Armenian Voters Seek a Savior to End Chaos

The earthquake struck first, destroying her home. Then came the Soviet collapse, independence, mass unemployment and hunger. Contemplating the ruins of her adult life, Amalya Digaryan blames it all on the president who ran Armenia from 1991 until last month.

“Look!” the 30-year-old cries with despairing anger. She points at the collapsing ceiling of the prefab hut that she and her husband have lived in for a decade--supposedly temporary housing put up after the earthquake that devastated northern Armenia in 1988, years before Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan became president. “This is all Levon ever gave us!”

An election today to find a permanent replacement for the unpopular Ter-Petrosyan marks Armenia’s late transition from chaotic post-Soviet improvisation to a more considered future. For people here, the vote represents a last chance to escape from a decade of modern disaster, authoritarianism and poverty. For the outside world, regional issues hang in the balance.

A peace plan for the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh--populated by Armenians but geographically inside neighboring Azerbaijan since early Soviet map makers redrew the area’s borders--has a shaky future. Most of the presidential candidates are against a compromise deal that international negotiators proposed last year and Ter-Petrosyan supported.

Continued instability in and around Karabakh would affect prospects for transporting out of Azerbaijan huge oil deposits being exploited by a U.S.-dominated consortium that includes companies from Britain, Russia and Turkey.

Last but not least, the democratic reputation of this tiny mountain country of 3 million people hangs in the balance with today’s vote. Foreign monitors said there were serious instances of fraud and irregularities in the 1996 presidential election, won by Ter-Petrosyan.

But none of these things are on Amalya Digaryan’s mind.

Dark hair dyed blond hangs on the collar of her ragged dressing gown as she lists her personal tragedies: She and her husband have no jobs in a town whose factories have scarcely been functioning since the 1988 earthquake; she has had to send her two preschool children, Julietta and Jurik, to live with her mother because she can’t feed them; there’s no heating or power in her hut; she’s been living on bread bought on credit from the local store, but now the owners are after her for their money; and she can’t even get municipal aid because she needs a passport to register and would have to pay 600 drams ($1, or about one-eighth of the average monthly salary here) to swap her old Soviet passport, now illegal, for a new Armenian one. She doesn’t have 600 drams.

And the roof fell in last winter.

What Amalya and her husband are desperate for now is a strong, wise ruler who will solve all their problems. Like many others in this town of amputated trees, shattered pride and merciless decay, they believe that the only man who can save them from annihilation is Armenia’s old Communist boss--and new presidential favorite--Karen S. Demirchyan, who ruled from 1974 to 1988.

“I think he’s the most solid candidate,” said 37-year-old Artur Digaryan. “He worked before [the Soviet collapse]. He knows the situation, and he can run the economy. I trusted him, and I still trust him. I don’t know the others: They promise a lot, but they do very little. But when Demirchyan speaks on TV, he doesn’t say anything superfluous, doesn’t humiliate anyone and never praises himself. He’s modest and efficient. I like that.”

When Demirchyan campaigned in the desolate squares of Gyumri, formerly Leninakan, thousands of ragged people ran to pull at his cashmere-clad arm, to embrace him or to pour out their personal woes to him.

Sleekly coiffed and oozing charisma, he made a speech deploring what had happened to them during the earthquake and afterward under Ter-Petrosyan: “Two disasters, one natural, one man-made.” There were eddies of applause and swells of approval as he told them they should have jobs and free health care. No one seemed to mind that he had no specific proposals on how he plans to improve their lot.

Up From Soviet Past

Demirchyan is the only candidate from the Soviet past, which Armenia’s many have-nots now remember as a lost golden age of peace and prosperity. The 66-year-old has spent the past decade running a big factory in Yerevan, the capital.

He is no longer a Communist, and he is not tainted by association with the ills of the Ter-Petrosyan era: severe economic hardships; two years with little heat or light in the early 1990s as a result of the Karabakh conflict; corruption; the banning of dissent; question marks over the honesty of elections; and, finally, an ill-timed decision by Ter-Petrosyan to ignore the wishes of his people and urge compromises for peace in Karabakh, which turned the country’s powerful defense establishment against him and led to his downfall.

But Demirchyan is not the only front-runner: There are three in the field of 12. At the top of the list is Robert Kocharyan, the prime minister and acting president, whose severe good looks are reminiscent of Robert De Niro and who is the choice of younger, more energetic voters with an eye to the future.

