RULING PARTY ‘UNTROUBLED’ BY TER-PETROSIAN COMEBACK
By Ruzanna Khachatrian and Karine Kalantarian
Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
Oct 29 2007
Former President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s decision to stand in next
year’s presidential election will not force any changes in the
electoral strategy of the governing Republican Party of Armenia (HHK),
one of its leaders said on Monday. "It would make no sense for the
most influential political force participating in the presidential
elections make changes in its strategy based on the participation or
non-participation of another candidate," parliament speaker Tigran
Torosian told reporters. He said the HHK will unveil its campaign
manifesto at a congress scheduled for November 10. The congress is
also expected to formally nominate the party’s top leader, Prime
Minister Serzh Sarkisian, as a presidential candidate.
Sarkisian has been regarded as the election favorite since the HHK’s
landslide victory in last May’s parliamentary elections. Observers
believe that Ter-Petrosian’s political comeback makes the outcome of
the vote due in February or March less predictable. Ter-Petrosian
announced his decision to run for president on Friday at a rally
in central Yerevan attended by an estimated 20,000 people. In a
90-minute speech, he repeated his harsh criticism of Armenia’s current
leadership and pledged to do his best to prevent a "reproduction
of the criminal regime." Although the Ter-Petrosian rally was the
biggest opposition protest staged in years, Torosian downplayed
its significance and claimed that it did not live up to organizers’
expectations. "A lot was done to gather many people," he said. "I
don’t think that expectations were lived up to." In televised
remarks broadcast on Friday, President Robert Kocharian dismissed
Ter-Petrosian’s electoral chances, saying that his predecessor will
not be Sarkisian’s main challenger. Kocharian said Armenians have
not forgotten severe hardship suffered by them during the early and
mid-1990s. He accused the Ter-Petrosian administration of "ruining"
the Armenian economy. Torosian, whose party supported Ter-Petrosian
until 1998, was less categorical on that score, saying that the
economy teetered on the brink of collapse at the time for "objective
and subjective" reasons. "I believe the president of the republic
referred to subjective processes," he said. The Armenian speaker also
declined to endorse Kocharian’s claims that there are "at least two or
three" opposition presidential candidates who are more popular than
Ter-Petrosian. "Rivals are classified not by politicians but by the
public with its votes," he said. Unlike Kocharian, Sarkisian has so
far been quite cautious in commenting on Ter-Petrosian’s return to
active politics and has yet to comment on the ex-president’s Friday
speech. The Armenian premier avoided any contact with journalists as
he visited the parliament building in Yerevan on Monday. Kocharian’s
highly negative assessment of his predecessor’s track record in power
could put Sarkisian in a delicate position given the fact he held
key government positions during most of Ter-Petrosian’s seven-year
presidency. Sarkisian was appointed as Armenia’s defense minister in
1993 and later served as minister of national security and internal
affairs in the Ter-Petrosian administration. In a related development,
police in Yerevan questioned on Monday several Ter-Petrosian loyalists
who were controversially arrested last week while publicizing Friday’s
rally in the city’s Liberty Square. The arrests followed a brief
clash between riot police and a group of opposition activists, most
of them members of the pro-Ter-Petrosian Aylentrank movement. The
11 activists, among them two newspaper editors, were set free after
four-hour negotiations between Ter-Petrosian and senior police
officers. They say the violence erupted after police officers
"illegally" stopped their march through the city center sanctioned
by the Yerevan municipality. The police, however, lay the blame on
the oppositionists, saying that the latter interfered with traffic
and littered streets with leaflets.
They opened a criminal case under articles of the Armenian Criminal
Code dealing with "hooliganism" and assault on state officials.
None of the oppositionists has been formally charged yet. "They are
now trying to show that our march disrupted traffic and so on," Nikol
Pashinian, editor of the "Haykakan Zhamanak" daily who led the action,
told RFE/RL after being questioned by police investigators. "They’ve
found two witnesses. One is a policeman and the other is a guy
I’ve known for a long time. I asked [the police] to subject him to a
psychiatric examination." Ter-Petrosian warned on Friday that he would
consider any further act of "repression" against his supporters a
"criminal violation of the electoral rights of citizens."