As Armenians Mourn, Elite Casts a Future

Along a dim corridor flanked by slouching men in black lies one of the political back rooms where thoughts of Armenia’s bloody assassinations last week are being shouldered aside and this country’s future is being pounded out.

Andranik N. Margaryan, head of one of the nation’s governing parties, is talking to the president, Robert Kocharyan, by phone.

Amid dense clouds of cigarette smoke, these men, like the country’s other remaining leaders, are deciding what to do now--after the prime minister, the parliament speaker and several other top officials were cut down Wednesday by gunmen whose leader was part messianic romantic, part embittered desperado.

Armenia’s entire political elite has been locked in marathon crisis meetings since the killings took place. But inside the back rooms, it is clear that people are not paralyzed contemplating why the unthinkable happened when the five gunmen invaded the parliament, killing eight people all told. They are hashing out who will get the top government job.

Meanwhile, as the shock waves from Wednesday’s violence ripple across Armenia, many are dismissing the question of why gunmen took the lives of so many of the nation’s leaders and are explaining the tragedy away, almost briskly, as a lunatic action by one deluded man and his followers.

Margaryan is a substantial, loose-shouldered man who has taken to wearing a revolver on his hip since the assassinations. It is nearly midnight, and the lights suddenly black out while the president is on the line. But the conversation continues without pause in the pitch darkness, as attendants scurry for candles.

Margaryan’s voice is cajoling. It rises in indignation, then becomes sturdily persuasive and firm. He gestures expansively with large hands, clutching a slim cigarette that he quickly replaces with another when it burns down to the butt.

After half an hour, the conversation abruptly ends. Margaryan rises and slings off his jacket, and the exhaustion shows in his face.

These leaders are burying their grief in work. Kocharyan was so busy in meetings and talks in the days after the assassinations that he neglected to go on television and address the people.

The killers’ prime target was Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisyan, a giant in Armenian politics, a war hero and kingmaker who both frightened and inspired his subordinates and could bring presidents down by switching his allegiances. Also killed was his political partner and parliament speaker, Karen S. Demirchyan.

Analysts say that the loss of two such powerful men has created a vacuum only the president will be able to fill and that the tragic events will strengthen his power.

Margaryan, chairman of Sarkisyan’s Republican Party, says the key to political stability will be to ensure the same political balance in the government that existed before the assassinations. He’s determined that the Unity alliance--the two-party bloc associated with the slain prime minister and the speaker that won parliamentary elections in May--will maintain its control and retain the critical positions in the government, including the premiership.

But the Unity alliance was a group forged around these two charismatic men, with the aim of winning the May elections. Some analysts believe that, in the absence of those leaders, the party will fade away or crumble.

Negotiations on Nation’s Future

The current, high-stakes political negotiations are not the only reason Margaryan has been smoking so much in the sleepless days since Wednesday’s attack. He was in the parliament when the gunmen struck.

“As soon as I heard the shots, I knew this was not a game, it was a terrorist act,” he says. “I saw very clearly how they hit the prime minister. As soon as they stopped spraying automatic gunfire about, they fired a final shot into his head.

“We were lying on the floor. When I raised my head, they [the gunmen] saw me and said, ‘Lie down flat or we’ll kill you.’ The wounded were just lying there. They wouldn’t let anyone near them. Some of them died there.”

Margaryan had to stand for more than eight hours as a human shield for one of the terrorists. He knows their leader, former journalist Nairi Unanyan--now under arrest along with the other gunmen--and describes him as a man with “soaring ambitions, that’s his problem. He’s got this messianic mentality.”

While it’s true that no evidence has emerged that the terrorists had the backing of any substantial political forces, the motives of the men, however wild and brutal, remain unexamined.

Unanyan horrified the nation with his actions. Yet he symbolizes the most extreme edge of a mood of deep disappointment, frustration and anger among many Armenians over the failure of the political elite to deliver the people a better life.

Problems in Formerly Wealthy Republic

Armenia used to be a wealthy Soviet republic producing military electronics. Now unemployment is high, salaries are low, opportunities are few, and bureaucratic corruption is one of the most serious problems facing the country.

In Yerevan, the capital, there are pretty lights in the trees, and the buildings in the main square are of pink stone. But at ground level, things can be grim. A stray dog approaches a garbage heap, only to shy away in surprise from a man rummaging for food there.

Unanyan’s mother says the sight of people foraging in the garbage sent him into a state of alienated despair. She spoke to him two months ago by phone from Russia, where she lives, and was shocked by his state of mind.

“He wasn’t crazy, not at all,” says political analyst Tigran Xmalian, who also knows Unanyan. “He was proud, too proud. He loved his country, and he wanted to be something in this country. He said that political activity had been made impossible in Armenia.”

But Xmalian adds that the gunman’s televised statement explaining his motives for the attack reflected a sense of grievance that is shared by many Armenians.

“Right before our eyes and in a matter of just a few years, our prosperous country has been brought to ruin and turned into a land which everyone only wants to leave. Our economy has been destroyed,” the statement said in part. And in fact, an estimated 1 million people have emigrated from Armenia in the last decade, leaving a population of about 3.5 million.

Sarkisyan, who will be buried today along with the others slain, was a huge figure in Armenian politics. He was a strongman who built the army from scratch. As defense minister under former President Levon A. Ter-Petrosyan, he persuaded Ter-Petrosyan to resign last year when the president was seen as being too weak in negotiations with Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Reuben Mirzakhanian, the chairman of the Democratic Liberal Party of Armenia, describes Sarkisyan as a large-scale figure who made some large-scale mistakes, although he does not specify what those were.

But one of them was undoubtedly a comment Sarkisyan made when he was defense minister in September 1996, after a presidential election whose results were widely believed to have been falsified by people around Ter-Petrosyan.

“Even if our opponents get 100% of the vote, we will not give power to them,” Sarkisyan said, as Armenians rioted over the poll results.

Disillusionment With Government

Xmalian argues that the genesis of Wednesday’s killings was in those days, when people felt betrayed and disillusioned by the authorities. Ter-Petrosyan left office in February 1998, but Sarkisyan remained and rose to become prime minister this June.

“They planted the seeds and they got this harvest, this bloody harvest,” Xmalian said.

In the days after the shootings, there have been many meetings at the Armenian parliament and a lot of milling traffic as Jeep Cherokees, Mercedeses and Jaguars have pulled up to the big steel gates.

According to Xmalian, Armenia’s parliament has turned into “a closed club of new rich who control the economic clans and power”--in sharp contrast to the poverty and powerlessness of ordinary Armenians. He says popular disenchantment with political developments is so strong that even the word “democratization” has been discredited.

“Some people left the country; some just obeyed. Some, like [Unanyan], tried to change things. He chose the most wild and radical means of improvement. Nothing can be improved by blood, of course, but he believed it,” Xmalian says.

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Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.