Armenia's opposition: "last warning" to president, but more rallies to come

The latest opposition rally in Yerevan was held last Thursday, led by the Armenian National Congress (HAK) and its chief Levon Ter-Petrossian, Armenia’s first president.  The latest in a series of demonstrations, this one was notable for the protesters reaching Freedom Square, a symbolic victory.  The turnout may have been as large as the previous rally on 1 March, with a crowd estimated to be at least 10,000 and maybe more, depending on the source.

(Judging by some of the photos, the 1 March rally looked larger than official estimates of 10,000, at least to me.  Estimating crowd size accurately can be done if you have a photo of the entire crowd taken from a great height, for example.  You can then superimpose a grid, zoom in and count the number of people in a typical grid square, and multiply by the number of squares – adjusting for the fact that some are more or less dense than others. There are other ways of doing it: U Cal Berkeley professor Herbert Jacobs studied crowds and came up with a way to estimate density, a guide still in use today.)

The HAK strategy appears to be to continue to stage large rallies until President Sargsyan bows to their key demands which include holding new parliamentary and presidential elections.

Ter-Petrossian has repeatedly compared the rule of President Sargsyan to that of deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, telling crowds since the first big rally on 25 February that the administration must agree to new parliamentary and presidential elections or facing the specter of a popular uprising.

The former presdient is careful to lace his revolutionary rhetoric with caveats, saying, for example, that while he has no doubt that “what has happened in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere will also happen in Armenia,” but adding that “unlike in those countries,” the political changes in Armenia will take place “smoothly and without upheavals.”  (Go here for a very informative article by RFE/RL correspondent Emil Danielyan.)

The strategy seems to include borrowing a Ukrainian-style “color revolution” template, albeit without a color and without reference to Gene Sharp.

It’s difficult to know what the minimum set of compromises is that will placate HAK and Ter-Petrossian.  At the 1 March rally, Ter-Petrossian reportedly said that “practical dialogue” between HAK and the administration could take place, but only on the subject of elections.

“This is our last warning to the authorities,” Ter-Petrossian told the crowd, although he said more or less the same thing last week.  (How many “last warnings” can there be?)

So there are two messages here: one is the demand for new elections (and the logical implication that only one election result is acceptable) together with the message that a package of compromises may also be acceptable. For Ter-Petrossian, the two premises are compatible, and it seems to me that if he settles for less, his credibility will be damaged.  (More than one Armenian analyst has suggested the Ter-Petrossian is a relic of the past in any case.)

President Sargsyan has in recent months yielded somewhat to critics who have complained of political and economic stagnation. See this analysis by Liz Fuller and Richard Giragosian for an in-depth look at the current political landscape, including a dissection of a controversial memo signed by the ruling coalition parties agreeing to support President Sargsyan in the next election, scheduled for 2013.

On the key demand of new elections, it is difficult to see Sargsyan agreeing unless he is sure he can win. It is more likely that he will wait out the opposition until the rallies lose momentum, while implementing more reforms.

An analyst at the Yerevan-based Civilitas Foundation (who requested anonymity) said earlier this month that new elections are improbable “unless some other new developments occur. The President will not leave voluntarily, or in concession. He will however make some new moves, some small concessions, which the EU and the US too have been wanting.”

The wait-and-see approach worked for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in 2009, when opposition leaders staged an endless series of rallies that rarely drew more than 20,000 people and gradually became a tiresome routine for most Georgians.  Saakashvili learned from the mistakes he made in 2007, when in the face of an energized opposition, he declared a state of emergency, curbed the press, and failed to restrain the police, who brutally crushed a popular protest in Tbilisi.

This script was played out in Armenia in March of 2008, when then-president Robert Kocharian responded in a similar fashion to a series of protests, leaving ten dead and scores injured.  In contrast, the police in Yerevan yielded on Thursday, allowing protesters to march to Freedom Square after negotiations with opposition leaders.

It’s hard to argue that Armenia is an Egypt-style revolution in the making, despite the large turnout at recent rallies.  Among other things, the comparatively lively political dynamic in Armenia (and Georgia, for that matter), with a degree of pluralism not found in Egypt or Libya, makes the comparison somewhat facile, in my opinion.

We will have to wait to see how the two sides jockey for advantage without appearing to cave in on their core messages. Stay tuned for the next rally on 8 April.