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22.11.07
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By Sergey Markedonov
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The Return of Levon Ter-Petrosyan
It seems like Armenia is creating a new political precedent not only in the South Caucasus, but in the whole post-Soviet space. For the first time, a former head of state is competing to return to power.
This is a new phenomenon for Eurasia. The former leaders of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, could not even consider such an option after retiring from presidential office. The late Boris Yeltsin became a political pensioner, occasionally allowing himself to criticize his successor on some trivial points. The former president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, is also in the same category. The example of Mikhail Gorbachev, who participated in the Russian presidential race of 1996, hardly provides a relevant comparison. Gorbachev led a state that ceased to exist – the Soviet Union.
This year, Levon Ter-Petrosyan has decided to break the post-Soviet tradition of “political demise” after retiring. How realistic his chances are, and how likely he is to make it even to the second round of the presidential ballot is a different question.
But the fact is that the first president of the Republic of Armenia, Levon Akopovich Ter-Petrosyan, has actually launched his campaign. For a politician who has long been written off, such a decision has already changed the electoral agenda.
Meanwhile, only yesterday the result of the elections seemed a foregone conclusion to people both inside Armenia and elsewhere. Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisyan was considered the favorite, running as an official successor to the current leader Robert Kocharyan. According to an opposition newspaper Aikakan Zhamanak, “By running in the upcoming presidential election, Levon Ter-Petrosyan has created a second center of influence within Armenia’s politics. This process has already become a reality, and it will deepen every day.”
Ter-Petrosyan ruled Armenia for 7 years, and resigned on February 3, 1998, as a result of a disagreement with top government officials over the issue of settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan. He has since refrained from commenting on the performance of the new administration; instead, Ter-Petrosyan returned to his academic interests. He received a doctoral degree in philology back in 1987 and has spent recent years writing a six-volume work titled “The Armenians and the Crusaders.” The first two volumes were published in 2005 and 2007.
However, following more than nine years of silence, the first Armenian president has spoken up again: “After 16 years of independence we are standing before a divide. The main task today is to destroy and eliminate the current system of power, the thoroughly corrupt – from top to bottom – criminal regime, which is guided not by the people’s will, but by the customs and practices of the criminal world.”
This was Ter-Petrosyan’s assessment of the country’s present government expressed during a reception celebrating the 16th anniversary of the country’s independence. And although the reception was organized by a marginal political party – the Armenian National Movement – Ter-Petrosyan’s words were heard loud and clear at the highest level.
Then the former president started speaking publicly at meetings. During a rally on Theater Square in Yerevan on October 26, he gave an hour and a half long speech. That was when Ter-Petrosyan stated his intent to participate in the presidential elections next February. The rally was followed with a series of meetings with representatives of influential international organizations and groups of voters. In November, Ter-Petrosyan met with Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, followed by a meeting with Armenian youth groups. Later he delivered public apologies to the citizens of Armenia for the social and economic hardships of the period of reforms he oversaw during his tenure.
But will Ter-Petrosyan have enough resources to compete with Armenia’s ruling government? Of course, this is not a question of money. Former presidents don’t have to worry about fundraising. The real question is whether the current regime will tolerate at least some competition, and foster the conditions similar to those of Russia’s 1996 presidential elections. That would turn the ex-president’s return to big politics into a demonstration of the elite’s democratic credentials. So far, the pro-government forces in Armenia have not shown a sign of such a commitment. Practically all the official mass media unanimously started recalling the “cold” and “hungry” 1990s.
But when mentioning the “cold and hunger” of the previous decade, it has to be noted that the country’s first president had to face the brutal war in Nagorno-Karabakh, which lasted until May 1994 and ended in a military victory for the Armenian side. And throughout the 1990s, pressure from Turkey was much stronger than it is today. The Georgian-Abkhaz conflict in 1992-1993 also called for a serious interference on the part of Armenia due to the presence of more than 70,000 Armenians in Abkhazia.
It is worth remembering the scale of the challenges Ter-Petrosyan confronted during his tenure. He had to create new national governmental bodies, the army, special services and the police; for the sake of survival, he had to impose some discipline on a society that has grown accustomed to meetings and strikes after the start of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1988. Ter-Petrosyan inherited a failing economy, since the republic could only operate as part of a planned Soviet system. Facing a blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan, he also had to lift up a debt-ridden economy.
