RFE/RL – Pashinian Vows To ‘Crush’ Top Opposition Leaders

In what critics denounced as death threats, Pashinian already vowed to “take out” former President Robert Kocharian and businessmen Samvel Karapetian and Gagik Tsarukian during the election campaign. He lashed out at them again during the final session of the outgoing Armenian parliament boycotted by opposition lawmakers.

“As long as I am prime minister, I will crush them in a targeted manner, I will crush them in a targeted manner,” he said. “I call on those citizens who do not agree with this line to stage a revolution in Armenia and change the government … There is no other way to stop this process.”

Pashinian doubled down on his threats to jail Kocharian, Karapetian and Tsarukian after their opposition groups rejected as fraudulent the official election results giving victory in the elections. Prosecutors charged Tsarukian with tax evasion before asking the Central Election Commission (CEC) to allow them to also indict Kocharian.

The commission headed by a longtime Pashinian collaborator gave the green the light for new criminal charges against the 71-year-old ex-president later on Wednesday. The charges were still not publicized by the Office of the Prosecutor-General. According to one of Kocharian’s lawyers, Aram Orbelian, they stem from a property deal approved by a former Armenian government in 2004 during his presidency.

“Mr. Robert Kocharian has no connection with that transaction, and his family members have no connection either,” he told reporters.

Orbelian linked the criminal case to ongoing “political processes” in the country. He also stressed that the statute of limitations for it has long expired.

This might explain why the prosecutors did not ask the CEC for permission to arrest Kocharian. They sought such permission against four other opposition election candidates.

One of them, Davit Ghazinian, is a senior member of Karapetian’s Strong Armenia alliance. The CEC allowed on Wednesday Ghazinian’s arrest on vote-buying charges strongly denied by him.

The official election results, which the three opposition forces will challenge in the Constitutional Court, showed Pashinian’s Civil Contract party winning 49.8 percent of the vote. Strong Armenia came in second with 23.3 percent, followed by Kocharian’s Hayastan that got almost 10 percent.

For its part, Tsarukian’s Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) fell just short of a 4 percent legal threshold for entering the new Armenian parliament after the CEC cancelled results in three precincts and refused to rerun elections there. The BHK as well as Strong Armenia and Hayastan bloc portrayed the controversial decision as further proof that the vote was rigged in the ruling party’s favor.

Pashinian denies the opposition allegations and accuses the opposition of having garnered hundreds of thousands of votes with bribes.

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