Slate: An Armenian Tragedy

COVID-19, unsurprisingly, is rampant in Karabakh and new arrivals at the center get their temperature checked and a face mask if they don’t have one. Many of these people had spent days or weeks in crowded underground bomb shelters in Karabakh before fleeing to Armenia. I couldn’t help but notice that the mask-wearing rate was maybe 60 percent, but who can worry about an invisible threat like the coronavirus when a very tangible one is landing and exploding around you? Besides, it’s pretty much impossible to socially distance when you’re a refugee. [...]

Armenia had won control of Karabakh in a previous war with Azerbaijan, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing. That war had ended in a cease-fire but not a peace treaty, and Karabakh is still internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory. Armenians didn’t see it that way, though. “There is no Armenia without Karabakh,” Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in one wartime address to the nation. [...]

Losing Karabakh would be not only a national defeat but also a blow, possibly fatal, to the hopes engendered by Armenia’s 2018 Velvet Revolution, in which the man-of-the-people ex-journalist Pashinyan improbably toppled the corrupt, strongman regime that had ruled the country for two decades. For Pashinyan to be the one to lose to Azerbaijan would threaten the country’s prospects for democracy.[...]

The Armenian media had, however, uncritically picked up the official line. This was partly due to a censorship regime: Shortly after fighting started, the government instituted martial law, one of the provisions of which was that it was illegal “to call into question the military capabilities” of the armed forces. But it also seemed to be partly a self-censorship in response to popular demand: There was no appetite for news about how Armenia was losing. [...]

This war had been coming for a long time. In the late 1980s, Armenians demanded that Karabakh—which was inside the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan—be transferred to Soviet Armenia. Interethnic violence broke out and then, when the Soviet Union collapsed, all-out war. By the time a cease-fire was signed in 1994, Armenia controlled a substantial part of Azerbaijani territory. That included Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as large swaths of other territory surrounding it, which Armenian forces captured during the fighting. Those territories had been almost entirely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis, who all fled. In total, more than 600,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced from this area, according to United Nations figures.

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TLDR News: Why Missiles Are Being Fired: Armenia & Azerbaijan Conflict Explained (Nagorno-Karabakh)

 Over the last few weeks, tensions have been rising between Armenia and Azerbaijan with both sides firing missiles at one another. This is all over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and it's an issue which goes back decades. In this video we explain the history of the dispute, the current situation and if a ceasefire can really work.

Foreign Policy: Armenia’s Democratic Dreams

First, Armenia’s Velvet Revolution represented the climax of a decade of peaceful protest centered on human rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and labor and employment issues—all explicitly non- or minimally political causes. Such activism created a model for advocating and securing tangible compromises from government figures. Small-scale protests also established nonviolence as a credible strategy. By the time Sargsyan announced his intention to become prime minister, there was already a well-known template in place for responding. [...]

These cases stand in stark contrast to the post-Soviet color revolutions, which were often sudden and driven by reformist elites, who were themselves usually backed by outside players, most notably the European Union and the United States. Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, for example, included mass protests but really resulted from the loss of faith at the top rather than a push from below. The revolution’s top-down nature allowed one of its leaders, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was quickly elected as president after the protests died down, to strengthen the executive branch of the government with little pushback from largely compliant parliamentary forces. Interelite competitions in the aftermath of the other color revolutions in Serbia and Ukraine produced paralysis within their governments, paving the way for illiberal forces to retake power later on.

The Velvet Revolution’s emphasis on consensus building also had more in common with Latin American revolutions than the color ones. Pashinyan spent his time bargaining both within parliament and the executive branch and among the mass mobilizers in the street. For example, he negotiated with various factions in parliament to hold a vote for the prime ministership as a way to reconcile the preferences of the protesters with parliamentary processes. He has likewise worked with both civil society movements and unaligned parliamentary groups to gain support for holding snap elections.

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openDemocracy: The struggle for Yerevan: how city elections became a referendum on Armenia’s revolution

Yerevan city council elections have become an important touchstone for Nikol Pashinyan’s revolutionary team. The “struggle for Yerevan” started on 16 May, a week after Pashinyan’s appointment as Prime Minister. That day, photos showing that trees had been felled in a park outside City Hall as part of a beautification project went viral. As a result, civic activists first occupied the park and then the municipality building as they demanded that Taron Margaryan, the mayor of Yerevan and member of former ruling Republican Party, resign. [...]

