Eurasia Daily Monitor

January 9, 2007 — Volume 4, Issue 6

IN THIS ISSUE:
*Moscow will negotiate only after Belarus cancels its transit tax
*Armenian authorities claim to thwart coup
*Nazarbayev outlines issues blocking warmer ties with China

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ARREST OF ARMENIAN "COUP PLOTTERS" RAISES QUESTIONS

Armenian authorities claim to have thwarted a coup d’etat that was
allegedly planned by hard-line nationalists opposed to major concessions
to Azerbaijan in the conflict over Karabakh. Two prominent veterans of
the Armenian-Azerbaijani war were controversially arrested last month
and now look set to stand trial for calling for a violent overthrow of
Armenia’s leadership. This development was followed by the discovery of
what law-enforcement authorities say was an arms cache in the home of
one of their associates.

The case, condemned as politically motivated by the Armenian
opposition, appears to have exposed a sense of insecurity within the
administration of President Robert Kocharian. Analysts believe that it
stems, in large measure, from the prospect a long-awaited peace deal
with Azerbaijan that would inevitably require painful concessions from
both parties to the Karabakh conflict.

One of the arrested men, Zhirayr Sefilian, is known as a staunch
opponent of the liberation of any of the seven Azerbaijani districts
surrounding Karabakh that were fully or partly occupied by Armenian
forces during the 1991-94 war. A Lebanese citizen of Armenian descent,
Sefilian commanded a battalion during the war and held the rank of
lieutenant-colonel when he retired from the military in the late 1990s
to set up a pressure group campaigning for continued Armenian control of
the occupied lands. The group, called Defense of the Liberated
Territories, has regularly lambasted the Yerevan government for its
readiness to trade the bulk of those lands for international recognition
of Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan.

The other, less prominent detainee, Vartan Malkhasian, is a senior
member of Fatherland and Honor, a small opposition party led by retired
police officers. Malkhasian and Sefilian were arrested on December 10
shortly after jointly forming the Alliance of Armenian Volunteers (HKH),
a new organization of war veterans hostile to Kocharian and sympathetic
to his rivals. According to the National Security Service (NSS), they
hatched a conspiracy to mount an armed rebellion against the government
during next spring’s parliamentary elections. The Armenian successor to
the KGB also rounded up and briefly detained some 30 rank-and-file
members of the group.

Both suspects as well as their loyalists reject the accusations,
which carry lengthy prison sentences. They have secured the backing of
virtually all major Armenian opposition forces. In a joint December 19
statement, about two dozen opposition parties accused the authorities of
launching a new round of "repressions" against their political opponents
ahead of the forthcoming elections. The Fatherland and Honor leader,
Garnik Markarian, went as far as to warn of armed resistance to possible
further arrests of nationalist activists.

The authorities and the NSS deny any political motives behind the
arrests, pointing to Sefilian’s and Malkhasian’s fiery speeches at a
December 2 meeting in Yerevan of over a hundred HKH activists, which was
apparently held behind the closed doors. The transcripts of the
speeches, subsequently made public by the HKH, show that the two leaders
implicitly accepted violence as a legitimate mode of struggle against
the ruling regime. Sefilian in particular vowed to "crack the head of
anyone who would dare to cede land" to Azerbaijan and scoffed at
opposition attempts to force regime change with a campaign of peaceful
demonstrations.

The NSS also announced on December 29 that it has found
"unprecedented quantities" of assault rifles, machine guns, grenade
launchers, and even shoulder-fired rockets in the village house of a
close Sefilian associate. The security agency said the man, identified
as Vahan Aroyan, was arrested "within the framework" of its ongoing
inquiry into the alleged coup attempt.

Sefilian supporters dismissed the claims as a fraud, and some of
them staged a demonstration outside the former KGB building in Yerevan
on January 1. They insist that the arrested men never explicitly called
for — let alone plotted — a violent regime change, an argument echoed
by mainstream opposition politicians and some media commentators. "The
way the arrests were made and the ensuing official statements and
‘explanations’ suggest that the authorities are alarmed," the Yerevan
daily Azg editorialized on December 13. "It is difficult to diagnose the
reasons for this jittery state of mind for the moment."

The most common explanation for this theory is that the Armenian
leadership wants to further weaken the opposition ahead of the
parliamentary elections and/or fend off possible protests against land
concessions to Azerbaijan. Deputy Defense Minister Manvel Grigorian, the
influential leader of the biggest organization of Armenian war veterans,
sounded less than enthusiastic about such concessions as he wrapped up
an annual conference of the Yerkrapah Union on December 9.

Under the peace deal proposed by international mediators and
discussed by the parties over the past few years, Karabakh’s
predominantly Armenian population would determine the disputed
territory’s status in a referendum to be held after the liberation of at
least five of the seven occupied Azerbaijani districts. Kocharian and
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev reported further progress towards the
signing of a framework peace accord along these lines during their early
December meeting in Minsk.

Highlighting his fears of a nationalist backlash, Kocharian
indicated on December 15 that Yerevan will not sign or unveil any
agreements with Baku before the Armenian elections expected next May.
The Armenian opposition, he claimed, would exploit even the most
pro-Armenian solution to the Karabakh solution in order to come to
power. Government sources in Yerevan say the parties will make a fresh
(and potentially decisive) push for peace in the second half of this
year, before presidential elections due in both Armenia and Azerbaijan
in 2008.

(Statements by the National Security Service, December 29,
December 12, 2006; Aravot, December 20; RFE/RL Armenia Report, December
15; Azg, December 13)

–Emil Danielyan

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