ARMENIAN PARLIAMENT OPPOSITION UNDER FIRE AFTER KEY VOTE
By Emil Danielyan

Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The two opposition parties represented in the Armenian parliament
are facing embarrassing accusations of secret collaboration with the
government after effectively acquiescing to the reappointment of the
country’s top prosecutor. The National Assembly overwhelmingly voted
on September 13 to endorse President Robert Kocharian’s decision to
extend Prosecutor General Aghvan Hovsepian’s tenure for six more years.

Only three members of the 131-strong legislature voted against his
candidacy, raising fresh questions about the opposition credentials
of the Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) and Heritage parties led by
former parliament speaker Artur Baghdasarian and the U.S.-born former
foreign minister Raffi Hovannisian respectively. Orinats Yerkir
and Heritage were the only opposition parties that cleared the 5%
threshold for winning parliament seats in the last general elections
held in May. The main political allies of Kocharian and Prime Minister
Serge Sarkisian won the polls by a landslide.

Two-day parliamentary debates on Hovsepian’s reappointment were a
mere formality as Sarkisian’s Republican Party of Armenia (HHK),
which controls most parliament seats, made it clear right from the
beginning that he will back Kocharian’s decision. A figure close to the
president, Hovsepian, 54, has been more than a senior law-enforcement
official since being first named prosecutor-general in 1998. He was
forced to step down in the wake of the October 1999 terrorist attack
on the Armenian parliament but was reinstated by Kocharian in the
job five years later.

Kocharian needed a parliamentary approval of Hovsepian’s continued
tenure in accordance with the 2005 reform of the Armenian constitution.

Over the past decade, Hovsepian has developed extensive business
interests, being widely linked with a number of lucrative companies. He
has also displayed growing political ambitions, so much so that at one
point he was viewed as one of Kocharian’s potential successors. He
became even more visible after getting, with strong government
assistance, hundreds of thousands of people to collectively perform
a traditional Armenian circle dance around the country’s highest
mountain in May 2005.

The soft-spoken and bespectacled prosecutor has furthered his political
agenda through an ostensibly apolitical organization uniting prominent
natives of Aparan, a mountainous district in central Armenia where he
was born and grew up. The so-called compatriots’ union transformed
itself into a political party last year and was expected to be a
major contender in the May elections. However, Hovsepian decided not
to enter the fray shortly before the vote as a result of an apparent
behind-the-scenes deal with Sarkisian. The latter was anxious to
make sure that the Aparan clan does not stand in the HHK’s way and to
ensure its support for his presidential bid. Sarkisian has clearly been
willing to give it something in return, as evidenced by Hovsepian’s
reappointment and the earlier appointment one of his deputies, Gevorg
Danielian, as justice minister.

Hovsepian will thus remain one of the leaders of Armenia’s vicious
and corrupt law-enforcement system that continues to operate in
utter disregard of human rights. Mistreatment of criminal suspects
and witnesses remains the norm, despite being illegal and running
counter to Yerevan’s international obligations. The most recent torture
scandal relates to the ongoing criminal investigation into the August
26 murder of the chief prosecutor of Lori region, Albert Ghazarian. The
investigation is being led by the Office of the Prosecutor General.

One of the theories circulating is that the crime was masterminded
by Samvel Darpinian, the mayor of the regional capital Vanadzor,
who was at loggerheads with Ghazarian. Several employees of a local
restaurant owned by an arrested nephew of Darpinian claim that they
were beaten by investigators to extract false testimony implicating
the mayor’s extended family in the shooting. Hovsepian pledged to
investigate the torture claims in the face of a mounting opposition
and media outcry. Few believe that any law-enforcement official will
be punished as a result, though.

Ghazarian’s assassination was the latest high-profile killing, which
occur regularly in Armenia. Most of them have yet to be solved. In
addition, law-enforcement authorities have been under fire this year
over the prosecution and imprisonment of several prominent government
critics on dubious charges.

Opposition lawmakers asked Hovsepian tough questions before the
September 13 parliament vote. But in the end, most of them chose
not to oppose his confirmation, leading more radical opposition
politicians and commentators to wonder whether Orinats Yerkir and
Heritage are really in opposition to the ruling regime. "In essence,
the parliamentary opposition complied with the majority’s decision,"
the Haykakan Zhamanak daily editorialized on September 15.

"This type of opposition is ready to fight as long as it is not up
against a representative of the regime," scoffed another pro-opposition
paper, Chorrord Ishkhanutyun.

Ex-speaker Baghdasarian was already mistrusted by many other opposition
forces and civil society members, despite attracting considerable
interest from the United States and European governments with his
pro-Western statements. Heritage’s Hovannisian risked facing similar
mistrust even before the parliament vote due to his ambiguous and
contradictory actions.

Hovannisian, for example, charged after the May elections that his
party had won three times more votes than were shown by the Central
Election Commission (CEC). However, the party’s representative to the
government-controlled body, Zoya Tadevosian subsequently voted for the
reelection of Garegin Azarian as CEC chairman. Furthermore, Tadevosian,
endorsed the official results of an August 26 repeat parliamentary
election in a central Armenian constituency, which was denounced as
"fundamentally unfree and unfair" by Hovannisian. The latter contested
the vote to try to win Heritage an extra parliament seat. He won less
than 4% of the vote, according to the official results.

A Heritage legislator insisted that the vote was deeply flawed during
the Armenian government’s September 12 question-and-answer session
in parliament. "The CEC received no complaints, your representative
accepted everything, and the chairman of your party filed no appeals
in connection with that," countered Sarkisian. "I can’t understand
what the matter is. Should I once declare that you lost?"

(Haykakan Zhamanak, Chorrord Ishkhanutyun, September 15; Aravot,
September 13)