Armenia in Crisis

October 27 should have been a day for optimism in Armenia. There were signs of genuine progress in the long-paralyzed talks with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh (Page One); local elections had just been held which won praise from international observers as the freest yet; and a new Catholicos of All Armenians was to be elected that day to head the Armenian Church worldwide. (See the Profile in this issue.)

But as the newly elected head of the Armenian Church was delivering his acceptance remarks in the see Armenians call Holy Etchmiadzin, word arrived that in nearby Yerevan, gunmen had shot up the Parliament, had wounded the Prime Minister, and were holding Parliamentarians hostage. Soon it was learned that both the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament — the two men who jointly dominated the Unity Party which won control of Parliament last year — were dead, as were several other senior officials. By the next day the Army was demanding the resignation of key security ministers, and the country seemed to be on the verge of chaos. The enthronement of the new Catholicos was postponed, and President Robert Kocharian sought to bring the various political parties together in show of national unity (though there were critics who saw Kocharian as potentially gaining strength from the deaths of his political rivals).

No one is likely to mistake the Caucasus for Western Europe anytime soon. Armenia and Azerbaijan have yet to resolve their war over Nagorno-Karabakh, and both countries have long faced internal strains; Georgia has had to struggle with secessionist movements in Abkhazia and Adjaria, and several assassination attempts against President Eduard Shevardnadze, and of course, in the Northern Caucasus, Russian forces were grinding their way towards Grozny in the latest Chechen War. (See also the story on Page One.)

President Robert Kocharian

Despite a fragile economy, Armenia had seemed to be doing a bit better in the past year, at least politically. The elections last May 30 had given the Miasnutyun (Unity) Party virtual control of Parliament, creating a counterbalance to Robert Kocharian’s Presidency. The two heads of Unity, Vazgen Sarkissian (Sargsyan) and Karen Demirchian were named Prime Minister and Speaker of the Parliament, respectively. But both men are now dead, and the two parties which united to form Unity were, really, merely power bases for their now-departed leaders. (Longstanding feuds between the “Karabakh” faction — Kocharian comes from Nagorno-Karabakh — and the “Yerevan” faction behind Sarkissian and Demirchian may also be resurrected.)

The limited information available initially seemed to indicate that the five attackers led by Nairi Hunanian were acting on their own and were perhaps somewhat confused or even delusional about their goals. If that proves to be the case, and there are no clear links of the attackers with any political party or individual, the country may weather the storm successfully, despite considerable confusion. But given the instability of the region generally, problems in the Armenian economy and continuing questions about potential links between the attackers and various factions, it is not easy to be optimistic. This Dossier looks at some of the players and issues.

T he five men who opened fire on the Armenian Parliament have been variously described as “sick people” and “schizophrenics” who did not seem to have a clear set of demands, other than a profound dislike of Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian (Sargsyan). Though their leader, Nairi Hunanian, had a past affiliation with the Armenian Revolutionary FederationDashnaktsutiun Party (Dashnaks for short), that group’s leader, Vahan Hovanissian, said that they had been expelled in the early 1990s. (The Dashnaks had been banned under former President Levon Ter-Petrossian but were legalized by Kocharian; a Dashnak connection with the killings could lead to suspicions of Kocharian’s own involvement.)

Parliament Speaker Karen Demirchian (Assassinated)

The killings — beyond their obvious shock effect and destabilizing impact — also threatened Armenia’s relatively fragile democratic institutions. Political parties are still, largely, organized more around the personalities of charismatic leaders than around clear-cut ideological programs. The Unity Party which gained virtual control of Parliament in this year’s elections is essentially an alliance between the Republicans, who followed the charismatic late Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian, and the Democrats of longtime Communist Party boss Karen Demirchian. Sarkissian’s support was drawn from his reputation as a founder of the Armenian army during the war over Nagorno-Karabakh (which Armenians call Artsakh); as a longtime Defense Minister he had widespread support among the Army.

The Democrats emerged as a personal vehicle for the political comeback of Karen Demirchian, Communist Party boss in the 1980s but in eclipse for over a decade until he ran against Robert Kocharian in 1998 and ran a strong second. Though associated by many with the bad old days of the Armenian earthquake and Soviet repression of Armenian nationalism, he clearly had a political base.

