Armenian Protests Falter Under Authoritarian Rule
President’s Hold on Power Contrasts Sharply With ‘Rose Revolution’ in
Neighboring Georgia

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 11, 2004

YEREVAN, Armenia — 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.”