Armenia chooses new parliament amid opposition worries about
potentially false results
AVET DEMOURIAN, AP Worldstream
Published: May 12, 2007

Armenia voted for a new parliament Saturday in elections dominated by
concerns about economic issues in the poor and landlocked ex-Soviet
republic and by opposition fears that officials will falsify the
results.

All 131 seats in the National Assembly are up for grabs _ 90 to be
chosen according to proportions that parties get nationwide and the
other 41 in single-mandate contests.

The last parliamentary election, in 2003, was assessed by Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe observers as falling short of
international democratic standards. But a preliminary report from the
OSCE’s elections-monitoring office on this year’s campaign did not
point to significant problems.

National media reports on the campaign have been "generally devoid of
negative reporting," the report said. The OSCE frequently criticizes
elections in post-Soviet countries for media reports that either ignore
opposition forces or portray them unfairly.

However, the report did raise concerns about one pre-election report,
when a newspaper obtained a secretly recorded tape of a conversation
between the leader of the Orinats Yerkir opposition party and a British
Embassy official. The party leader, Artur Bagdasarian, reportedly says
he is seeking to have the international community give a poor
assessment of the vote.

President Robert Kocharian subsequently said Bagdasarian’s comments
could be considered as treason.

Bagdasarian on Saturday said, "We already have signals of violations,"
including the disappearance of ballots.

But Prime Minister Serge Sarkisian said, "I hope this election will be
for the people and for the observers the best in Armenia’s history. …
I don’t think there will be falsifications."

Opinion polls indicate the top parties are likely to be Sarkisian’s
Republican Party and the Prosperous Armenia Party, each appearing
positioned to get about 30 percent of the vote.

Prosperous Armenia is a comparatively new player on the political
scene, having been formed in 2004, and its origins are unclear. Some
observers suggest it was formed at Kocharian’s initiative as a way to
have a counterbalance to the Republican Party.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which has been the Republican
Party’s partner in forming a parliamentary majority, is seen as likely
getting third place.

National turnout at noon, four hours after the polls opened, was
reported at 10.5 percent, but lines were seen outside many polling
stations, indicating participation could accelerate.

All the main parties call for addressing economic and social problems,
including ways to increase the population of about 2.9 million. The
country’s population has dropped sharply in the post-Soviet period as
the birthrate declined and an estimated 900,000 people emigrated,
largely due to manifest economic problems.

The tiny South Caucasus nation has few natural resources and its
economic development is further restricted by the closing of its
borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey _ both of which were closed in
protest of ethnic Armenian troops taking control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a
territory in Azerbaijan, during a six-year conflict in the early 1990s.

Armenia refused to grant visas to eight Turkish observers who wanted to
come as part of the OSCE’s election mission.

After police clashed with opposition demonstrators at a gathering in
the capital, Yerevan, this week, opposition concerns that the
authorities will manipulate the election results have risen and
activists have promised to take to the streets if that happens.

"If they once again try to falsify the elections, we will call all our
fellow citizens to come into the center of Yerevan" on Sunday, Aram
Sarkisian, leader of the opposition Republic Party , was quoted by the
newspaper Kommersant as saying this week. Sarkisian is unrelated to the
leader of the Republican Party.