Published since 07.2002
Published on March 28, 2008
ANALYSIS: CRISIS SEEN AS STEMMING FROM LTP/ROBERT KOCHARYAN’S “LIBERAL POLICY”
- At present, it is very difficult to make assumptions regarding ways of Armenia’s development after the dramatic events of March 1-2. The limited nature of reports and the special regime of providing information do not make it possible to follow the process, and it is not quite correct to base on rumors and gossip that have been actively circulated lately. Political analysts for their part have assumed a wait-and-see position and do not engage in a concrete discourse. At the same time, one should point out that in the aspect of “liberal priorities” of the development of Armenian statehood declared still in the early 1990s nothing principally new has happened. The current authorities are the successor of the preceding ones and also rejected in embryo all prerequisites for the establishment of alternative ideological currents in the country, and first of all leftist currents. In this connection, it is enough to quote the well-known statement of the advisor to the current president on economic issues, first representative of the World Bank in Armenia Vahram Nersisyants: “Currently, it is the Republican Party of Armenia that guides proponents of a liberal policy. The establishment of a liberal political force in Armenia became possible first of all due to the former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan and the Armenian All-National Movement party led by him that still on the threshold of independence laid the foundations of a liberal political movement, and secondly, it was continued and developed by the current authorities under the leadership of Robert Kocharyan.” In this aspect, the dramatic events in Armenia present largely an informational interest for the international community. They, of course, may be used as a mechanism of external pressure on the Serzh Sargsyan administration, but only if it shows a tendency towards reconsidering certain provisions that were foisted upon Armenia in the 1990s. Such a thing can take place if Yerevan shows disagreement on the matter of getting involved in new projects which, for instance, theoretically may be refusal to provide Armenian territory for carrying out air strikes on Iran. Nevertheless, there are no reasons today to suppose that the newly elected president is seeking such a scenario. Remarkable in this aspect is the first official proposal of Robert Kocharyan as acting president of Armenia in February 1998: “Regardless of the change of power, Armenia is responsible for all international agreements and treaties signed earlier.” This proposal was addressed to the international community, which is largely interested in Armenia’s not turning off from the “liberal path” regardless of the degree of the inclination of the local forms of its manifestation. It is this circumstance that Vahram Nersisyants meant as he said: “It causes alarm that certain elements have penetrated the ranks of the Republican Party and, possibly, they will make an attempt to shift the liberal policy of the Republican Party towards the policy covered with pseudo-nationalist slogans and arguments, as it happens in a number of Latin American countries.” It is patently clear that the international community will be in a wait-and-see position, will not be in a hurry to make serious utterances and even will support the newly elected president whose victory objectively is not subject to dispute. In this connection, he will be given a card blanche for carrying out quite an independent personnel policy. Moreover, Serzh Sargsyan’s voiced readiness to cooperate with all political organizations elicited an exclusively positive reaction, as in such a case a more active part of the Armenian society will automatically group under the “cap of democracy”. The second aspect is connected with internal discomfort in which Armenian society has lived during all years of “liberal reforms”. The process of formation of a new Armenian bourgeoisie has been accompanied by outrageous manifestations of social injustice as well as the establishment of a fundamentally new culture humiliating and oppressing the public layer whose representatives have not yet been transformed into a new “over-national community”. The Armenian peculiarity of the process of the transformation of society consists of several nuances, one of which is the war with Azerbaijan. The head of this process, the first president of the republic sought to secure a due level of transformation of once a common ethno-cultural commonality into a socium of cosmopolites as soon as possible, including at the price of ceding Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 1988 he did not miss an occasion for publicly opposing the basic foundations of Armenian history, the first display of which became the open outrageous treatment of Catholicos of All Armenians Vazgen I. It is in this aspect that the sense of the thesis about the “falseness of national ideology as a political category” should be interpreted. Representatives of the opposite wing in the official authorities that for their part were adherents of “liberal values” did not allow a hint at the possibility of achieving such a result at the cost of ceding Nagorno-Karabakh. It was this split that conditioned the tension in the relations between the two camps of authorities, which by the end of 1997 grew into an open confrontation and unavoidable resignation of Levon Ter-Petrosyan. However, the new authorities proved unable to give an estimation to the activities of the first president, including his defeatist position on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. It is obvious that in the event of the presence of such an estimation, the electorate of Levon Ter-Petrosyan would have considerably got thinner and there would have been a real possibility for avoiding such a deep split inside the society. Nevertheless, on the first day of spring 2008 the society split and, therefore, the main task of the new authorities is to reanimate the public state. The Serzh Sargsyan administration will be unable to solve this task without a convincing estimation of what happened, which implies a tough criticism of not only the initiators of the disturbances, but the authorities themselves. Moreover, the new leadership of Armenia is simply doomed to detaining and arresting the first president of the country, for otherwise about 80 percent of the voters who took part in the election and who under no conditions would have supported Ter-Petrosyan will express mistrust to the Sagsyan administration, which, in its turn, will provoke a new wave of protest. Only through presenting an integral portrait of the first president, exactly as a man who advocates the need for ceding Nagorno-Karabakh, will the authorities manage to convince the protest electorate that it [electorate] regardless of even such an aspiration, was formed under the symbol of national apostasy. This heavy process cannot pass without pain, however sooner or later the accumulated differences were to have made themselves felt. The prospect of the court proceedings into the “Levon Case” is quite real, but it is also obvious that the first president is also getting prepared for it. It is for this reason that Armenia’s president-elect as never before is interested in the consolidation of all political forces and the recently formed four-party coalition may be considered to be evidence of this. and, obviously, at present intensive negotiations are being conducted. Besides two governing parties – the Republican Party of Armenia and Prosperous Armenia – as of yet joined the coalition Artur Baghdasaryan-led Orinats Yerkir. The rest political organizations are not in a hurry to express their position, and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) even stated about its quitting the coalition. Today’s realities do not allow for building a more or less concrete scheme of a future personnel organization of the country. In all probability, in the course of March a number of political parties will express their position on participating in the coalitional government (DELETE). It is quite possible that the new administration will have a rich personnel of presidential advisors on different issues, which will include leaders of a number of parties and separate politicians who will agree to cooperate with the new authorities. Only after such reports will it be possible to judge more specifically about the vectors of Armenia’s development in short-term prospects.
- Aris Ghazinyan
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Today in Armenian history- 1799 Birth of Eone Kish (Kishian), Hungarian Armenian revolutionary figure.
- 1827 General Ivan Paskevich is appointed Governor of the Caucasus and Commander of the Caucasian Special Corps.
- 1830 Birth of organist, conductor, teacher, and public figure, Anton Mayilian in Tbilissi.
- 1907 Birth of surgeon Ivan Gevorgian. He invented pain-killers and pioneered new ways for blood transfusion.
- 1920 The Drama Institute presents its first play.
- 1923 Birth of two-time hero and pilot Nelson Stepanian. The group of pilots led by Nelson Stepanian sank more than 50 enemy ships and destroyed 13 airplanes in World War Two. Nelson Stepanian flew 240 sorties. He died in a dogfight in 1944.
- 1928 Birth of artist and sculptor Ara Harootoonian. His great architectural work is the Sardarapat complex.
- 1988 The Supreme Soviet of the USSR rejects Artsakh's demand to be reunited with Armenia.
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