Armenian PM raps rivals ahead of election
Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:00am EST
By Margarita Antidze
YEREVAN, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan
appeared confident of victory in a Feb. 19 presidential election,
telling tens of thousands of his supporters on Sunday his rivals were
unable to deliver on their campaign pledges.
The 53-year-old premier is supported by President Robert Kocharyan.
Both are credited with ensuring fast economic growth and raising living
standards in the tiny Caucasus nation, which has tense relations with
neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Opinion polls give Sarksyan more than 50 percent of voter support, and
he has said he hopes to win outright in Tuesday’s first round of the
election.
"We are the only force able to make good on the promises given during
the election campaign," Sarksyan told a rally of around 40,000 of his
supporters in Freedom Square in the centre of Armenia’s capital Yerevan.
"The opposition cannot do the same. You can’t rely upon these people,"
he said to the enthusiastic crowd of supporters, many waving Armenia’s
blue-orange-red tricolor flags.
Chanting "Victory!", the rally later marched to a cathedral along a
central avenue.
Sarksyan’s two rivals — former speaker of parliament Artur
Baghdasaryan and previous President Levon Ter-Petrosyan who was forced
to resign in 1998 — have failed to forge a last-minute alliance,
boosting the premier’s chances to win.
Earlier this month Ter-Petrosyan complained to Armenia’s Constitutional
Court that officials were causing "insurmountable obstacles" for his
campaign. He said he was being denied equal access to the television
airwaves.
Baghdasaryan’s Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) party was trounced by
Sarksyan’s Republican party in parliamentary elections last May, seen
as a rehearsal for Tuesday’s vote.
If he is elected president, Sarksyan will have to deal with the
unresolved conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of oil-producing
Azerbaijan whose ethnic Armenian population broke away in a 1990s war.
The independence of Serbia’s province of Kosovo could strengthen a bid
by Armenian-backed Nagorno-Karabakh to be recognised as a state,
Sarksyan told Reuters in an interview.
Armenia’s relations with Azerbaijan’s ally Turkey are fraught, in part
because it refuses to recognise as genocide the killings of ethnic
Armenians by Ottoman Turkey.
Sarksyan has promised to reduce the proportion of the population living
in poverty to 10 percent from today’s 25 percent during his five-year
term, to bolster economic reforms and to create new jobs. (Writing by
Dmitry Solovyov; editing by Andrew Roche)