Protesters and Police Clash as Armenia Unrest Grows
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
March 2, 2008
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YER EVAN, Armenia – The largest crowds this tiny, mountainous country
has seen in years have clogged central streets here for 10 days, as
Armenians of all ages have protested the results of a presidential
election they say was stolen.
But what had mostly been demonstrations without much heat – a daily
march to rally near government buildings and some slogan-shouting –
took a more ominous turn on Saturday when Armenian authorities began
using heavy-handed tactics to break up crowds. By the end of the day,
rioting and looting had begun some areas of the capital, and the
government imposed a state of emergency to deal with the disorder.
Witnesses reported that the police were firing tear gas canisters
and, in some cases, bullets high into the air. In some neighborhoods,
drunken gangs began looting, breaking through glass storefronts.
The tensions started with the presidential election on Feb. 19,
the fifth since this landlocked country in the Caucasus Mountains
gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It pitted
a political insider, the current prime minister, Serge Sargsyan,
against Levon Ter-Petrossian, an academic who was the country’s
first elected president. Term limits barred the current president,
Robert Kocharian, from running.
While Mr. Ter-Petrossian, 63, put up a real opposition with an
aggressive campaign, the rest of the election conformed completely to
the old Soviet standards. Votes were bought. Television coverage was
embarrassingly skewed. Big men in large cars bossed vote counters. As
a result, the party in power stayed in power, with 52 percent of
the vote.
Similar stories have played out in other post-Soviet countries, of
which Armenia is a relatively bright example. Tucked between Azerbaijan
and Turkey, two sworn enemies, and without any natural resources,
Armenia has to rely on outside help to survive. Its government usually
allows more dissent than most. Journalists rarely disappear and turn
up dead.
Which is why the actions of the police officers on Saturday – and last
month’s election, whose results have still not been fully recognized
by the United States – were so disappointing.
On Saturday morning, Armenian authorities, saying they smelled a coup,
used a favorite method of crowd dispersal, planting hand grenades
and guns near some of the protesters as they slept, witnesses said,
and then demanding they leave. A fight followed, and the authorities
said 31 people were hurt.
Obedient state television showed contrived scenes of police and sniffer
dogs walking up to small piles of shiny, new grenades and handguns,
nestled like Easter eggs in the grass of a small park.
"It’s a completely artificial reason," said Boris Navasardian,
president of the Yerevan Press Club. "They had plans to disperse the
crowds by force from the very beginning."
By early afternoon, crowds had reassembled in another spot. As they
demonstrated, things began turning violent around the fringes, with
cars being overturned and some windows being broken. As more fights
broke out, riot police officers and soldiers surged into the fray.
It was unclear late Saturday how many people had been hurt in the
intensified clashes. Reuters reported that the Health Ministry said
that 10 people had been hospitalized but did not give further details
or address whether any police were among the injured.
>>From the beginning, there were disturbing signs about the
presidential election.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which deployed
333 observers, concluded that 16 percent of the count was "bad" or
"very bad." At one polling station, a quarter of all ballots were
declared invalid. In another, all but one of 1,449 voters in a set
of polling stations were for Mr. Sargsyan.
"I told the government that the probability of this is as high as
the birth of a dog with five legs," said Geert Ahrens, head of the
organization’s Election Observation Mission here.
There were moments of drama straight out of Gogol. In one recount
seen by a Western observer, some members of a counting committee,
in an apparent attempt at filibuster, wandered away and were missing
for hours. The committee chairman was declared sick. Then came a
rumor that he had had a heart attack.
Finally, in sheer frustration after hours of waiting, an
official ripped open an envelope marked as containing ballots for
Mr. Sargsyan. The ballot on top of the pile was for his opponent,
Mr. Ter-Petrossian, and other officials immediately rushed to close
the envelope.
"I can only assume it was a bad count that someone did not want
reopened," the observer said.
Even so, when seen in the context of the broader region, Mr. Ahrens
said: "I’ve seen worse."
"We won the election," Mr. Ter-Petrossian said Thursday, sitting in a
cafe, the Swan Lake. He added that he had received 65 percent of the
vote, a figure that Mr. Ahrens said was "not grounded in any factual
evidence." Mr. Ter-Petrossian’s aides, who all refer to him as "the
president," seemed to have internalized the figure nonetheless.
Then came the crowds, which only seemed to grow, particularly after
a government-organized rally broke ranks last week to join them,
in a large public park in front of Yerevan’s opera house.
Mr. Ter-Petrossian, who is fond of dramatic entrances, rushed onto the
stage, as Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" blared from loudspeakers. He spoke
for hours, revving up the crowd of angry grandmothers, bored young
men eating sunflower seeds and a variety of Armenian professionals.
Mr. Ter-Petrossian, who was president from 1991 to 1998, presents
himself as the one to rescue the country. For the past nine days he has
slept in his Lincoln Town Car, parked near the protesters’ camp, and he
calls the protests "a clear, classic bourgeois, democratic revolution."
"To keep this regime is a catastrophe for Armenia," he said last week,
smoking a cigarette in a gilded holder. "It’s a pyramid scheme. An
eastern monarchy from the Middle Ages."
Though many Armenians share his frustration, fewer think that he is
the man capable of making real changes. As president, he relied on
the very methods he is now criticizing, they say, arresting opposition
figures, closing news organizations and sending armored vehicles into
the streets after a tainted election in 1996.
"A revolution means there is a principled person from outside the
system who wants to change it," said Avetik Ishkhanyan, chairman of
the Armenian Helsinki Committee. "But this opposition created the
system. It is identical to the people in power."
Part of the problem is Armenia’s Soviet past. Legal institutions like
courts became instruments of state power, and even after 17 years,
people are still suspicious of them.
"The Soviet Union is dead, the Soviet man is not," said an Armenian
government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There is
still no trust."
Mr. Sargsyan, for his part, said that his opponent seemed to be more
interested in street protests, which have paralyzed life in the
capital, than in following the tedious procedure to challenge the
results in court.
"If they had something to claim, they could do it," he said, sitting
in his lofty office in central Yerevan. "Why didn’t they? O.K.,
it was hard. They weren’t in the mood. But they could still do it."
As for the crowd, he predicted that "step by step, it will die out."
Johan Spanner contributed reporting.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
