True Democracy Is Key Issue as Armenians Vote

As soon as Armenia’s contentious parliamentary elections are over today, Flora Nakhshkaryan expects that the government will shut down her newspaper once again.

“Armenia is not a democracy,” said Nakhshkaryan, editor in chief of the vitriolic but popular anti-government daily Golos Armenii, which means Voice of Armenia in Russian. “We are becoming a police state.”

In the past six months, Armenian President Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan has suspended an important opposition party, brushed off the death of one of its leaders in prison and shut down about a dozen opposition newspapers, magazines and news agencies. Now he is asking Armenian voters to approve a new, highly authoritarian constitution that would give him sweeping powers of which Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin could only dream.

Exhausted by seven years of war and economic hardship, the Armenian public seems little troubled by opposition leaders’ charges that this nation, which regained its independence just four years ago, is edging toward dictatorship.

Many credit Ter-Petrosyan with keeping their young country safe from the coups, civil wars and militarism that have ravaged neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia. In the volatile Caucasus region, that achievement alone will earn votes for his ruling party in the country’s first post-Soviet parliamentary elections.

Ter-Petrosyan, an anti-populist and somewhat remote scholar of linguistics, was once seen by the West as a model fledgling democrat.

But the crackdown on the opposition, the increasingly subdued tone taken by the state-owned media and allegations of widespread harassment of political foes and election campaign violations suggest that he may be flirting with a more authoritarian style of government such as those taking hold in many other former Soviet republics.

Ter-Petrosyan has not had himself declared president into the next millennium, as three Central Asian potentates have done. And he has refrained from disbanding his balky Soviet-era Parliament with tank fire, as Yeltsin did in 1993.

Still, his December ban on the ultranationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation, better known as the Dashnak party, earned a rare protest from the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan. Armenia’s highest court later reduced the ban to a six-month suspension--just long enough to keep the party from competing in today’s elections.

The trial of Dashnak leaders on charges of drug trafficking, assassinating the former mayor of Yerevan and sponsoring terrorism is scheduled to begin Friday. Meanwhile, the 21 suspects are being held in solitary confinement, according to Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki, the only human rights monitor who has been allowed into the prison.

Ter-Petrosyan and his government have denied any responsibility for the May death of Artavazd Manukyan, one of the imprisoned Dashnaks.

According to the government autopsy, the 40-year-old Manukyan died of a heart attack brought on by double pneumonia and from anemia caused by hemorrhaging. The official report said there was no evidence of bodily trauma, and the government says Manukyan died in the hospital despite efforts to save him.

Opposition leaders say there is no way to know whether Manukyan was mistreated or died from untreated illness. But they insist that his lawyer, family and doctor begged for three months that he be transferred to a hospital and that the requests were denied.

It’s Called Murder’

“If you know a man is ill and he is bleeding, and you have three requests from his lawyers to give him urgent medical care and you refuse, what is that called?” Nakhshkaryan asked. “It’s called murder.”

International diplomats were denied permission to visit Manukyan in prison before his death.

In a steely appearance in Parliament several days later, Ter-Petrosyan expressed no regret over the death and instead fiercely denounced the right-wing Dashnaks as “a terrorist fascist organization.”

To millions of ethnic Armenians in the United States, Europe and elsewhere in the diaspora, these developments have dimmed hopes that Armenia could make a smooth transition from communism to free-market democracy.

Now it appears that even this tiny, homogenous country, chockablock with entrepreneurs and Ph.D.s who have extensive contact with Western values through relatives living abroad, has not been able to escape the strong-arm-style political culture forged by 70 years of Soviet rule.

“It is still one of the most democratic countries in the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States], but it’s certainly less democratic than it was before December,” when Ter-Petrosyan shut down the Dashnaks, said University of Michigan scholar Ronald G. Suny.

“If I say Armenia is a purely dictatorial country, that would not be true,” said former Prime Minister Vazgen Manukyan, leader of an anti-government electoral coalition. “When we gained independence, we were a democracy in name but without any democratic institutions. Our leaders were required to check their own use of power since there were no checks upon them,” a test that Ter-Petrosyan has failed, said Manukyan, who is not related to the Manukyan who died in May.

“Now we are going through a transition from a semi-democratic system to an authoritarian regime,” he said.

