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Armenia's Opposition Has a Bloody Baptism

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  • Armenia's Opposition Has a Bloody Baptism

    The Moscow Times
    Thursday, Apr. 15, 2004. Page 7

    Armenia's Opposition Has a Bloody Baptism

    By Kim Iskyan

    Until a few weeks ago, Armenia was a bedrock of stability compared to its
    neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan. But now Armenia is trying to join Georgia
    in throwing off a corrupt and repressive regime.

    A bit more than a year ago, Armenian President Robert Kocharyan followed up
    a fraudulent presidential election victory with a correspondingly
    counterfeit parliamentary poll a few weeks later. Subsequent opposition
    protests sputtered, but a call by the country's otherwise pro-presidential
    Constitutional Court for a "referendum of confidence" within a year provided
    a shred of hope.

    Twelve months later, with no referendum in sight, and naively inspired by
    last autumn's "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, the Armenian opposition dusted
    off its placards and focused on forcing Kocharyan and Co. to move forward
    with the referendum or else just quit.

    But Armenia isn't Georgia. Demonstrations in Yerevan were initially
    postponed in part due to a chill in the air. Many of the 15,000 people
    ostensibly attending an opposition rally last week were more intent on
    chomping on sunflower seeds in the sunshine than on change. Subsequent
    protests intimated a deep revolutionary spirit in a hardened core, but the
    sentiment was not widespread.

    Part of the problem is that Armenia's opposition hasn't convinced the
    cynical electorate that it is more interested in bringing about real change
    than in having a turn at the feeding trough. And for all his government's
    incompetence and corruption, Kocharyan has kept most Armenians supplied with
    heat, electricity and water most of the time.

    Kocharyan, though, took no chances. Vehicles trying to enter Yerevan over
    the past few days have been forced to turn around for fear that their
    occupants were potential protesters. In the brutally bloody climax to recent
    protests, government troops blasted a few thousand demonstrators with water
    cannons and stun grenades at 2 a.m. in front of the country's parliamentary
    building. The next day, opposition offices were seized by police, and
    opposition leaders went into hiding to avoid arrest. Now that constitutional
    and peaceful means of bringing about change have been met with barbed wire
    and a kick in the head, watch for the opposition to explore other means.

    Meanwhile, much of the head-in-the-sand Armenian diaspora theorizes aloud
    that foreign governments must be behind the unrest, since things really
    aren't that bad in the homeland -- the 50 percent poverty rate
    notwithstanding. So don't look to them to argue with Kocharyan's message of
    power through fear, as Armenia slides down the slippery former-Soviet slope
    toward dictatorship, and not even a benign one at that.


    Kim Iskyan, a freelance journalist and consultant in Yerevan, contributed
    this comment to The Moscow Times.
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