioned rallies in the summer, as a rule, ended with a march through the streets. By 9 pm Moscow time the action was over.
Representatives of the opposition consider yesterday to be decisive: although the permanent rally has not been resumed, a whole campaign of protests has started, according to them, on the steps of the Matenadaran. One of the most prominent leaders of the opposition, Ararat Zurabyan, spoke at the rally, who put forward his candidacy for the elections of the head of the key Yerevan prefecture “Center” (they will be held on September 28). Levon Ter-Petrosyan announced the transition to the side of the movement of the Association of Armenian Volunteers - another association of participants in the Karabakh war, and the Women's Union of Armenia.
According to opposition leaders, branches of the Armenian National Congress are opening throughout the country, and the organization is building its internal structure. The next rally is scheduled to take place in ten days: the pauses between demonstrations are becoming shorter and shorter, the actions are becoming more decisive.
Yerevan considers Levon Ter-Petrosyan to be a good expert in the struggle for rallies and a leader capable of captivating the masses - in the late 1980s, his rallies broke Soviet power in Armenia, and in early 2008 they almost broke the regime of Robert Kocharyan and his successor. Moreover, the politician, who was in a virtual information blockade of the official media, who tirelessly reminded voters that the years of his first presidency, the Armenian “dashing 90s”, were “years of cold and darkness”, managed to reassemble huge areas.
In February of this year, the transfer of power from Robert Kocharyan to Serzh Sargsyan looked almost sanctioned in Moscow: in the simplified schemes of a number of analysts, Mr. Ter-Petrosyan turned out to be something of an “Orange revolutionary”, seeking to replace the established elite and, as a result, her “pro-Russian orientation”. Over time, the inappropriateness of such a simplification became clear: the architect of the principles of Russian-Armenian cooperation back in the Yeltsin era, Ter-Petrosyan supported Russia much more decisively in its actions during the crisis in Georgia than the current president of Armenia himself. Serzh Sargsyan managed to achieve a symbolic breakthrough in relations with Turkey - President Gul's visit to the qualifying match of the football championship between the national teams of Armenia and Turkey became, if not a guarantee of future normalization, then at least a sign of warming relations.
But the Russian vector of Armenian foreign policy still looks problematic. One of these days, Mr. Sargsyan is going to Georgia, which, besides Iran, is Armenia’s only window to the outside world. And the Armenian Foreign Ministry already announced at the end of last week that it would never recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as the independence of Karabakh. This statement will undoubtedly benefit the normalization of relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, which is inevitable for Armenia, no matter who its president is. But it will inevitably cause additional irritation in Armenia itself, which naturally values the de facto independence of Karabakh, and in Moscow. After all, the Russian authorities clearly counted on the support of Armenia as the current chairman of the CSTO on the issue of recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.