ASALA ACTING AS OPPOSITION

Just recently, the focus of attention of Armenian public was on the tragedy in Gyumri where Valeriy Permyakov, a Russian soldier who had deserted from Russia's 102nd military base, shot dead seven members of the Avetisyan family. Now politicians and experts are discussing a new incident which is fortunately not so tragic.

On 31 January, activists of the so-called Constituent Parliament who intended to hold their motor rally in the occupied Karabakh, were beaten in the Lacin corridor [a mountain pass within the borders of Azerbaijan forming the shortest route between Armenia and Nagornyy Karabakh].

Syuzan Simonyan, a co-founder of the Rights and Support Foundation, told the following to Armenian media. "There were many people in mufti; they blocked the road. There were masked people with assault rifles and snipers above our heads. We were lined up very close to each other and it is only thanks to Zhirayr Sefilyan's reasonable tactic as commander that we had no casualties. He had told us in advance, before we reached the place, that we should not get out of our cars if we encountered an obstacle. We lined up as Zhirayr with several fellows left his car and came up to a group. Police and riot police arrived. They popped up like a landing force. When it became clear for Zhirayr Sefilyan during their talk that the way was barred and they failed to reach an agreement, he turned around and walked along the entire motorcade instructing them to turn back. Until that moment, everything seemed to be peaceful but when Sefilyan passed by our car we were attacked by a group of bandits," Syuzan Simonyan said.

Policemen and young people wearing riot police uniforms were striking blows. And all that was happening at gunpoint with volleys of automatic fire unleashed over our heads by submachine-gunners standing at some height," a march participant said. According to him, "among those beaten up were Zhirayr Sefilyan, his wife and son, Pavlik Manukyan, Varuzhan Avetisyan, Igor Muradyan, Alek Yenigomshyan and another 10-15 people who had their telephones, money and passports taken out of their pockets. He drew his own conclusions: "If you look at this from the political point of view, it appears that Karabakh representatives have shown that there is a border with Armenia and Armenian residents have no right to go to Karabakh".

The Karabakh separatist regime has its own theory. Thus, the head of the regime, Bako Sahakyan, has held a special meeting on the incident and ordered investigation. He announced that, allegedly, the initiative to hold the motor rally in Karabakh by the opposition civil initiative Pre-Parliament aroused indignation from the very outset and that hundreds of people were going to "hinder the motor rally" and the police had to intervene between the motor rally participants and the Karabakh residents to prevent clashes.

One could ask to what extent the violent dispersal of the "motor rally" participants matches with what some human rights non-governmental organizations say about the extraordinarily democratic nature of the occupation regime in Karabakh. Or one could just specify whether investigation makes any sense at all now that Mr Sahakyan has already outlined the official version. In our view, the most important factor in all that matter is that the "Constituent Parliament" is a new opposition association which has come to replace Pre-Parliament, another opposition structure in Armenia with the same persons and the same "slogan" platform. Activists of the Constituent Parliament promised that this alternative body would represent the will of the people from the day of its foundation and assume responsibility for establishing a special system of state administration guided by national interests, for forming a democratic state, incorporating Karabakh de jure in the Republic of Armenia and organizing a transitional process of the country's decolonization. Most importantly, they promised to usher in the centenary of the "Armenian genocide" without the incumbent "regime".

As many experts say today, there is an obvious excess of all sorts of parliamentary, non-parliamentary and other organizational structures. Against their background, the Constituent Parliament would hardly deserve any special attention if it were not for one circumstance: its core is made up of former (if they can ever be former) professional Armenian terrorists, just those who gained combat experience in the Middle East and then moved to Armenia and Karabakh. Among them are both Zhirayr Sefilyan and Alek Yenigomshyan, one of the chieftains of the terrorist organization ASALA [Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia], who has served quite a long term in a Swiss prison for terrorism.

If reports by Yerevan-based pro-government media are true, the Constituent Parliament is a structure having no support with the people and deserving no serious attention altogether. However, the stiffness displayed by Armenia's authorities - a man of sense will find it hard to believe in the Karabakh puppets' independence - in suppressing the motor rally, leaves no doubt that official Yerevan has seen direct and obvious threat to themselves in the Constituent Parliament. This is no wonder. First and foremost, the Constituent Parliament maintains a hard-line pro-Western position. Meanwhile there is an exceptionally favourable environment for anti-Russian sentiments in today's Armenia. In the first place, it is only natural that the country's public opinion is astir with the recent tragedy in Gyumri. Apart from this, as from 1 January 2015, Armenia at last became a member of the Eurasian Union, although, as is known, it had to join it without Karabakh which was quite rightly assessed in Yerevan as a failure. Naturally enough, forces positioning themselves as pro-Western ones tried to play on that, carefully withholding the fact that there was a no less impressive failure at the NATO summit in Wales where its participants spoke in support of Azerbaijan's territorial integrity. The most important thing is that Serzh Sargsyan's "narrow circle" is well aware that the Constituent Parliament is an assembly of just those politicians who will not hesitate to try and settle all problems with the use of time bombs and the Kalashnikov assault rifle; or the favourite weapon of terrorists in the 1970s - the Czech-made Skorpion submachine gun. It looks like the memories of the "parliament shooting" in Yerevan on 27 October 1999 are too fresh.