As Protests Flag, Armenia’s President Seems to Prevail

Armenian President Robert Kocharyan’s government appears to have won at least a tactical victory in deflating recent protests and defending his hold on office after an election last year that his opponents claim was rigged.

A string of demonstrations seeking Kocharyan’s ouster began early this month, and thousands of protesters gathered again in Yerevan, the capital, Wednesday evening to press their demands, Russian news agency Interfax reported.

But what organizers had billed in advance as a “decisive” protest early last week ended with a predawn crackdown, as baton-swinging police backed by water cannons cleared a crowd from the avenue leading to the presidential palace. About 30 people were reported injured, and the opposition was incensed. But subsequent rallies had less steam rather than more.

Opposition leaders remained defiant and were trying to turn the president’s tough tactics against him.

“We want the world to know that the opposition is very far from being subdued and broken,” Stepan Demirchyan, who lost to Kocharyan in last year’s election and is a leader of the protests, said late last week in a telephone interview from Yerevan. “We are not flat on our back, and we are ready to keep on fighting. And we will make sure we see this struggle of ours through to a victorious end.”

Still, things have not been going according to plan for those in Armenia who hoped to imitate the success of the opposition in neighboring Georgia, where a nonviolent revolution forced President Eduard A. Shevardnadze from office in November.

That uprising has variously been dubbed a “velvet revolution,” after Czechoslovakia’s peaceful overthrow of communism, or the “rose revolution,” after the single long-stemmed rose that a key protest leader -- now President Mikheil Saakashvili -- carried as demonstrators took over Georgia’s parliament.

Kocharyan himself has drawn the comparison and emphasized his confidence that the scenario will not be repeated.

“The Armenian opposition, encouraged by the Georgian ‘velvet revolution,’ has clearly decided that the situation in the country will enable them to achieve the same outcome,” Kocharyan told Russian state television. “But the situation cannot be compared.”

Kocharyan cited strong economic growth in recent years as one reason he cannot be pushed out, and said another is that his administration is far stronger than was Shevardnadze’s.

He also downplayed the controversy over the April 13 police crackdown on protesters.

“The country has carried on in the past and will continue to do so,” he said.

The opposition’s drive against Kocharyan is rooted in complaints he failed to win a legitimate victory in the March presidential election last year, despite official results showing him taking 67% to Demirchyan’s 33%. Last April, Armenia’s Constitutional Court confirmed the vote but suggested a referendum within a year to gauge confidence in the nation’s leaders.

Kocharyan’s government rejected the idea. The recent protests have been timed to the expiration of the one-year period.

Immediately after last year’s election, Peter Eicher, head of the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said there were “serious problems and irregularities” in the vote, but he declined to say whether they were enough to change the result. He said there was intimidation, widespread ballot-box stuffing and discrepancies at a large number of polling stations.

David Petrosyan, a commentator with independent news agency Noyan Tapan, said there was sufficient anger at the president and his policies that Kocharyan had good reason to fear holding a referendum.

But Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, a Tbilisi think tank, said there did not appear to be “a revolutionary situation” in Armenia.

“Mr. Kocharyan has more control of his state than Mr. Shevardnadze did,” Rondeli said. “Mr. Shevardnadze was already aging, he was losing control.”

Another factor is Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Rondeli said. “Armenia is at war, in reality, and many people there are afraid if political destabilization happens it will be disastrous for Armenia,” he said.

But Kocharyan’s tough stance on the protests has failed to solve any real problems, said Petrosyan, the commentator.

“Armenia resembles a powder keg today, and whether or when it explodes will depend solely on who decides to hold a lighted match to it first,” he said. “Something is bound to happen one way or another. For now, everything is up in the air. Everyone is waiting and getting ready for the final showdown.”

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