The New York Times
 Tuesday


Protests Bring Down The Leader Of Armenia

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA; Neil MacFarquhar reported
from Moscow and Richard Pérez-Peña from London. Ivan Nechepurenko
contributed reporting from Moscow..



MOSCOW -- Ten days of demonstrations that escalated throughout Armenia
forced the resignation Monday of the man who has led the country for
the past decade, creating the latest crisis in a post-Soviet state
trying to overcome a legacy of weak democratic rule.

The unexpected resignation prompted scenes of jubilation in the
capital, Yerevan, and other cities. Tens of thousands of people
flocked to the central Republic Square in Yerevan, where all afternoon
and into the night they danced, cheered and waved the Armenian flag, a
striped tricolor of red, blue and orange.

Serzh Sargsyan, president since 2008, reached his legal two-term limit
earlier this month. A constitutional referendum in 2015 had
transferred most presidential powers to the role of prime minister,
however, and the Parliament, dominated by his right-wing Republican
Party, swiftly voted him into the post with no other candidate given a
chance.

''I was wrong,'' Mr. Sargsyan said in a brief resignation statement
carried by the official news agency. ''The street movement is against
my tenure. I am fulfilling your demand.''

The level of protest caught many by surprise. ''The way that they
proceeded was so arrogant that it triggered a rather intense reaction
that nobody expected,'' said Richard Giragosian, the director of the
Regional Studies Center, a Yerevan think tank.

Thousands of incensed Armenians, most of them young, swarmed through
Republic Square starting on April 13. The protests gradually spread to
other major cities in the tiny southern Caucasus nation, including
Gyumri and Vanadzor.

The pressure on Mr. Sargsyan, 63, to resign ratcheted up markedly on
Monday after soldiers from one company of the country's prestigious
peacekeeping force, which had served abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Kosovo, joined the march in Yerevan in their uniforms.

''All the momentum was with the street,'' said Thomas de Waal, an
expert on the Caucasus region at Carnegie Europe in Brussels.

Tuesday is Armenia's Genocide Memorial Day, when many of the country's
more than 2.6 million people turn out onto the streets. It was
expected to quickly turn into a vast anti-Sargsyan demonstration that
would have been unthinkable to suppress by force, said Aleksandr M.
Iskandaryan, the director of the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan.

Mr. Sargsyan had promised last year not to try to extend his tenure in
office by becoming prime minister when his presidential term ended.

Karen Karapetyan, who had just left the post of prime minister to make
way for Mr. Sargsyan, stepped in as acting prime minister.

The rapid events threw the country into disarray. The new Constitution
invests considerable power in the Parliament, and some expected snap
elections to be called.

The demonstrations were fueled by a new generation of Armenians
disenchanted with the small elite of politicians and their oligarch
allies who have long controlled the government and much of the
economy, analysts said. The protesters dismissed the standard argument
that Armenia needed unvarying leadership to negotiate an end to the
conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan and to deal with the tense
relations with Turkey on the other side.

''There is a new generation that wants change,'' Mr. de Waal said.
''The problem is that they do not really have a leader.''

Nikol Pashinyan, the opposition member of Parliament who led the
protests, lacks a party and a large constituency.

Mr. Sargsyan agreed to meet with Mr. Pashinyan on Sunday but stormed
out of the meeting within minutes, claiming he was being blackmailed.
Then Mr. Pashinyan and two of his opposition allies were detained
overnight, after scores of demonstrators were also detained. The three
opposition leaders figures were released on Monday.

Mr. de Waal compared the protesters to the professional, urban elite
who turned out to protest President Vladimir V. Putin's re-election in
2012 after he served as prime minister for one term to avoid term
limits. Some Armenians even referred to their leader's maneuver as
''pulling a Putin,'' Mr. Giragosian of the Regional Studies Center
said.

Unlike Armenian leaders, however, Mr. Putin cracked down hard, sending
in the riot police and making an example of some protesters with
lengthy jail sentences. Any sign of government change through
protests, like that in Ukraine, makes the Kremlin jittery, so the
protests in Armenia garnered scant attention on Russian state
television until Mr. Sargsyan resigned.

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, praised the
transition for being peaceful, saying, ''Armenia, Russia is always
with you!

Armenia, a Soviet state until declaring independence in 1991, remains
a close partner of Russia in a volatile region, with a Russian
military base at Gyumri. It has been locked for two decades in a
low-grade war with Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic, over
control of a disputed enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh. Some Armenians
accuse Russia of fueling a new outbreak of the fighting in 2016 by
selling arms to both sides.

Azerbaijan has long exploited unrest in Armenia to try to make gains
in the conflict, which may be one reason Mr. Sargsyan acted swiftly,
analysts said. Beyond that, the start of his presidency in 2008 was
marred by street protests in which 10 people were killed and 100
injured -- so he was determined to keep the peace this time, they
said.

Apart from political and territorial tensions, the country also has
suffered from a rocky economy in recent years. Armenia depends heavily
on remittances from its diaspora, which grows by some 50,000 people
annually, said Andrei G. Areshev, a researcher on the Caucasus at the
Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Armenians working in construction and other manual jobs in Russia were
hit hard by the devaluation in the ruble in 2015, but they sent home
$1.07 billion last year, according to records from the Central Bank.
As prime minister, Mr. Karapetyan had helped the economy grow by
fostering a technology sector, among other steps.

Given that most key government officials, including the acting prime
minister, are Sargsyan allies, it is unclear that his resignation will
bring any immediate change, or what he protesters might do next.

''The government hoped the tide would die down, but the opposite
happened,'' Mr. Iskandaryan said in Yerevan.


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