The two men, and their two parties, might have seemed strange political bedfellows, but they shared concerns about the power of Robert Kocharian, who is from Karabakh, and some speak of the “Yerevan” faction as opposed to Kocharian’s “Karabakh” faction.

The killers not only killed the two party chiefs, Sarkissian and Demirchian, but also both Deputy Speakers of Parliament and four other officials. They virtually decapitated the Parliamentary leadership.

Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkissian (Sargsyan) (Assassinated)

President Robert Kocharian moved quickly to give an impression of strength and firmness, calling the leaders of all parties together and calling for a united front in the crisis. But the problem was a deep one: when Parliament sought to assemble to elect a new leadership, it discovered that, without a leadership, there was no constitutional way to convene the body. (An emergency session can be convened by one-third of the members, but only if supported by the Speaker, and with the Speaker and both Deputies dead, there was no one to sign off on the question.) As a result, President Kocharian had to call a special session using Presidential authority.

Reflecting the Unity bloc’s dominant position in Parliament and the desire for an image of national unity, the new Speaker was elected from Unity and the two Deputies represent the two major parties constituting Unity. But none of them have the national reputation of Sarkissian and Demirchian. Perhaps even more indicative of the grasping for symbolism was the choice of Aram Sarkissian, the younger brother of the murdered Prime Minister, as the new Prime Minister. The younger Sarkissian is a virtual political unknown, a man who had been running a cement factory in a provincial town. (The new leaders are profiled at the end of this Dossier.)

The Army’s Role

Adding to the jitters naturally produced by the decapitation of Parliament was nervousness over the Armed Forces’ intentions. Immediately after the massacre (the next day), a communiqué was issued by the Defense Ministry demanding the firing of Interior Minister Suren Abrahamian, National Security Minister Serge Sarkissian, and the country’s Prosecutor General, for the security lapse which allowed the invasion of Parliament. The move, which seemed to threaten a coup, put Kocharian in an awkward position at a moment when he was desperately attempting to convey an image of strong leadership; Serge Sarkissian in particular is a close political ally of Kocharian’s. Adding to the problem were reports that the military had set up road blocks outside of Yerevan to control access to the capital.

The Defense Ministry’s statement did not explicitly threaten intervention, but it did claim that earlier complaints about attacks on the senior military command had been ignored and that “What has happened became possible only in the situation of absolute absence of a security system in this country”, warning as well that “the current situation is fraught with unpredictable consequences”.

In addition, there were rumors that Kocharian was under considerable pressure not only to accept the resignations of the Interior and Security Ministers but also to maintain the Prime Ministership in the party of the fallen Prime Minister. The choice of his younger brother for the job presumably satisfied military desires in that respect.

No one really expected a military coup as such, but the military posturing clearly limited Kocharian’s freedom of action and provided a strong reminder of the source of Vazgen Sarkissian’s original political strength.

What Impact on the Karabakh Talks?

The killings came at a moment when, for the first time since the fall of Levon Ter-Petrossian in early 1998, there seemed to be real progress towards a settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. That immediately led to the questions of whether the killings were inspired by those prospects, and whether the prospects would fade in the wake of the massacre.

The answer to the first is that as this was written there was no clear evidence that Karabakh was the immediate motivation for the killings. But even so, progress towards peace may be impeded by the change of leadership.

Since the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh war with a ceasefire in 1994, neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan have moved significantly from their original positions. The so-called Minsk Group seeking a solution to the problem has sought to come up with a formula for genuine self-determination for the Armenian-populated region without removing it completely from Azeri sovereignty; Azerbaijan has stuck by its claims to the region and Armenia has insisted on independence. (And of course, the current President of Armenia is in fact from Karabakh.) (For a fuller background to the issue, see the three-part Dossier on Nagorno-Karabakh in The Estimate for July 18, August 1, and August 15, 1997.)

When President Levon Ter-Petrossian sought to accept a Minsk formula which amounted to less than full independence in early 1998, he was brought down, and Karabakh leader Kocharian soon replaced him.

 There had been widespread speculation of a new breakthrough on Karabakh during this month’s Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Summit in Istanbul, scheduled for November 18-19. US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott has been in the region seeking to promote a bargain (He met with Vazgen Sarkissian only hours before the Armenian killings), and opposition figures in both Armenia and Azerbaijan have been warning against a sellout. Since early October, there have been demonstrations in Azerbaijan charging that President Haydar Aliyev might be ready to give up absolute Azeri sovereignty over Karabakh, and Aliyev’s Foreign Minister was fired over the issue. (For more on the Azeri internal situation, see the lead story .)