However, Ter-Petrosyan himself hardly neglected the topic of cold and hunger during his discussion with potential voters. Having repented, he noted that “the dark and cold years” became the “price of freedom for Nagorno-Karabakh.” But is Armenia’s varied opposition ready to accept and value the legacy of Ter-Petrosyan’s era?
Today the answer is more likely to be negative. In the words of Shavarsh Kocharyan, the leader of the National Democratic Party, “Armenia’s first President Levon Ter-Petrosyan was able to obtain independence for Armenia, but he was unable to put it to good use.” And the speaker is neither a representative of the Armenian “party of power” (the Republican Party) nor a functionary of the presidential administration. Many politicians opposed to the current regime cannot forgive Ter-Petrosyan for the fact that many of today’s tendencies (the overbearing use of “administrative resources,” the pressure on mass media, and so on) first emerged when he was still in power.
Of course, many will recall the scandalous presidential election of 1996. On September 21, 1996, Ter-Petrosyan was elected for a second term as president. But days later upheaval followed in Yerevan, caused by the protesting opposition, and a state of emergency was declared. Law enforcement agencies persecuted a number of opposition leaders, many of whom stand against President Kocharyan today.
These events also cast a shadow on the country’s first president. Many figures in the opposition movement today believe that Ter-Petrosyan is responsible for the appearance of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sarkisyan on Armenia’s political arena. Indeed, it was Ter-Petrosyan who initiated Kocharyan’s appointment as Armenia’s prime minister on March 20, 1997. Incidentally, a number of analysts in Armenia, and even in Azerbaijan, consider this step to have been a major strategic mistake on his part. By recruiting Kocharyan, a native of Nagorno-Karabakh, into the Armenian political elite, Ter-Petrosyan deprived the contested Armenian enclave of any formal independence. From that point on, political figures from Nagorno-Karabakh settled down in Yerevan.
The most difficult problem, however, consensus on a solution to which is practically unattainable, is the possibility of reaching a settlement over the Karabakh conflict. In his speech on September 26, 1997, Ter-Petrosyan advocated a compromise in resolving the issue. Armenia’s president practically agreed to a step-by-step settlement of the conflict.
Until then, the Armenian elite supported the idea of the so-called “package plan,” which meant “packaging” any signed accords with a long-term agreement on the prospects of the future “peace” deal. Unlike the “package plan,” the step-by-step settlement process implied postponing an immediate resolution in favor of “small deeds” (for example a partial withdrawal of Armenian armed forces from the Azerbaijani territories outside Nagorno-Karabakh or a gradual return of displaced people).
These problems were supposed to be addressed in the process of negotiations, as mutual trust between the conflicting sides would increase. The opposition saw such an approach on behalf of the president of Armenia as treachery. Today many people – not only representatives of the pro-government camp, but also the opposition – agree with this assessment of the former president’s decision.
Political analyst David Petrosyan justly notes that “President Robert Kocharyan has shown his concern for the present situation, even threatening his predecessor with bringing up things from the past. Indeed, there were more than enough violations of the law in the 1990s, but things haven’t really changed since then. The former rulers of Armenia probably also have enough information on the more objectionable ‘feats’ of the current administration. Thus, we do not believe that Robert Kocharyan’s threats can influence the situation in any significant way.”
Today, Ter-Petrosyan’s main goal is not only to defeat the regime, but also to consolidate the opposition. To be more precise, it is impossible to think of accomplishing the first goal without achieving the second. Meanwhile, uniting the ranks of the wrangling opposition presents a difficult challenge. Armenia’s first president will have to answer thousands of embarrassing questions, explaining his personal role not only in the mistakes made in the past, but also in contributing to what is happening in the country today.
Only after accomplishing all of these tasks will Levon Ter-Petrosyan be able to avoid the fate of the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who received just 1 percent of the vote in 1996.
Sergei Markedonov is the head of the Interethnic Relations Department at Moscow’s Institute of Political and Military Analysis. |
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