THE MAGNIFICENT FOURSOME

The Armenian opposition has marked the sixth anniversary of the tragic events of 1 March 2008, when army special forces fired on the participants in a rally in the streets of Yerevan, who were protesting against the falsifying of the results in the presidential elections on 19 February that year. At that time, according to official versions, the current president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, had been victorious in the first round. His main rival was the first president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan.

According to various estimates, 7,000-10,000 were present at the rally that was held in Yerevan on 1 March 2014. There was a procession from Theatre Square to Myasnikyan, where the March events ultimately ended in tragedy. 

As might have been expected, there were sufficient radical statements made. To begin with, those attending the rally held a minute of silence to remember the 10 people who perished on 1 March 2008. Addressing those gathered in Freedom Square, Armenia's former president, the leader of the Armenian National Congress party, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, said that the greatest threat to Armenia was the continuing exodus of its population.

"What is acceptable to us is a union which promotes the prosperity of the Armenian people on their own land and facilitates the growth of Armenia's population," Ter-Petrosyan stated. At the same time, to many people's surprise, he said that membership of the Customs Union [with Russia] was irreversible and that the prospects for integration with the European Union in the foreseeable future were unrealistic, having stressed that all the political forces should proceed from "the irrefutable actual circumstances" in mapping out their activity and that he thought that ignoring these circumstance might lead to serious mistakes and dangerous consequences.  

According to the leader of the Armenian National Congress, task No. 1 in this connection was to promote authorities who would be maximally capable of exploiting the possibilities in the national interests offered by this union and to reduce the negative aspects as far as possible, since the present authorities were incapable of implementing the requisite reforms in the country, and this is why they should resign. 

First and foremost, the Sargsyan regime does not understand the meaning of national interests sufficiently well to carry out this mission. National interests and the Sargsyan regime are incompatible concepts. The impression is being created that we are dealing with foreign conquerors or with a band of robbers who have managed to come to power, the first president stated.

In his speech the head of the Armenian National Congress parliamentary faction, Levon Zurabyan, touched upon the activity of the so called "foursome format" of the parties of the "Armenian National Congress", "Prosperous Armenia", "Heritage" and the "Dashnaksutyun Armenian Revolutionary Federation", which had joined forces in order to initiate the declaration of a vote of no confidence in the country's government. "We have managed to raise the issue of the authorities' shady gas-related enterprises and the issue of an investigation being carried out into the events of 1 March. The four main forces in the country have created a single front against the authorities, debates are being held, and possibly the issue of a vote of no confidence in the government of Armenia will very soon be put point-blank; this moment is drawing near. I do not rule out the fact that these forces will possibly put forward the issue of impeachment of Serzh Sargsyan," Zurabyan said.

The secretary of the parliamentary faction of the Armenian National Congress, Aram Manukyan, agree with him, after noting that exposure of the crime of 1 March is not only a legal issue, but also a matter of overall dignity. "Either Armenians get the culprits punished for the events of 1 March 2008 or Armenians are not a nation. No matter when this happens, but these crimes need to be brought to light. The same is true of the shooting in the parliament on 27 October 1999," Manukyan stressed. He informed them that the protesters from the regions were barring the way to the capital, but that the way to the movement of the people could not be barred. 

It is of course possible that the authorities in Armenia would simply not take any notice of the radical statements made by the opposition members. All the more so since the leaders of the opposition in Armenia are constantly making fine-sounding statements, but as a rule it doesn't go any further than that. To all appearances, moreover, the opposition leaders did not even plan to hold rallies round-the-clock, they did not bring their tents with them and did not promise that there would be endless actions until they "gained victory". But the good news for official Yerevan stops here. First of all, the opposition managed to get together at least 10,000 people at their rally, according to the most modest estimates. It is also important that the opposition has managed to unite, albeit with difficulty. A sort of coalition has already taken shape which is referred to in Yerevan as "the magnificent foursome": it consists of the "Armenian National Congress", the Armenian Revolutionary Federation "Dashnaksutyun", "Heritage" and the "Prosperous Armenia" party headed by Gagik Tsarukyan. The latter numbers among its ranks Armenia's former foreign minister, Vardan Oskanyan, on whose support  those surrounding Armenia's second president, Robert Kocharyan, are evidently staking. In other words, the rift in the "[Azerbaijan's breakaway region of] Karabakh clan" is deepening. Moreover, the water oligarch, Gagik Tsarukyan, is expressing the interests of at least a considerable part of Armenian big business.

The fact that the staff of major Yerevan enterprises, including "Grand Candy" and the long-suffering "Nairita", joined the opposition members at the rally is an even more alarming symptom for the authorities. The opposition parties are actively encouraging voters making social protests to join them. In the state of affairs in Armenia, these tactics are more than dangerous for the country's authorities. In short, the protest action on 1 March confirmed yet again that events in Armenia are possibly developing towards a worse variant for the ruling team.

The complaints of the Yerevan political scientists are also worthy of special attention, particularly of those who are commonly referred to as being in the pro-Western camp; they are complaining about the "lack of action" on the part of the West, which, they say, rendered serious support to the Ukrainian opposition, but ignored their Armenian colleagues. 

But Ter-Petrosyan is already openly seeking a union with Moscow. His speech at the 1 March rally may be regarded as a message directed towards Russia that not only Sargsyan can look after her interests in the region. This is already a rather more alarming symptom for Armenia than many people think.

Naturally, a long time can be spent analysing and arguing about the extent to which the West was behind the events in Kiev's Maidan Square and what reasons for them were purely Ukrainian. But there is something else that is much important: in appealing to people's thinking, the political forces in Armenia are staking on external "players", which is extremely typical of Armenian history over the last few decades. The authorities in Armenia are obviously placing their hopes in Russia's support, calculating that it is precisely Moscow that will resolve Armenia's problems and will do everything needed to keep "their own" in power. But Moscow is in no hurry to become part of this process. This is simply because Armenia which is a small, poor country, isolated from the leading regional projects thanks to its own aggressive policy, does not evoke such interest in foreign players as Ukraine does.

 It is hardly likely that the rivals for power in Yerevan today are capable of and really ready to change the situation. In order to get Armenia out of the political dead-end, those unpopular Azerbaijan- and Turkey-related compromises for which it is high time, need to be made, but alas in Armenia neither the authorities nor the opposition are ready to do this. So, this means that the situation of its citizens is hardly likely to change for the better, even in the event of hypothetical, extensive internal political changes occurring in Armenia. Well, perhaps with the exception of the "close circle" of the new winners.