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On Monday, after more than a week of protests reverberated throughout the political echo-chambers of Armenia eventually forced the resignation of Armenia’s Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. “I am addressing you for the last time as the country’s leader,” Sargsyan wrote. “The movement in the streets is against my tenure. I comply with your demand.”
The unexpected resignation prompted scenes of jubilation in the capital, Yerevan among many other cities and provinces of the country. Thousands and thousands of Armenian citizens flocked to the streets and to the central Republic Square in Yerevan where all afternoon and late into the night they danced, cheered and waved the Armenian flag to incantations in a striped tricolor of red, blue and orange.
Serzh Sargsyan, president since 2008, reached his legal two-term limit earlier this month. A constitutional referendum in 2015 had transferred most presidential powers to the role of prime minister, however, and the Parliament, dominated by his right-wing Republican Party, swiftly voted him into the post with no other candidate given a chance. “I was wrong,” Mr. Sargsyan said in a brief resignation statement carried by the official news agency. “The street movement is against my tenure. I am fulfilling your demand.”
The pressure on Mr. Sargsyan, 63, to resign ratcheted up markedly on Monday after soldiers from one company of the country’s prestigious peacekeeping force, which had served abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, joined the march in Yerevan in their uniforms.
Mr. Sargsyan had promised last year not to try to extend his tenure in office by becoming prime minister when his presidential term ended. Karen Karapetyan, who had just left the post of prime minister to make way for Mr. Sargsyan, stepped in as acting prime minister. The rapid events threw the country into disarray. The new Constitution invests considerable power in the Parliament, and some expected snap elections to be called. The demonstrations were fueled by a new generation of Armenians disenchanted with the small elite of politicians and their oligarch allies who have long controlled the government and much of the economy, analysts said. The protesters dismissed the standard argument that Armenia needed unvarying leadership to negotiate an end to the conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan and to deal with the tense relations with Turkey on the other side.
Nikol Pashinyan, the opposition member of Parliament who led the protests, lacks a party and a large constituency. Mr. Sargsyan agreed to meet with Mr. Pashinyan on Sunday but stormed out of the meeting within minutes, claiming he was being blackmailed. Then Mr. Pashinyan and two of his opposition allies were detained overnight, after scores of demonstrators were also detained. The three opposition leaders figures were released on Monday. Armenia, a Soviet state until declaring independence in 1991, remains a close partner of Russia in a volatile region, with a Russian military base at Gyumri. It has been locked for two decades in a low-grade war with Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic, over control of a disputed enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh. Some Armenians accuse Russia of fueling a new outbreak of the fighting in 2016 by selling arms to both sides.
Apart from political and territorial tensions, the country also has suffered from a rocky economy in recent years. Armenia depends heavily on remittances from its diaspora, which grows by some 50,000 people annually, said Andrei G. Areshev, a researcher on the Caucasus at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Armenians working in construction and other manual jobs in Russia were hit hard by the devaluation in the ruble in 2015, but they sent home $1.07 billion last year, according to records from the Central Bank. As prime minister, Mr. Karapetyan had helped the economy grow by fostering a technology sector, among other steps. Given that most key government officials, including the acting prime minister, are Sargsyan allies, it is unclear that his resignation will bring any immediate change, or what he protesters might do next. “The government hoped the tide would die down, but the opposite happened,” Mr. Iskandaryan said in Yerevan.
By MSEAP Cyber Secretariat (mseap@assembly.go.kr) |