 By some accounts, it had been hoped that Aliyev and Kocharian could sign an agreement at the Istanbul Summit which would call for autonomy for Karabakh in such a way as not to seem to be aggressively asserting Azeri sovereignty, while Armenia would be accepting something less than full independence for Karabakh. Although both Kocharian (himself a former President of Karabakh) and Vazgen Sarkissian were seen as hard-liners on Karabakh, some believe that Sarkissian might have been moving towards a compromise solution.

The statements by the attackers, at least insofar as they were made public, did not link their actions to Karabakh so much as to claims that Sarkissian was not legitimately elected, and allegations of corruption. But even if Karabakh was not the motive, the killings may serve as a deterrent to any compromise: the new leadership lack the clout or personal reputation of the old, and a weak government is less likely to accept an unpleasant compromise. Armenia is by no means out of the crisis brought upon it by the killers, and another casualty may be the proposed Karabakh compromise formula.

The New Prime Minister: Aram Sarkissian

T he man named to succeed the slain Prime Minister of Armenia, Vazgen Sarkissian, is his younger brother Aram, who has not been active in politics, ran a cement factory in the town of Ararat, and is little known in the capital of Yerevan. But the disappearance of most of the leadership of the two parties which make up the Miasnutyun (Unity) Bloc which controls Parliament created a vacuum which needed to be filled; Aram Sarkissian may, however, prove to be primarily a symbolic stand-in for his murdered brother. Whether he will enjoy the strong support of the Army which his brother, a founder of Armenia’s Army and longtime Defense Minister, enjoyed is another question.

Aram Sarkissian is 38, born January 2, 1961, in the village of Ararat in the Ararat region. After local secondary school he studied sculpture at an art school in Yerevan, served in the Soviet Army 1981-83, and then graduated as an engineer from the Architectural Construction Department of Yerevan Polytechnic Institute in 1989. He returned to Ararat and worked in the Araratstroytrust factory, then transferred in 1993 to theArarat Cement Factory, where he served as Assistant Director-General and then as Deputy Director-General for capital construction. In 1998 he became its Executive Director. He joined his brother’s Republican Party and the Yerkrapah union of volunteers from the Karabakh war, but was not otherwise active in politics. He was chosen over some other possible candidates by Unity and then appointed by President Robert Kocharian on November 3, the one-week anniversary of the massacre.

Aram Sarkissian is married with three children.

The New Speaker: Armen Khachatrian

A rmen Khachatrian, 42, a close political ally of murdered Parliament Speaker Karen Demirchian, was chosen to succeed Demirchian on November 2. Khachatrian is from Yerevan, and was a founder of Demirchian’s Democratic Party, which along with the late Vazgen Sarkissian’s Republican Party forms the Unity Bloc.

Khachatrian studied in the Philology Department of the State Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1978, and taught the Armenian language at a local school before becoming head of the Science Department of the National Picture Gallery in 1980-91; he then worked with the Komsomol, the Communist Youth Movement, and returned to teaching at School Number 191 in Yerevan until 1990. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, he became the principal and founding member of the Hrachia Acharian University in Yerevan.

When former Communist leader Karen Demirchian ran for President in 1998, Khachatrian headed his election effort, and became Co-Chairman and Board Chairman of the Unity Alliance. He was elected to Parliament earlier this year and chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. He speaks four languages, is married, and has three children.

The Two New Deputy Speakers

T he two Deputy Speakers chosen on November 2 represent the two parties constituting the Unity Bloc: the Democratic Party of the late Karen Demirchian and the Republican Party of Vazgen Sarkissian.

Representing Sarkissian’s Republicans is Tigran Torosian, a 43-year-old engineer from Yerevan with a doctorate and a background in computers. He joined the party in 1993, and has been its Deputy Chairman since 1998. Elected to Parliament this year, he is married with one daughter.

From the Democratic Party comes Gagik Aslanian, 45, from the village of Talin, an economist by training, with a Ph.D., who became Chief Economist of the Plastic Company in Yerevan and in 1993 its Deputy Director. Like many in the Democratic Party he was a member of the former Communist Party, joining Demirchian’s Democrats for the Presidential elections of 1998. Elected to Parliament this year, he chairs the State and Law Committee. He is married with three children.

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