Opposition protest the outcome of the 2003 Presidential Election, Armenian National Assembly, Baghramian Avenue, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003

Well, as reported in the last 2007 Parliamentary Election Monitor on this blog, there is renewed speculation that Kocharian will seek to retain control over the country as Prime Minister after he steps down as President in 2008. Under the Consitution, Kocharian can not run for a third term in office, but given amendments falsified passed last year, he might not actually want to as more power will soon be afforded to the Prime Minister and Parliament.

Obviously, this once again means that next year’s parliamentary elections are going to be the most important and potentially volatile yet. Most Armenians think that Serzh Sarkisyan is likely to become President unless we actually hold democratic elections, but in order to secure both his and Kocharian’s future, power has to be maintained over the Parliament. RFE/RL has more.

President Robert Kocharian intends to continue to play a key role in Armenian politics and government affairs after completing his second, presumably final term in office in just over a year from now, his national security adviser said on Monday.

[…] There are growing signs that his most influential and longtime associate, Defense Minister Serzh Sarkisian, is his preferred candidate for the Armenian presidency.

The Armenian press has been rife with speculation that Kocharian would like to serve as prime minister after 2008. The 52-year-old president, who came to power in 1998, himself stoked it at a November 2005 meeting with university students in Yerevan. “Who is better than I in terms of knowledge, experience, hard work and resilience?” he said, answering a question about his political plans for the future.

Kocharian has been heavily linked with a new but extremely ambitious party set up by Gagik Tsarukian, one of Armenia’s wealthiest government-connected men. The party called Prosperous Armenia has effectively kicked off its well-financed campaign for next spring’s parliamentary elections recently with a large-scale distribution of relief aid to impoverished farmers across the country.

Meanwhile, I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of election-related stories since the last post, but work has been a little hectic of late. However, pretty much everything can be seen or analyzed in light of the imminent elections. They will determine everything in Armenia for the forseeable future, but most importantly for those in power, who gets to keep their money, property and freedom from prosecution. A lot is at stake. Really, a great deal — and certainly enough to continue the tradition of falsifying elections.

I think we can even see the continuing push to resolve the conflict over Karabakh in this light. Seemingly beyond all logic and expectations, the OSCE Minsk Group are once again saying that a window of opportunity for a breakthrough still exists. Moreover, signs on the ground in Lachin, for example, indicates that Armenia is perhaps preparing for a peace deal. Some readers will treat this with some skepticism, and after so many similar declarations, I can understand why.

However, an Azeri (I forget who) recently said that a peace deal now is important because the West doesn’t know what will happen during the parliamentary elections. Moreover, Aliyev himself said that he believed negotiations were now entering into the final phase. Add to that some reports indicating that Armenia is ready to return territory currently under its control and you’ve got to sit up and take notice.

However, I think that until a declaration is made by both Presidents in a joint press conference it’s not worth anyone holding their breath in anticipation. Of course, some are saying that all but one of nine details of a peace agreement are now ready. RFE/RL also has more on this.

The settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict may again be on the cards following the latest meeting of the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan, senior officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Monday.

“Hope is emerging especially as concerning Nagorno-Karabakh,” the OSCE’s chairman-in-office, Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht, was reported to declare in Brussels as he opened a meeting of foreign ministers of 56 nations making up the Transatlantic security organization.

The unresolved conflicts in Karabakh and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union are high on the agenda of the two-day conference. De Gucht, whose country holds the OSCE’s rotating presidency, urged fellow ministers to give a new impetus to protracted international efforts to resolve those disputes.

The Belgian official was present, along with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, at the opening of crucial talks between Presidents Ilham Aliev and Robert Kocharian that took place in the Belarusian capital Minsk last Tuesday. Both presidents indicated afterwards that they made further progress towards a mutually acceptable peace accord, with Aliev saying that the Karabakh negotiating process is nearing its “final stage.”

[…]

The most important of those principles is a referendum on Karabakh’s final status that would take place after the liberation of Armenian-occupied districts in Azerbaijan proper. Oskanian indicated the parties still disagree on important practical modalities of the proposed vote, saying that Azerbaijan has yet to fully accept the Karabakh Armenians’ “right to self-determination.”

Well, if that is the one issue that still remains to be determined and agreed upon, it’s the most significant and actually, the reason for the war in the first place. It’s also a political hot potato that I’m sure the pro-Government camp can do without as the opposition looks desperately for an issue to unite around. Corruption and social inequality really don’t seem to figure much for the electorate given that they’re not too sure the alternatives to what’s in place now would be any different.

Another issue might be Armenia’s growing isolation in the region and from regional communication and energy projects, but Armenians as a whole are so damn insular that they rarely think of there being anywhere outside the Republic unless it’s just somewhere they can move to in order to escape their lives here. Nevertheless, an interesting story I first read on Blogian is resulting some interesting commentary in the local press.

“Haykakan Zhamanak” reports that several leading Armenian newspapers are facing indefinite suspension of their publication because a publishing company that prints them is running out of newsprint. The Tigran Mets publishing house has informed them that it is unable to ship a fresh consignment of newsprint from Russia to Armenia because of Moscow’s continuing transport blockade of Georgia and a storm in the Black Sea. The paper says Vrezh Markosian, the owner of Tigran Mets who is close to Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian, is very busy participating in Hovsepian’s public relations stunts, instead of finding an alternative supply route. It says the situation also illustrates just how shaky Armenia’s communication with the outside world is. “The ‘capacity’ of roads linking Armenia with the outside world is extremely limited and is becoming even more limited at the moment.”

“Aravot” agrees, saying that the emerging crisis is a vivid indication of Armenia’s geopolitical isolation. “Since the signing of the 1994 truce our authorities have failed to make peace with Azerbaijan and normalize relations with Turkey, as a result of which a whole country depends on a Black Sea storm and a shark gnawing phone cables in the same,” says the paper. “Today there is a shortage of newsprint, tomorrow the same might be true for fuel or wheat,” it adds.

Anyways, I’d expect activity for the parliamentary elections to diminish as the New Year approaches. Then, Armenians will do nothing apart from feast for 13 days until we truly enter what will likely to be the most hectic and potentially dirty elections in Armenia’s short history as an independent State. So, unless something really newsworthy happens before then, this Monitor isn’t likely to be posted frequently until sometime after 13 January 2007.

See you then.

Opposition protest the outcome of the 2003 Presidential Election, Armenian National Assembly, Baghramian Avenue, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003