The background for these events was the intensification of decentralised public protests across Armenia. On that same day (16 May), roughly 20 protests on very diverse issues were taking place in different parts of Armenia. The revolution, it seemed, was being disseminated and localised. At the same time, these decentralised protests questioned the capacity of Pashinyan’s government to control the situation. This concern was raised by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia and a former ally of Pashinyan’s against the Republican Party regime. “Pashinyan is the Prime Minister now, the head of the state whose most important duty is to secure the normal workflow of government bodies,” said Ter-Petrosyan. “Consequently, although these spontaneous protests, seizure of buildings and blocking of roads are done with good and sincere intentions, they actually work against Pashinyan.” [...]

Yerevan is too big a city for Armenia, with its population of three million. More than a third of them live in Yerevan. All governmental and administrative agencies, institutions are centralised here. While looking at the economics, more than 60% of Armenia’s GDP, 74% of retail, 61% of construction, and 80.6% of services are produced in Yerevan. In other words, Armenia looks like a man whose head is far bigger than his body — and to find its balance, this man has remain upside down, causing disproportionate distribution of everything among the country’s other regions. [...]

These attempts to transform the elections into a referendum narrowed the political space which had been opened, ironically, mostly by Pashinyan’s previous efforts. But while the presence of Pashinyan does not cancel out the fact of holding city council elections with 12 participating forces, it should be noted that his strategy requires only two political subjects — himself and the public. No other political subjects are envisaged under this logic. From the one side, this strategy clears the political arena, but from the other it devastates it. Any other subject finds itself in a love triangle — where the third person is superfluous. Moreover, to bring sense to his own active participation and therefore replacing the city council agenda with the revolutionary agenda, Pashinyan targeted people in his speeches who weren’t candidates for the city council or even represented via any of the forces. In this sense, the city council elections became impossible: voters could not elect the “light” and “dark” forces as described by Pashinyan per se, but could give their votes to the My Step bloc in approval of the April-May events. These kind of post-revolutionary elections are always approximate.

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Jacobin Magazine: The End of Armenia’s Old Regime

With a population of a little under 3 million and an economy entirely reliant on favorable trade with its larger neighbors and remittances from abroad, Armenia has been incredibly vulnerable to the shifting winds of the global economy. With the arrival of the worldwide recession in 2008, the country was hit exceptionally hard. On paper, the recovery began two years later, with GDP growth back in the black by 2010 and further growth from then on (reaching a high of 7.5 percent for 2017). But this “recovery” was not felt by the vast majority of Armenian people. Unemployment actually increased from 16 percent to 17 percent during the last decade and roughly one-third of the population remains below the poverty line. [...]

The revolt that came to engulf Armenia in 2018 was born from the ripples of the bloody consolidation of Republican Party rule in 2008. That year, the country’s opposition — a loose coalition of middle-class urbanites, a handful of oligarchs, and members of the ruling elite that had been deposed in 1998 — coalesced around the controversial figure of Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia’s first postcommunist president. Likely inspired by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Ter-Petrosyan ran for president and when, as expected, he was defeated in a blatantly rigged election, he called on his supporters to come out into the streets. But his daring attempt to repeat history was met with overwhelming state force. When the dust settled, eight protesters and two police officers were dead, Ter-Petrosyan was under house arrest, and the Republican Party was unquestionably the only dominant political force in the country — having crushed or co-opted any formerly disloyal elites. Yet this victory came at a cost. The fratricidal bloodshed and the ensuing financial crisis meant that the HHK came to rule through managed coercion mixed with societal apathy, while outside the halls of power a new extra-parliamentary opposition began to develop. [...]

The first successful civic initiative was small. Led by a group of young environmentalists in 2012, it was organized around an occupation — a couple hundred strong at its peak — that successfully blocked the slated conversion of a major park in central Yerevan into a trade zone for shops. The following year an even bigger mobilization, organized by a coalition of groups, arose in response to the Yerevan municipality declaring a 50 percent increase in public transport fares. This time thousands of Yerevan’s citizens joined the protest and the attendant fare boycott, refusing to pay anything above the standard price. And once again, the government backed down. [...]

