ARREST OF ARMENIAN "COUP PLOTTERS" RAISES QUESTIONS
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
Jan 9 2007
Armenian authorities claim to have thwarted a coup d’etat that
was allegedly planned by hard-line nationalists opposed to major
concessions to Azerbaijan in the conflict over Karabakh. Two prominent
veterans of the Armenian-Azerbaijani war were controversially arrested
last month and now look set to stand trial for calling for a violent
overthrow of Armenia’s leadership. This development was followed by
the discovery of what law-enforcement authorities say was an arms
cache in the home of one of their associates.
The case, condemned as politically motivated by the Armenian
opposition, appears to have exposed a sense of insecurity within the
administration of President Robert Kocharian. Analysts believe that
it stems, in large measure, from the prospect a long-awaited peace
deal with Azerbaijan that would inevitably require painful concessions
from both parties to the Karabakh conflict.
One of the arrested men, Zhirayr Sefilian, is known as a staunch
opponent of the liberation of any of the seven Azerbaijani districts
surrounding Karabakh that were fully or partly occupied by Armenian
forces during the 1991-94 war. A Lebanese citizen of Armenian descent,
Sefilian commanded a battalion during the war and held the rank of
lieutenant-colonel when he retired from the military in the late 1990s
to set up a pressure group campaigning for continued Armenian control
of the occupied lands. The group, called Defense of the Liberated
Territories, has regularly lambasted the Yerevan government for
its readiness to trade the bulk of those lands for international
recognition of Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan.
The other, less prominent detainee, Vartan Malkhasian, is a senior
member of Fatherland and Honor, a small opposition party led by retired
police officers. Malkhasian and Sefilian were arrested on December
10 shortly after jointly forming the Alliance of Armenian Volunteers
(HKH), a new organization of war veterans hostile to Kocharian and
sympathetic to his rivals. According to the National Security Service
(NSS), they hatched a conspiracy to mount an armed rebellion against
the government during next spring’s parliamentary elections. The
Armenian successor to the KGB also rounded up and briefly detained
some 30 rank-and-file members of the group.
Both suspects as well as their loyalists reject the accusations,
which carry lengthy prison sentences. They have secured the backing of
virtually all major Armenian opposition forces. In a joint December 19
statement, about two dozen opposition parties accused the authorities
of launching a new round of "repressions" against their political
opponents ahead of the forthcoming elections. The Fatherland and Honor
leader, Garnik Markarian, went as far as to warn of armed resistance
to possible further arrests of nationalist activists.
The authorities and the NSS deny any political motives behind the
arrests, pointing to Sefilian’s and Malkhasian’s fiery speeches at
a December 2 meeting in Yerevan of over a hundred HKH activists,
which was apparently held behind the closed doors. The transcripts
of the speeches, subsequently made public by the HKH, show that the
two leaders implicitly accepted violence as a legitimate mode of
struggle against the ruling regime. Sefilian in particular vowed to
"crack the head of anyone who would dare to cede land" to Azerbaijan
and scoffed at opposition attempts to force regime change with a
campaign of peaceful demonstrations.
The NSS also announced on December 29 that it has found "unprecedented
quantities" of assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and
even shoulder-fired rockets in the village house of a close Sefilian
associate. The security agency said the man, identified as Vahan
Aroyan, was arrested "within the framework" of its ongoing inquiry
into the alleged coup attempt.
Sefilian supporters dismissed the claims as a fraud, and some of them
staged a demonstration outside the former KGB building in Yerevan on
January 1. They insist that the arrested men never explicitly called
for — let alone plotted — a violent regime change, an argument echoed
by mainstream opposition politicians and some media commentators. "The
way the arrests were made and the ensuing official statements and
‘explanations’ suggest that the authorities are alarmed," the Yerevan
daily Azg editorialized on December 13. "It is difficult to diagnose
the reasons for this jittery state of mind for the moment."
The most common explanation for this theory is that the Armenian
leadership wants to further weaken the opposition ahead of the
parliamentary elections and/or fend off possible protests against land
concessions to Azerbaijan. Deputy Defense Minister Manvel Grigorian,
the influential leader of the biggest organization of Armenian war
veterans, sounded less than enthusiastic about such concessions as he
wrapped up an annual conference of the Yerkrapah Union on December 9.
Under the peace deal proposed by international mediators and discussed
by the parties over the past few years, Karabakh’s predominantly
Armenian population would determine the disputed territory’s status
in a referendum to be held after the liberation of at least five of
the seven occupied Azerbaijani districts. Kocharian and Azerbaijani
President Ilham Aliyev reported further progress towards the signing
of a framework peace accord along these lines during their early
December meeting in Minsk.
Highlighting his fears of a nationalist backlash, Kocharian indicated
on December 15 that Yerevan will not sign or unveil any agreements with
Baku before the Armenian elections expected next May. The Armenian
opposition, he claimed, would exploit even the most pro-Armenian
solution to the Karabakh solution in order to come to power. Government
sources in Yerevan say the parties will make a fresh (and potentially
decisive) push for peace in the second half of this year, before
presidential elections due in both Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2008.
(Statements by the National Security Service, December 29, December
12, 2006; Aravot, December 20; RFE/RL Armenia Report, December 15;
Azg, December 13)