ATTEMPTS OF "DRIVING ARMENIA INTO A CORNER" TURN OUT A FAILURE
Armen Tsatouryan

Hayots Ashkhar Daily
March 25, 2008

The presidential elections and the subsequent events of March 1-2
were a serious test to Armenia’s international rating and reputation
earned in the course of many years.

The difficulties that fell to our country’s lot recently became the
subject of the biased attention of the superpowers having serious
interests in the region. The struggle between the authorities and
the opposition was some way or another linked to the convergence and
conflict of some of those key interests.

We began tasting the first bitter fruits of this phenomenon in
the post-election period when no single day passed without the
visit of delegates representing some European or international
structure. Offering their help to the forces that were leading a
sharp struggle against one another, the organizations which were
simultaneously acting as mediators were actually imposing their
conditions not only on the direct parties to the conflict but also –
on Armenia.

During the whole post-election period the great number of delegates
representing Western countries never tried to answer the question
whether the protest actions organized by the opposition leader might
be considered a normal phenomenon in their countries in view of the
fact that the pro-Government candidate received 2.5 times more votes.

They were not interested in such "details"; the important thing was
that there was "distrust of the election results". As to whether
such distrust was real or artificial, dramatized and envisaged for
a foreign spectator, our guests were no longer interested in that.

Even after L. Ter-Petrosyan chose the territory nearby the French,
Italian and Russian Embassies as the site of the ‘decisive battle’,
aiming to arouse an international interest in the dramatization of the
protest actions, nobody asked these people why they were endangering
the uninterrupted work of the foreign country representatives.

Instead, the films shot from the windows of those embassies were
spread all over the world, and there started the raffling of a
well-staged scenario.

The first part of the presentation of such scenario was Ter-Petrosyan’s
March 11 press-conference.

However, Ter-Petrosyan’s chances began diminishing slowly, along with
lifting the state of emergency in the town of Yerevan, forming a broad
political coalition and publishing the reform program declared by the
latter. The demand previously imposed on the opposition by the PACE
Monitoring Committee to respect and recognize the decision of the
Constitutional Court the final clarification of Russia’s attitude
towards the authorities in Armenia also greatly contributed to it
as well.

Unlike some Western guests, Deputy Foreign Minister and State Secretary
G. Karasi n publicly refused to meet with L. Ter-Petrosyan. In this
way, the senior Russian official showed his country’s clear-cut
negative attitude towards the scenario of making Armenia a target of
international pressures.

It became obvious that the scenario of giving the opposition freedom
of hands and suppressing the authorities to maximum possible extent
will not work in Armenia even if it becomes necessary to threaten the
country with the prospect of terminating the "Millennium Challenges"
program. In such conditions, the sketches of the second part of the
"soap opera" concerning the Armenian elections and post-electoral
developments became visible.

This time, after rendering such "great services" to the international
community, the opposition leader has to moderate his ambitions for
power and simply become an ordinary lever for imposing certain foreign
policy issues on Armenia.

The "Moor" has done his job: he has harmed our country’s international
rating and reputation, questioned the outcome of the elections and
provoked an international intervention. Now he can go away for ever
if the Armenian authorities demonstrate a clear-cut attitude towards
the forces which funded the skillfully dramatized performance.

In their recent statements, the international structures emphasize
all the time that the OSCE Observation Mission considered the
Armenian elections mostly in line with the international standards,
i.e. legitimate. However, their final report is still to be
published. Before that, NATO is to hold its summit in Bucharest. Within
the frameworks of the summit, Armenia and Azerbaijan may resume the
interrupted talks as well.

However, on the eve of staging the second part of the international
political "soap-opera" concerning the Armenian elections and
post-electoral developments, President-elect Serge Sargsyan paid a
working visit to Moscow.

The unconditional support of the Russian leadership creates the strong
basis that may make Armenia feel more confident in confronting the
possible international coercions.

The scenario of staging a "colored revolution" in Armenia or, in case
of its failure, driving our authorities into a corner and imposing
serious concessions with regard to different international issues is
reaching a deadlock in a slow though consistent manner.