Armenia’s new Prime Minister, former president Serzh Sargsyan, was forced to resign on Monday, just days after being sworn into office, following protests that broke out across the capital city Yerevan that saw tens of thousands pour into the streets and demand his ouster.
Protesters chanted “Refuse Serzh” marching toward Republic Square, meant to challenge Sargsyan’s efforts to tighten his grip on power. Sargsyan previously served as president of the land-locked South Caucasus country for 10 years.
Karen Karapetyan, a former prime minister and former executive at the Russian gas company Gazprom, has taken over as acting PM, after a meeting of ministers that sought a way to fill the vacancy left by the encumbered Sargsyan.
Fikrat Sadikhov, a political commentator in Baku, says the latest developments in Armenia would have implications on the geopolitical situation in the South Caucasus, including the resolution of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“Sargsyan’s step-down could one way or another influence the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” Sadikhov told Caspian News. “It largely depends on who will fill his empty boots. I don’t believe the new premier would agree to liberate the occupied lands of Azerbaijan at once. However, I do believe that with Sargsyan’s abdication we can expect some positive developments in the process of settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.”
“Armenia’s escape of the ongoing economic isolation is not possible without making a compromise with Azerbaijan.”
Against the backdrop of the South Caucasus’s growing role in global energy and transportation projects, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway and Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), Armenia is not reaping any benefit from what are lucrative investments for neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan. Armenia’s geopolitical isolation from the two projects, as well as its western neighbor Turkey, has cost it dearly in both geopolitical clout and economic reward. As a result, Armenia remains dependent upon Russia’s markets to export its goods.
Ongoing enmity between Armenia and Azerbaijan sparked in the late 1980s when Armenian rulers started to demand the separation of Nagorno-Karabakh region from Azerbaijan and its incorporation into Armenia due to a partial Armenian population in the region alongside indigenous Azerbaijanis. By 1992, the two countries were fighting an all-out war.
The war claimed the lives of over 20,000 Azerbaijanis, while nearly one million Azerbaijanis were internally displaced and 4,000 went missing. The full-scale war came to a stop in 1994, thanks to a ceasefire, but Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts are still occupied by Armenia.
Serzh Sargsyan, who is from Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region, was one of the field commanders that fought against Azerbaijan during the war. When Robert Kocharyan, another veteran of the war, came to power as president of Armenia in 1998, he appointed Sargsyan as defense minister by 2000. Along with other Armenian military officers that eventually rose to power, the two became part of what has been dubbed the Karabakh clan by both local and foreign circles.
Thomas de Waal, a Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, interviewed Sargsyan in 2000 for a book he wrote about the Karabakh war, titled “Black Garden.” De Waal wrote that Sargsyan was not denying the systematic killing Azerbaijanis during his time as field commander in the region.
“Before Khojali, the Azerbaijanis thought that they were joking with us, they thought that the Armenians were people who could not raise their hand against the civilian population,” Sargsyan told de Waal, according to the account. “We were able to break that [stereotype]. And that’s what happened.”
De Waal notes in his book that Sargsyan’s words are, “suggesting that the killings may, at least in part, have been a deliberate act of mass killing as intimidation.”
Under Sargsyan’s direct guidance, Armenian forces massacred 613 people, including 106 women, 63 children and 70 elderly people, and took hostage 1,275 others in Khojaly city in Nagorno-Karabakh region. Another 150 Azerbaijani nationals went missing, whose fates remain unknown to this day. Those suffering major injuries or having been maimed totaled 487, including 76 children.
Azerbaijanis maintain that the Karabakh clan’s first decade-long rule in Armenia, from 1998 to 2008 under Robert Kocharyan, only undermined any effort to find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, instead of seeking a durable, peaceful solution to the issue in line with the four UN Security Council resolution, all passed in 1993, that call for Armenia to withdrawal its forces from the region.
Kocharyan dodged peace talks with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in France in 2006, when he left the meeting under the pretext of having to use the restroom – yet he never came back.
When Sargsyan succeeded Kocharyan in 2008, hopes sprang for change. However they were quickly dashed, as the Sargsyan pursued the same policy with regards to Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as his predecessor. In a speech delivered in August 2016, Sargsyan said Nagorno-Karabakh “will never be a part of Azerbaijan [and] it is excluded.”
In an address made this past February, then-president of Armenia described what was a bloody war as, “an impregnable fortress of our [Armenia’s] newest history, a symbol of perseverance and victory.”
Elkhan Shahinoglu, head of the Baku-based Atlas Research Center, says Sargsyan’s resigning is the end of a two decades-long Sargsyan-Kocharyan era in Armenian history, and could be a perfect time for the Azerbaijani government to send a message to Yerevan concerning its position regarding the conflict.
“The Sargsyan-Kocharyan duo was the mastermind of occupation. They would never light a green light leading towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Now, the new rulers in Armenia should get a message from Baku that if they give up the occupation and agree to a fair peace, it would work in Armenia’s favor,” Shahinoglu wrote on his Facebook page.
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