U.S. RELUCTANT TO PRESS YEREVAN DESPITE FREEDOM PLEDGE

By Emil Danielyan

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

U.S. President George W. Bush’s emphatic endorsement of Georgia’s
2003 “Rose Revolution” and its consequences was meant to demonstrate
U.S. support for similar change elsewhere in the world. But it exposed
a fundamental contradiction in his administration’s stated pursuit
of democratization across the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

While holding up Georgia as a role model for other, less democratic
ex-Soviet countries, the United States appears reluctant to go to
great lengths in forcing their rulers to stop rigging elections and
abusing human rights.

Authorities in at least one of them, Armenia, have surely taken
notice. Washington did not condemn them for unleashing unprecedented
repression against their political opponents last year and are hardly
facing U.S. pressure at the moment.

John Hughes, editor of Armenianow.com, a Yerevan-based online
publication, had reason to wonder: “In the U.S. President’s roll call
of heroes â… was there any thought that as near to Tbilisi as DC is
to Delaware Armenian citizens were still recovering from senseless
bludgeoning, when last year they tried to hop the democracy train
encouraged by the smell of Georgia’s roses but crushed by Armenia’s
smelly reality?”

Bush’s pronouncements during his visit to Georgia were rather ambiguous
in that regard. “As you watch free people gathering in squares like
this across the world, waving their nations’ flags and demanding
their God-given rights, you can take pride in this fact: They have
been inspired by your example and they take hope in your success,” he
told tens of thousands of people in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square on May 10.

Indeed, thousands of disgruntled Armenians were inspired by the
Georgian revolt when they took to the streets of Yerevan in April
2004 to demand President Robert Kocharian’s resignation. The most
important of the opposition demonstrations at the time took place
just meters away from the U.S. embassy in the Armenian capital and
was brutally broken up by security forces on the night of April 12-13.

The wholesale beatings and arrests of peaceful demonstrators were
followed by the ransacking of the offices of Armenia’s main opposition
parties. They were part of the regime’s broader crackdown on dissent
that involved mass imprisonments of opposition activists across the
country, a transport blockade of Yerevan and worst ever violence
against journalists. Human Rights Watch condemned and provided a
detailed account of the “cycle of repression.”

The U.S. State Department, however, stopped short of explicitly
criticizing Kocharian’s handling of the protests, calling instead for
a “dialogue” between the two sides. As if to drive home Washington’s
point, the then-U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John Ordway, dined with
Kocharian at a jazz club in Yerevan a few days later. It was the very
nightspot where Kocharian’s bodyguards beat to death in September 2001
a man who greeted the Armenian leader in a way they found too familiar.

Despite the glaring lack of U.S. support for their efforts to replicate
the Rose Revolution, leaders of Armenia’s increasingly pro-Western
opposition have continued to pin their hopes on Washington. Especially
after the Bush administration threw its weight behind last November’s
“Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.

But as a senior U.S. administration official indicated in a conference
call with Armenian and Azerbaijani journalists ahead of Bush’s trip
to Tbilisi, Washington does not consider regime change imperative for
Armenia’s or Azerbaijan’s democratization. The United States will
instead work with “reformers in and outside the two governments,”
the official said.

Observers were quick to note that virtually no Armenian oppositionist
was invited to the official opening on May 6 of a new U.S. embassy
building in Yerevan. Kocharian and most members of his government
attended the ceremony. The current U.S. ambassador to Armenia, John
Evans, subsequently denied snubbing the opposition, citing a lack of
space for guests in the vast embassy compound.

Evans has repeatedly said in recent months that Armenia is “headed in
the right direction” both politically and economically. “Sometimes
progress is not as swift as we’d like, but the basic direction is
right,” he told a group of Armenian-Americans last February.

Evans did not specify what he means by “progress.” The two disputed
presidential elections held by Kocharian in 1998 and 2003 were
criticized by the U.S in equally strong terms. The 2003 vote was the
most violent in Armenia’s post-Soviet history. Yerevan’s human rights
record, regularly slammed by the State Department, has also hardly
improved under Kocharian.

On the contrary, last year’s crackdown on the Armenian opposition was
the worst since the Soviet collapse. The Armenian law-enforcement
agencies have since been exercising KGB-style functions of secret
police monitoring and suppressing opposition activity. The situation
with freedom of speech has likewise deteriorated since the scandalous
closure three years ago of Armenia’s sole television station critical
of Kocharian.

The ruling regime is thus inherently disinterested in genuine political
reform as it would mean an almost certain loss of power and enormous
wealth accumulated by its members. Whether the Americans fail to
realize this, distrust Kocharian’s foes, or have more overriding
regional priorities such as a resolution of the long-running Karabakh
conflict is not clear.

Armenianow’s Hughes suggested that the U.S. motives are not
necessarily rational. “America loves a winner, especially if he
speaks Ivy-League English,”the American editor explained, referring
to Georgia’s U.S.-educated President Mikheil Saakashvili. “Coming
close (as in Armenia’s failed opposition) doesn’t count in war and
democracy pimping.”

–Boundary_(ID_HjVt7jfI5Bqb+LepNGouSQ)–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress