ARMENIAN GOVERNMENT ‘LACKING MANDATE’ TO MEND TIES WITH TURKEY
Ruben Meloyan

RFE/RL
28.04.2009

Levon Zurabian, a leader of the opposition Armenian National Congress.

Armenia’s government will fail to sell any ground-breaking agreements
with Turkey to the domestic public as long as it holds dozens of
"political prisoners" and refuses to engage in dialogue with its
political opponents, the main opposition Armenian National Congress
(HAK) said on Tuesday.

"It is impossible to carry out a process of Turkish-Armenian
reconciliation, which requires serious public support, without
a process of internal Armenian reconciliation," said Levon
Zurabian, a top HAK representative. "Today any consideration of the
Turkish-Armenian roadmap is meaningless. One must first consider a
roadmap for internal national reconciliation."

Zurabian referred to the April 22 statement by the Armenian and Turkish
foreign ministries on a gradual normalization of strained relations
between the two neighboring states. Both the HAK and another major
opposition force, the Zharangutyun party, have demanded the immediate
disclosure of the "roadmap" announced by the two ministries. The
Armenian authorities have so far refused to do that.

According to Zurabian, although the HAK does not trust government
assurances that the announced framework is good for Armenia, it will
reserve final judgment on the deal u ntil it is made public. In
any case, he said, the authorities lack the popular mandate to
normalize ties with Turkey and accept a compromise solution to the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict because of their continuing crackdown on
the opposition stemming from the troubled presidential election of
February 2008.

Zurabian pointed to the continuing imprisonment of 55 opposition
members arrested in the wake of the vote and "police repressions"
against other HAK activists. "The authorities do not realize that
until the domestic political crisis is resolved progress in any
process fateful for the Armenian people will not be possible," he
told journalists.

Echoing statements by the HAK’s top leader, former President Levon
Ter-Petrosian, Zurabian suggested that the authorities are exploiting
the ongoing rapprochement with Turkey and the Karabakh peace process to
get the West to "turn a blind eye" to their poor human rights record.

"We have serious reason to suspect that the processes of
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and Karabakh settlement are used by
Serzh Sarkisian for securing the international community’s support
or consent for crushing the opposition," he said.

The Turkish-Armenian dialogue and Karabakh talks were on the agenda
of Zurabian’s meeting late on Monday with the visiting U.S. Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza and Marie Yovanovitch,
the U.S. ambassador to Armenia. Yovanovitch held a separate meeting
with Ter-Petrosian on April 22, in a further sign that Washington finds
opposition support important for the success of the Turkish-Armenian
and Armenian-Azerbaijani talks.

"It’s a time when Armenia needs unity," Bryza told RFE/RL on Monday. "I
hope that the entire country will remain unified or will become unified
in supporting an agreement that will improve everyone’s life," he said.

Chances of such unity decreased further on Monday as the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) announced its decision
to leave Armenia’s governing coalition in protest against President
Sarkisian’s conciliatory policy on Turkey. Leaders of the nationalist
party believe that the year-long dialogue with Ankara has produced
no tangible results for Yerevan and has only complicated greater
international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide.

Zurabian described Dashnaktsutyun’s exit as a "first sign that this
regime is not viable" and will show deeper cracks in the coming months.

He said the HAK will be ready to cooperate with Dashnaktsutyun only
if it acts like "real opposition." "They need to earn the right to
be a real opposition," he said.

Dashnaktsutyun leaders, who had been in strong opposition to the
Ter-Petrosian administration in 1991-1998, have sounded even more
skeptical about chances of such cooperation . The influential party
unequivocally endorsed the government crackdown on the opposition
and, in particular, the bloody suppression of Ter-Petrosian’s massive
post-election demonstrations in Yerevan.