OSKANIAN WARNS OF ELECTION UNREST
By Ruben Meloyan

Radio Liberty, Czech Republic
Jan 9 2008

Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian emphasized on Wednesday the
significance of next month’s presidential election for Armenia’s
international reputation and expressed concern in that regard about
the possibility of post-election unrest in the country.

The Armenian authorities received a major boost to their international
legitimacy and democratic credentials with Western observers’ largely
positive assessment of their conduct of last May’s parliamentary
elections.

"I think these elections will have an even bigger impact," Oskanian
said of the presidential vote scheduled for February 19. "If we
conduct them well, our positions will definitely strengthen in the
international arena."

"But if we hold bad elections, I can say for certain that consequences
will be negative and that Armenia will lose the reputation it acquired
in the past year. That will have a negative impact on our foreign
policy," he added in a warning clearly addressed to his own government.

Armenian leaders and the election frontrunner, Prime Minister Serzh
Sarkisian, in particular, have said that they will do their best to
ensure that the upcoming elections meets democratic standards.

Opposition leaders are skeptical about such assurances, citing
Armenia’s history of electoral fraud. Some of them have threatened
to dispute fraudulent vote results with street protests.

Oskanian seemed worried about such possibility as he stressed the need
for Armenian political groups to avoid election-related violence. "The
people must make it clear to everyone that [violence] must not be a
means of solving political issues," he told a news conference. "I have
the impression, based on my conversations with different people, that
the issue of achieving political objectives by means of instability
remains on the agenda of certain political forces."

Oskanian declined to name those forces.

Sarkisian’s most radical opposition challenger, former Levon
Ter-Petrosian, and his allies say they still have faith in the
government-controlled electoral process and have no intention to stage
the kind of post-election uprising that toppled the governments of
neighboring Georgia and other ex-Soviet states.

Oskanian, meanwhile, sounded more positive about the upcoming election
at a meeting later in the day with Geert-Heinrich Ahrens, head of the
main international vote monitoring mission deployed in Armenia by the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A statement by
the Armenian Foreign Ministry cited Oskanian as telling Ahrens that
its work will be a "real affirmation of the establishment of democracy
in Armenia."

Ahrens said, for his part, that the mission will comprise 28 long-term
and about 250 short-term observers.