WEST SILENT AS YEREVAN STEPS UP PRE-ELECTION CRACKDOWN ON OPPOSITION
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
Dec 10 2007
With just over two months to go before a fateful presidential election,
Armenia’s leadership is stepping up what increasingly looks like
repression against supporters of its most formidable opponent, former
president Levon Ter-Petrosian. The authorities in Yerevan have been
busy in recent weeks harassing his loyalists (including a prominent
businessman), orchestrating a televised smear campaign against him,
and trying to muzzle the rare television station that dared to provide
airtime to Ter-Petrosian.
The crackdown exposes the extent of their worries about the
ex-president’s bid to return to power and may only be a taste of things
to come during and after the election scheduled for February 19. The
outgoing President Robert Kocharian and his preferred successor, Prime
Minister Serge Sarkisian, seem to be emboldened by the West’s positive
assessment of their handling of last May’s Armenian parliamentary
elections. U.S. and European officials have so far avoided criticizing,
at least in public, their latest actions, which could have alarming
repercussions for the freedom and fairness of the upcoming vote.
The ruling regime claims to be untroubled by Ter-Petrosian’s political
comeback, saying that he is widely loathed by Armenians and is not
even the main opposition presidential candidate. Its jittery behavior
suggests the opposite, however. In particular, the authorities have
been anxious to minimize attendance at Ter-Petrosian rallies in Yerevan
that attracted an unexpectedly large number of people. Unable to run
TV advertisements on the government-controlled electronic media,
Ter-Petrosian and his allies spread the word about those rallies
mainly by leaflets and small publicity marches through the Armenian
capital. Police broke up the first such march, staged in late
October. Five of its active participants, among them two newspaper
editors, were arrested on the spot and charged with assaulting "state
officials performing their duties."
There have also been reports of police hunting down young
pro-Ter-Petrosian activists posting anti-Sarkisian leaflets in
the city center. One of them claimed to have been ill-treated by
the chief of the Yerevan police and warned against engaging in
anti-government activities before being set free. The 20-year-old
activist was severely beaten by unknown men and hospitalized for
several days after publicizing his detention (Haykakan Zhamanak,
November 16). That the opposition demonstrations are perceived to
be dangerous by the authorities was confirmed on December 5, when
tax inspectors confiscated 4,000 newly printed leaflets announcing
the next Ter-Petrosian rally. The printing company that manufactured
them was promptly accused of tax evasion (Aravot, December 7).
Tax-evasion cases have also been brought against several companies
owned by Khachatur Sukiasian, the sole Armenian tycoon who has publicly
voiced support for Ter-Petrosian. Two of their chief executives are
now under arrest pending trial. Local observers believe the crackdown
is politically motivated and aimed at discouraging other "oligarchs"
from following Sukiasian’s example.
Virtually all of them are dependent on and loyal to the regime,
having helped it rig past elections.
Fear of a "dangerous" precedent was also behind the authorities’
harsh reaction to a decision by a small TV station in Armenia’s second
city, Gyumri, to broadcast, as a paid advertisement, Ter-Petrosian’s
September 21 speech in which he denounced the Kocharian-Sarkisian
duo as "corrupt and criminal." The GALA channel has since been fined
$82,000 for tax evasion and could be forced this month to remove its
transmitter from Gyumri’s sole television tower.
Kocharian and Sarkisian have gone to great lengths to keep their
political opponents at bay throughout their decade-long rule. Their
most recent large-scale crackdown on the Armenian opposition in spring
2004, launched in response to the latter’s attempt to replicate
the 2003 "Rose Revolution" in neighboring Georgia, was accompanied
by unprecedented human rights abuses. With the Ter-Petrosian camp
clearly ready to challenge questionable vote results on the streets,
similar unrest may well follow the upcoming presidential election.
The European Union, which never reacted to the 2004 repression, appears
to have no such concerns, however. The EU’s special representative
to the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, sounded quite optimistic about
the Armenian presidential race after holding talks with Kocharian,
Sarkisian, Ter-Petrosian, and other opposition leaders in Yerevan last
month. The February vote, he said, will underscore the "maturity of
Armenia’s political system" and a "high degree of pluralism" in the
country (RFE/RL Armenia Report, November 20).
The EU praised the Kocharian administration’s conduct of the May
parliamentary elections, which are regarded as fraudulent by the
Armenian opposition and civic groups. The positive assessment paved
the way for the release of ~@21 million ($29 million) in financial
assistance to Armenia, stemming from its participation in the bloc’s
European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) program. Just how that assistance
will facilitate political reform in the country, a key aim for its
inclusion in the ENP, remains unclear.
The Kocharian administration does not seem to be facing much pressure
from the Council of Europe either. Armenian Foreign Minister Vartan
Oskanian discussed preparations for the presidential election with
Secretary General Terry Davis and other senior Council of Europe
officials during a December 7 visit to Strasbourg (Statement by the
Armenian Foreign Ministry, December 7). None of those officials has
publicly expressed concern at the election-related developments
in the country. In trying to promote Armenia’s democratization,
the Strasbourg-based organization puts the emphasis on legislative
reform, a strategy that has clearly failed to work, as evidenced by
the recent erosion of civil liberties enjoyed by Armenians.
As always, the United States is more assertive than the Europeans
in pushing for a clean vote. The U.S. charge d’affaires in Yerevan,
Joseph Pennington, reportedly secured on December 4 Sarkisian’s consent
to the holding of a first-ever exit poll in Armenia to be financed by
the U.S. government. Still, Washington continues to tread carefully,
apparently because it still hopes to broker an Armenian-Azerbaijani
peace deal on Karabakh before the Armenian election. The chief
U.S. Karabakh negotiator, Matthew Bryza, is due to visit Yerevan and
Baku in mid-January in a last-ditch attempt to get the two sides to
overcome their remaining differences.