ArmeniaNow content Comments (0)
I wanna be back
On the inside with you
Little Anthony – On the Outside Looking In
He looked lonely.
Standing on the Opera House steps with his people kept at a safe distance and his dignitaries presumably viewing via video feed, President Serzh A. Sargsyan looked very, very, alone.
He had been president for about 30 minutes and this was his first act, to assume Commander in Chief status of the Republic of Armenia Army and for his troops to salute their new chief parade-style.
But parade became charade on this Inauguration Day and not even state propaganda television could edit out the absurdity of the first several minutes of Armenia’s third Head of State.
On a day when he should have been able to greet his people, President Sargsyan had reason to fear them. By his count 52.8 percent have constitutionally demanded that he lead them. But not even they were allowed on the Opera House grounds to show their love.
The man whose party had bussed in thousands of out-of-towners to a post-election rally weeks before, now stood behind a cordon of security so impressively effective that a camera span showed only empty space beyond which Serzh Sargsyan’s masses were held.
He was unharmed. He was untouchable. He was unavailable.
He had his army, and it marched in front of him in grand goose-step, as far as the limited yard of the Opera House would allow before the parading boys would have stacked up on top of each other, held in by a ring of empty cafes.
He had been their Minister of Defense and now he was in need of defense. Serzh Sargsyan the war hero who bravely staved off the enemy, Azerbaijan, shut down Yerevan streets, inconvenienced thousands, made it impossible for mothers to take children to school and taxi drivers to make a living because he feared his own people on this day that should have been a national embrace.
Three hundred miles north of Baghdad, Yerevan had its own “Green Zone” on Inauguration Day. One man to blame for it, the new president, stood alone on a red carpet with a television camera as his congregation. The other, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, presumably watched from within his own cocoon where house arrest has kept him since March 1.
Nobody could blame President Sargsyan if he were afraid, and the fact that he would stand there exposed to potential penetration of the two-block safety bubble was itself an act of bravery. That First Lady Rita was not at his side, may have indicated how much courage it took to stand there.
Somewhere in the city locked away from their new president, the people he will lead watched their TVs and watched the streets for indication of when they were again allowed to move like free people.
When he came here in 2001, Pope John Paul II was allowed an adoring reception by thousands lining the streets.
When he came here in 2006, French President Jacques Chirac was allowed an adoring reception by thousands lining the streets and even stepped from his security detail to shake their hands.
But on the day that should have been the best in Serzh Sargsyan’s life, standing on city center sidewalks was forbidden. And so the new President of the Republic of Armenia finished his salute of troops and walked back inside the Opera House to the VIPs he trusted to be there.
A new term begins, with president and people denied.
admin @ April 10, 2008
Authoritarian regimes are usually said to rely on fear in order to maintain their control over a given society. That is only partially correct. Apart from the element of fear, what often keeps authoritarian regimes afloat is the general apathy of their populations, a reluctance of getting involved in politics not so much out of fear, but out of a superficial concern with individual everyday life rather than deep engagement with the fate of society and the state. The Roman emperors understood as much: in return for ‘panem et circenses’ (‘bread and circuses’), their populace allowed them a free hand at ruling their empire at their whim. And perhaps it is this model that our leadership in Yerevan hoped to emulate over the next few years, believing that their fellow Armenians would be subject to the same cynicism, materialism and vapidity that typifies our ‘elite’, if only they were offered the bribe of economic growth and the sedative of TV soap operas in return for their acquiescence.
They were wrong. The March events showed that the Armenian population will not allow a small clique of well-connected politicians, chinovniki and oligarchs to take over their state and its economy. That they would not play along with the screenplay concocted on Baghramian avenue, whereby our leaders assumed they would pretend organising free and fair elections, while both the international community and the local population would play along and pretend their noses were bleeding – in the former case, bribed by the prospect of a swift resolution of the Karabakh conflict, in the latter case, silenced through the few breadcrumbs that fall onto the floor while our oligarchs-cum-politicians enjoy their imperial banquet of economic growth and plunder.
The incoming Armenian president faces a simple choice between three options. Firstly, it can start offering more breadcrumbs and ensure a greater participation of the population at large in Armenia’s economic growth – but it is difficult to see how that would be possible without the elimination of the current system of informal economic monopolies and without the creation of a level playing field that would allow the Armenians’ entrepreneurial prowess to develop to the full. This brings us to the second option: the creation of just such a level playing field in both the economic and political spheres, the elimination of those monopolies and the taming of the oligarchs: in short, democracy and the rule of law. Failing that, Armenia would be faced with the third option: the suppression of those who will not be bribed through breadcrumbs and circuses (however generous and entertaining), through old-fashioned fear and terror. And only the gods know where this would lead.
Dziran @ March 31, 2008