Kocharyan is widely supported in Yerevan, where signs of economic recovery--new stores, clothes and computers--are visible, and in the border regions near Azerbaijan. Although he is from Karabakh, and therefore not officially a citizen of Armenia, local reporters estimate that the 43-year-old Kocharyan has about 28% of popular support nationwide, compared with 35% for Demirchyan.

There is also Vazgen Manukyan, who in 1996 was the preferred presidential candidate of urban intellectuals and Soviet-era dissidents in an election that he maintains Ter-Petrosyan stole from him. Despite sympathy over those claims, Manukyan’s reputation was tarnished by the mudslinging that followed. Estimates of his support are around 20%.

Kocharyan, who was president of Nagorno-Karabakh before becoming prime minister, has shown himself to be a reformer in the year he’s been in power in Armenia.

He recently lifted a ban on the mainly emigre Armenian opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation, popularly known as the Dashnak party. He moved to attract foreign investment by firing corrupt heads of tax and customs departments. He also fired corrupt regional bosses, moved ahead with privatization and restaffed key ministries with younger, more active ministers. He wants to share the powers the president now holds more equally with government and parliament. He’s the only presidential candidate with a home page on the World Wide Web.

While diplomats, journalists and election experts say they are “skeptical, and even suspicious,” about how honestly local government officials will carry out this election, most say they do not think that Kocharyan is likely to subscribe to the kind of large-scale electoral fraud noted in the 1996 elections.

Just in case, there will be 180 international monitors, twice as many as last time, scrutinizing today’s poll--as well as the runoff two weeks from today between the two top vote-getters if no single candidate gets more than 50% of the votes the first time around.

“There are always local officials who want to keep their own jobs by keeping their boss in power, but this time I feel that there’s at least more willingness at the top to play by the rules,” said one election expert.

Memories of Genocide

Kocharyan’s tough position on Karabakh also pleases Armenians, whose cousins inside Turkey were the victims of a genocide by Ottoman Empire soldiers that peaked in 1915. They are fiercely suspicious of all things Turkish; many see Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan as an extension of the long-vanished Ottoman Turkish empire.

“All Armenians look at Karabakh through the prism of the [1915] genocide,” said a diplomatic source. “It’s a very emotional issue. They feel strongly that Karabakh is an Armenian redoubt--it’s sort of like the Jewish thing--and they’re determined that never again will such a thing happen.”

So most Armenians like Kocharyan’s simple negotiating formula: “I think the Azeri side must change its position.”

But Kocharyan’s views on Karabakh have worried the West, Russia and Turkey--who need to ensure stability in the region if Azerbaijan’s oil is to be transported safely to world markets. A shaky cease-fire has held in Karabakh for a couple of years, but negotiations are blocked.

Of today’s candidates, only Demirchyan has never made his policy on Karabakh clear--leaving room for maneuver if he wins. Diplomats here say this alone makes him the preferred candidate of Azerbaijan and others in the oil game.

A surprise outsider, Demirchyan is coy about why he decided to return to politics--”The people needed me”--and about how his campaign is financed. “Legally,” he said, then expanded, with a smile: “It doesn’t cost much. We’re not spending much on ads or anything. We’re just going to the people.”

This mysteriousness has fostered the belief among some Armenians that Demirchyan, like the former Communist Party bosses of neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia--Heydar A. Aliyev and Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who returned to power in the early 1990s--might now be getting quiet support from Armenia’s big northern neighbor, Russia. Some Armenians believe that Moscow wants a relatively compliant regional leader, versed in Kremlin ways, to get more leverage in a quarrelsome area where it still has interests.

Kocharyan said he was not sure what his older rival’s ties to Moscow might be.

But he said that he was “surprised by Demirchyan’s candidacy, and by his popularity. There’s an explanation: Unfortunately, people are living in tough conditions here and waiting for a savior. That’s a dangerous state to be in and encourages a purely emotional view, and later disillusionment.”

The hasty election, being rushed through within 40 days in response to Ter-Petrosyan’s abrupt departure, has made little visual impact on Armenian towns. Few posters have gone up since campaigning officially began March 7. Monitors say no candidate has yet used his allocation of 90 minutes of free television time.

But everyone in the cafes and restaurants of Yerevan is watchful, and inclined to be pessimistic about the election outcome.

Among often-heard questions are: Will soldiers in the army be told how to vote by their bosses? Will the defense establishment push for Kocharyan at all costs? Will the result bring to power some new, mafia-style clique that will damage ordinary people’s lives in new ways they can’t yet guess? What else can go wrong?