While the attempts to bar government buildings met with near universal failure — security forces were always nearby — the road blocks were another story. The choice of roads to be blocked was not planned in advance and was up to protesters’ self-organization, which added an element of unpredictability and surprise for which the authorities had not prepared. Security forces, likely with previous occupation-style protests in mind, had hunkered down, setting up barricades lined with phalanxes of riot police, barbed wire, and water cannons in the city’s key locations. They had prepared for a siege, a frontal assault, a proverbial storming of the Bastille. Instead, they found themselves forced to play authoritarian whack-a-mole, furtively trying to find and dismantle dozens of tiny, shifting, yet effective roadblocks throughout the city center.    

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Social Europe: Armenia’s Velvet Revolution

In 1978 Vaclav Havel wrote The Power of the Powerless in which he argued against the communist regime, maintaining that it forced people to “live in a lie”. For Havel, the resistance against the lie was to begin living in the truth and to challenge one’s own powerlessness through recognising one’s agency. Fast forward forty years, and we are now witnessing a new velvet revolution in post-socialist Armenia, a country which proclaimed its independence from Soviet rule in 1991, but which has long struggled to create a democracy. More than anything else, this is a revolution about values. It is about the values of Armenian society and its domestic, socio-economic and political realities. The revolution is not about geopolitics or foreign relations. [...]

Through these actions Armenia’s citizens, who some had described as apathetic, fatalistic, and demoralised, began to challenge the regime’s hold on power and its legitimacy to govern. Today, per official statistics, over one third of Armenians live in poverty and the country’s population has declined below 3 million due to both emigration and a declining birth rate. On the one hand, there is a desire to be rid of the oligarchic system of governance and to implement a more democratic and just system of governance which recognises and respects the rule of law and the human rights of Armenia’s citizens. On the other hand, there is a desire to live in a fairer society, where citizens live with dignity and where nepotism and corruption do not lead to extremes of social and income inequality and poverty.  [...]

Inclusion and tolerance are new values to Armenian society, where not only disabled people, but also people who identify as LGBT have faced discrimination, marginalisation, and even violence. Indeed, the RPA old-guard has used the presence of feminists and LGBT activists involved in the movement to attack Pashinyan as promoting ‘Western values’. And to be sure, the old divisions may return after the revolutionary euphoria passes, but for now, suited doctors and lawyers are rallying and marching alongside young tattooed hipsters, grizzly-bearded old men, and vocal young feminists, in an atmosphere characterised by peace, joy, and tolerance.

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The New York Review of Books: Armenia’s Bad Week for Autocrats

Back in December 2015, Armenia held a constitutional referendum to transform the government from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary system. The ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), a coterie of free-market business elites, oligarchs, and allied politicians, engaged in its usual election habits of vote-buying and other irregularities to make sure the referendum passed. The object was to enable the RPA’s leader, the former president Serzh Sargsyan, to become prime minster instead, once his presidential term elapsed—which it did on April 9 this year.  [...]

Sargsyan is of a different breed to Assad. He is a member of a quasi-oligarchic, nationalist party with wide support in the military. While his government refrained from a draconian crackdown, the Republicans have lacked legitimacy among the population for a long time. An OSCE report documented that election-rigging and outright vote-buying were rampant in the 2013 presidential election. [...]

The confrontation between Sargsyan and the street movement reached a boiling point on Sunday, April 22. A highly anticipated meeting between the opposition leader, Nikol Pashinyan, and the prime minister lasted minutes, and within hours the opposition leader had been detained at a local police station. That night, the rallies swelled to more than 100,000, as demonstrators poured into the streets. On April 23, unarmed soldiers joined the rallies. Pashinyan was released and, within hours, the prime minister had resigned. It was the day of our younger, glass-smashing son’s fifth birthday. The gift was unexpected.

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Al Jazeera: Who is Armenian opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan?

He was the editor of Armenia's best-selling daily liberal newspaper, The Armenian Times, which has always been highly critical of the governments of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan. [...]

In 2004, Pashinyan's car - parked just outside The Armenian Times office in downtown Yerevan - burst into flames after an apparent explosion.

Pashinyan has said the blast was an assassination attempt engineered by a wealthy businessman, Gagik Tsarukian.

Not long before the explosion, Pashinyan's newspaper published a story that accused Tsarukian of illegally cutting down trees to build a villa in an Armenian resort town. [...]

Way Out is a merger of Civil Contract, Bright Armenia, and Republic political parties that together form the opposition in Armenia's parliament. It has nine out of 105 seats in the National Assembly.

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