COMMENTARY: LTP’S MEETING WITH DASHNAKS “NO SURPRISE” FOR SERZH
- Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan permitted himself quite an interesting confession on October 3. Commenting on the weekend meeting of ex-president Levon Ter-Petrosyan with representatives of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, Dashnaktsutyun), he noted that “this meeting is not an event that should have come as a surprise to me.” It only remains to guess what the top contender for presidency meant. He was hardly aware of any veiled dialogue between the bitter foes, since there had simply been no such contact. The approaches of the first president of Armenia to Dashnaktsutyun looked very much like the policy of pagan monarchs to the early Christian communities, and the motivation of persecutions – “disturbance of public order and a threat to the constitutional order” also fit well in the context of persecutions against Christians. The de-facto leader of Dashnaktsutyun, head of the Athens Bureau Hrair Marukhian was exiled from the republic in 1992 and later died in Greece under mysterious circumstances. The activities of the party in the territory of Armenia was banned as illegal from December 1994 and the decision was followed by plundering and closing more than a dozen newspapers and magazines directly or indirectly connected with the party and liquidation of the party’s “Vardanian” printing house. The mid-1990s are a period of high-profile political trials of numerous Dashnaktsutyun members that the first president thought were to “unmask” the terrorist essence of this organization; the so-called “Dro” and “Vahan Hovhannisyan + 30” trials are in fact an inseparable part of Armenia’s history at the close of the 20th century.
Though, from now on, the historical meeting between the ex-president and two former prisoners of Armenian jails – Hrant Margaryan and Armen Rustamyan – is considered to be a completed fact. Despite the seeming unnaturalness and internal contradictoriness of this contact, especially inside the Dashnak center in the surrounding of portraits of ideologists of the party so radically persecuted by Ter-Petrosyan, the Armenian prime minister stated that it did not come as a surprise to him. This very non-accidental confession indeed needs to be comprehended somehow.
It is quite possible that it should be regarded in the context of certain relationships that had been established by the mid-1990s between the first president of Armenia and structures close to Dashnaktsutyun. The example of Gerard Libaridian, a former Dashnaktsutyun member who was appointed senior advisor to the president on foreign affairs and put in charge of the Karabakh issue immediately after Armenia gained independence, is illustrative in this respect. According to the data of a number of Turkish mass media, Libaridian was also the leader of nearly all secret diplomatic missions of Yerevan conducting negotiations with Ankara and trying to achieve normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations. In other words, even when Dashnaktsutyun was banned in the territory of Armenia, the first president maintained relations with circles close to this party. Ter-Petrosyan’s lobbying of the interests of the former Catholocis of the Great House of Cilicia Karekin II for being elected Catholicos of All Armenians under the name of Karekin I was also perceived within that same context. Many more examples showing that while Dashnaktsutyun members were being persecuted, Ter-Petrosyan was actually maintaining relations with certain party-related structures and persons can be cited. Does it mean that we are witnessing a split or a tendency of such a split within Dashnaktsutyun itself? Perhaps Serzh Sargsyan was dropping hints about that…
It is symptomatic that one of the party’s leaders, Vahan Hovhannisyan, was not attending the historical meeting. He is one of the two nominees for a presidential candidate from Dashnaktsutyun. And the second nominee, Armen Rustamyan, was receiving Ter-Petrosyan. Perhaps it is still too early to speak about a split in the upper party echelons, but the very fact of objective confrontation is demonstrative. In this respect, the visit of the first president to the Dashnaktsutyun office seems to be a mechanism aggravating such confrontation and capable of splitting the party’s ruling clique into two camps in the future. Some analysts say in this connection that Ter-Petrosyan is continuing his policy to split the party and to achieve this goal he is ready even to visit the party’s office in person.
It is noteworthy that the first president in fact did not hide such an intention. It was on his initiative that in the mid-1990s an artificial organization “Armenian Dashnaktsutyun Party” was registered with the Armenian Ministry of Justice. That organization was intended to supplant the truly existing party that by that time had been banned. But that idea proved a complete fiasco.
Interestingly, Dashnaktsutyun’s Hayots Ashkharh newspaper recently published a small report whose content was against the party commentaries regarding that meeting. It said that the visit of the first president became a serious party omission. Vahan Hovhannisyan, who recently entered family relations with the Prime Minister (Hovhannisyan’s daughter is engaged to be married with Serzh Sargsyan’s nephew), does not wish to open all the intra-party brackets yet, stating that “if Armenia is negotiating with enemies – Turkey and Azerbaijan – then negotiating among Armenians cannot go beyond the scope of morality.” Does it mean that the prime minister was trying to open the brackets instead of him?
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- 1813 The Russian-Persian Treaty is signed at Fort Gyulistan (Artsakh). It ended the war that had started in 1804. According to the agreement, Persia recognizes the provinces of Artsakh, Gyandja, Shaki, Shoragual, Talish, Derbent, Ghoobay, Pambak, Zangezoor, Shirvan, Baku, Loree and Shamshadin as belonging to the Russian Empire.
- 1882 Birth of literary critic Hovhanness Avagyan. He died in 1959.
- 1895 Rebellion breaks out at Zeitoon against Turkish administrative malpractices.
- 1961 The Armenian SSR decides to rename the Kotayk, Abovian and Adini regions to Ani region.
- 1962 Diasporan Armenians begin a new repatriation program to Armenia.
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