Armenia’s Rebel With a Cause

Since Prime Minister Robert Kocharyan took power last week as acting president of Armenia, the small detail of his citizenship has hardly raised an eyebrow.

In the streets and markets here in the capital, members of the public are calm--even optimistic--about the prospect of change after more than seven years of economic hardship under former President Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan.

Yet for now, the man who heads Armenia is not officially a citizen because he comes from the neighboring separatist republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Kocharyan, who was president of Nagorno-Karabakh before coming to power in Armenia, pledged Sunday that the presidential election he has called for March 16 will be free and fair. He also said that he will decide soon whether to run for the job himself--and that he expects he would have to win a ruling from the Supreme Court to be eligible. (Under the constitution, no similar eligibility requirement exists for the office of prime minister.)

“Legally, I have all the citizen’s rights,” the soft-spoken president declared in an interview Sunday. “The Supreme Court will make the final decision.”

The citizenship question is just one element of the powerful issue that dominates Armenia’s politics and casts a shadow over daily life: What will be the fate of the 150,000 Armenians who, like Kocharyan, are from Nagorno-Karabakh?

Historically, the small republic was a part of Armenia, but when the region was under the control of the Soviet Union, the Communists handed the territory to Azerbaijan. In 1988, even before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh began fighting for independence. During a six-year war, the rebels defeated the Azerbaijani army, seized Azerbaijani land as a buffer zone and forced more than 500,000 refugees to flee to Azerbaijan.

Kocharyan, a leader of the separatist forces, was Nagorno-Karabakh’s most influential leader before moving to Armenia a year ago to become prime minister under Ter-Petrosyan.

Armenia has long supported Nagorno-Karabakh’s quest for independence from Azerbaijan, and most Armenians have dreamed of the day when the two would be united. But Armenia’s support for Nagorno-Karabakh prompted two of its neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, to impose an economic blockade that has stifled Armenia’s economic growth.

In the hope of ending the blockade, Ter-Petrosyan began calling for negotiation of a settlement that would give land back to Azerbaijan and allow the return of refugees while postponing a decision on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh as an independent republic.

The plan proved his undoing. Ter-Petrosyan apparently underestimated Armenians’ support for the breakaway republic and their willingness to continue living under the blockade so that Nagorno-Karabakh could remain independent.

Facing strong pressure from key members of his Cabinet, a majority of parliament, the opposition parties and Kocharyan himself, Ter-Petrosyan resigned Tuesday. The speaker of parliament, a Ter-Petrosyan ally who was first in line to become acting president, resigned the next day, handing the job to the prime minister, who retains that office as well.

“It was Levon Ter-Petrosyan’s mistake that he couldn’t see that the Karabakh problem was an emotional issue for the Armenian people, an issue of the dignity of the people,” Kocharyan told The Times. “He thought that if people knew they lived in bad conditions because of Karabakh, they would give up.”

Temporarily, at least, the events leave Armenia, with a population of 3.6 million, under the leadership of the Karabakh rebels--a bit like the tail wagging the dog.

But in Yerevan, residents have met the change with equanimity. Most express a willingness to support Nagorno-Karabakh to the end but are hopeful that a new president can find a way to resolve the stalemate and revive the economy.

On a street outside Yerevan’s central market this weekend, former soldier Mher Saghoyan, 25, was holding two roosters he hoped to sell for $6 apiece to customers who would sacrifice them in a religious ceremony and then eat them for dinner. He said he spent all of the six-year war in the border region fighting the Azerbaijanis and is ready to go to war again if necessary.

“I dream for a good future,” he said. “Though much of the hardship is in the past, we are ready to endure more hardship. I am ready to fight again for my motherland.”

For most of independent Armenia’s 6 1/2 years, living conditions have been difficult. Only in the past two years have residents regularly had electricity and heat. Today, most goods are available in shops, but the cost of transporting them past the blockade through Georgia or Iran has kept prices high. The government has been slow to privatize industry, and the country has high unemployment and little manufacturing.

“We are ready to endure these hardships until the end of our lives, but the sooner we resolve this conflict, the better, because it has its impact on the economy,” said farmer Arthur Zakarian, 25, who comes to the Yerevan market to sell his produce. “We need a president who is a peaceful man and is able to resolve this in a peaceful way.”

With Ter-Petrosyan’s resignation, peace negotiations sponsored by the United States, France and Russia have come to a halt. The mediators of the three countries are scheduled to meet in Paris next week to seek a solution.

But some Armenians blame the mediators for putting pressure on Ter-Petrosyan to agree to a flawed settlement that sold out Nagorno-Karabakh, costing him the presidency and setting back the negotiating process.

“There had never been this kind of a united front against a president,” said acting Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian. “He was cornered, and he thought he can’t just continue like this. He chose not to use his constitutional power to fire the prime minister. He thought that would have a huge boomerang effect and create a huge backlash.”

Kocharyan said that Armenia will take no further steps in the peace process until after the election. But he said the only acceptable solution will be one that grants Nagorno-Karabakh independent status on an equal footing with Azerbaijan.

He suggested that a confederation of equal states--like the makeup of the current government in Bosnia-Herzegovina--could provide a face-saving solution for both sides. But in order to work, he said, any peace settlement will require the United States and other powers to guarantee the pact and commit peacekeeping troops if necessary.

Kocharyan played down any differences between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, pointing out that they share a common culture, religion, economy, currency and legal system.

“The two states are Armenian states,” he said. “They are so closely related it is difficult to draw a border between them.”

While Kocharyan acknowledges that the Armenian Constitution does not grant citizenship to residents of Nagorno-Karabakh, he argues that Armenia’s declaration of independence, on which the document is based, gives them the right of Armenian citizenship.

If he decides to run for president, he said, he expects that there will be a challenge to his candidacy and that the Supreme Court will be called upon to decide the citizenship question. “In two or three days, I will make up my mind and come up with a final decision,” he said.

Whether he runs or not, Kocharyan said, he wants to prevent any allegations of vote-rigging such as those that arose after Ter-Petrosyan’s 1996 victory, weakening him politically and besmirching Armenia’s reputation abroad.

“We are ready to do everything to avoid such things in the coming election,” Kocharyan said.