On the charming but dilapidated streets of ancient Yerevan, political violence and intimidation are on the rise.

Two weeks ago, opposition demonstrators clashed with pro-government paramilitary troops in a bloody melee in downtown Yerevan that put at least four demonstrators in the hospital. Both pro- and anti-government candidates and journalists, as well as three of the Dashnak defense lawyers, have reportedly been beaten.

Opposition leaders say that 32 political foes of the government, including the Dashnaks, are in jail and that criminal cases are pending against at least 60 more. They also allege that the Central Election Commission has been packed with government backers who have unfairly disqualified eight opposition parties from today’s ballot.

The government says that some of the party members’ signatures were forged and that the Dashnaks were suspended by the high court because their leaders were foreign citizens--and many were foreign residents--in direct violation of the election law. The Dashnaks have 18 seats in Parliament and could have tried to amend the law instead of flouting it, government officials said.

“Democracy is a contract,” said Jirayr S. Liparitian, an American academic who is now a senior adviser to Ter-Petrosyan on national security issues. “Parties have to respect the rules, and individuals have to respect the rules--and they often don’t.

“It is not their purpose to have a good election,” Liparitian said of the opposition. “It is their purpose to discredit the election.”

As for the fate of Golos Armenii, neither Liparitian nor presidential spokesman Levon Zurabyan was sympathetic. Unlike the Dashnak-sponsored newspapers that were shut down in December, Golos Armenii has no link to the banned group. But the ex-Communist, muckraking broad sheet has insulted almost every senior government official.

Liparitian said the paper routinely prints wholly false information, accusing him of being a CIA agent and “selling” the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave to Azerbaijan.

“If this was the United States, I would have taken them to court,” he said. “Why should we support them?”

The campaign against Golos has been long and nasty. Last year, the government brought a court case against the newspaper for “disseminating disinformation”--and lost. Next, unknown thugs ransacked its offices, severely beat one employee and told others to stop publishing or else, Nakhshkaryan said. The paper’s electricity was inexplicably cut off for four months, and now it is being evicted from its state-owned office building.

Fragile Democracy

Ter-Petrosyan’s aides passionately defend the fight against the Dashnaks as necessary to save Armenia’s still-fragile democracy.

Zurabyan insisted that the government has evidence that a clandestine wing of the party smuggled heroin from Beirut to Yerevan to Moscow and on to Europe to finance its political activities. Moreover, he said, documents seized by the government prove that the underground Dashnaks had the former mayor of Yerevan murdered and masterminded other political assassinations.

Dashnak leaders have denied all charges. Critics--and some Westerners--wonder whether they can get a fair trial under the Soviet-era court system.

The Dashnaks have been the leading voice of the Armenian diaspora, but after 50 years in exile, they have not established deep roots in independent Armenia.

In recent weeks, opposition demonstrations have reportedly drawn crowds as large as 35,000, but a gathering on Freedom Square last week drew 5,000 at most.

Many were elderly people who were looking to the opposition not for fresh political ideas but for economic salvation. With monthly pensions worth $6, their poverty is so desperate--even by post-Soviet standards--that even the frailest among them work in cottage industries to earn money for food.

Still, Ter-Petrosyan has major advantages heading into the elections. Most independent observers predict his party will place first even if it does not command a majority of the 190 parliamentary seats.

A seven-year war with Azerbaijan over the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh enclave culminated last year in a huge seizure of Azerbaijani territory by Armenian forces. A 13-month-old cease-fire appears to be holding, giving the Armenians both land and peace--at least temporarily.

The economy, though paralyzed by an energy blockade by Armenia’s pro-Azerbaijani neighbors, is gradually stabilizing.

Garina Khknavorian, 47, said Ter-Petrosyan was probably wrong to shut down newspapers and suspend the Dashnak party, but overall she views the president as a force for stability.

“They say it’s becoming a police state, but there are pluses to that too,” she said. “You couldn’t walk the streets two years ago. Hooligans would tear off your gold chains and snatch fur hats off people’s heads, and there were several burglaries in our building.”

Now the crime rate has fallen, Khknavorian said, and she can walk the streets at night safely. For that, she will vote for the status quo.

“People just want to live in peace,” she said.