Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

222 The History of Armenia

gave rise to expectations that the United States could facilitate a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Sargsyan had been a staunch advocate for the continuation of close ties with Russia, and Moscow may have construed his negotiations with the United States as undermining Russian interests in the region. Speculation ran high that the five gunmen acted to forestall further negotiations, but no evidence has been brought forth to support such claims.67 The Kocharyan government survived the crisis.

Kocharyan won his reelection bid in March 2003. Of the total 1,548,570 votes cast, 1,044,424 voted for Kocharyan, and 504,146 for Stepan Demirchyan. In the parliamentary elections, the Republican Party of Armenia, with 23.66 percent of the total votes, secured the majority (twenty-three) of seats. Significantly, the Dashnaktsutiun, which had been banned by President Ter Petrosyan in 1994, won 11.5 percent of the votes and 11 seats in the National Assembly. Ter Petrosyan’s own party, the Armenian National Movement, won less than 1 (0.65) percent of the votes and gained no seats in the parliament. The Communist Party, which had dominated the republic for seven decades, also failed to win seats, as did a number of other parties, such as the Liberal Union, the Union of Industrials and Women, and the Ramkavar Azatakan Party.68 As during the Ter Petrosyan government, economic issues determined the election outcome. Having secured his reelection, Kocharyan felt confident to address the foreign policy problems that seemed intractable under his predecessor.

KOCHARYAN’S FOREIGN POLICY

Geography, as always in international politics, is one of the primary factors influencing foreign policy. By the closing days of the millennium, the three republics in the Caucasus had become part of expanding networks of relations with their neighbors and the major powers. Geopolitical and economic considerations compelled Armenia to maintain its relations with Russia as a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Georgia, on the other hand, sought to distance itself from Moscow, demanded the removal of the Russian military bases from its territory, and moved closer to Turkey and the United States. Azerbaijan utilized the lure of oil as an incentive to attract the support of western corporations.

In April 1999 Armenia participated in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Washington, DC. Although not a member, Armenia participated through NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. Its participation underscored the necessity of balancing Armenia’s foreign policy between the East (in this case Russia and Iran) and the West (the United States and Europe). The timing of the summit created the

particularly awkward position for Kocharyan and Oskanian of maintaining close security ties with Russia, which for its part opposed the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia, while cultivating closer ties with NATO. At home, the Communist Party, headed by Sergey Badalyan, led the opposition against Kocharyan’s participation, claiming that Armenia’s involvement in NATO could potentially undermine the republic’s relations with Russia with dire consequences for national security.69

In late November 1999 Kocharyan attended the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Istanbul. The principal agenda items included the adoption of the new Charter for European Security and the revised Treaty on Conventional Forces of Europe. There, Kocharyan held conferences with a number of his counterparts, including presidents Suleyman Demirel of Turkey, Jacques Chirac of France, and Bill Clinton of the United States. The declaration issued by the summit covered a vast array of international topics, including approval of efforts by the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan to resolve the Karabagh conflict through the Minsk Group. Significantly, the declaration made no mention of Karabagh as an independent, sovereign entity. The Istanbul summit promised no more than support for the continuation of ArmeniaAzerbaijan negotiations but without accepting Karabagh as a legitimate partner, a position not different from that pursued by the OSCE since the early phases of the negotiations in 1992. In addition, several bilateral and multilateral agreements were signed, including a Georgian-Russian agreement to withdraw or to reduce Russian military presence in Georgia and an agreement providing for the transit of Azerbaijani oil from Baku to the Mediterranean port of Jeyhan in Turkey.70 Unlike the negative assessments of the Lisbon summit of December 1996, initial public reaction to the Istanbul summit in matters pertaining to Armenia and Karabagh was more favorable. This was perhaps partly due to Kocharyan’s statements claiming to have achieved more positive results than his predecessor, but the Istanbul summit failed to resolve the precarious status of Karabagh.

Among the western powers, the United States has played a significant role in shaping the agenda for the resolution of the conflicts in the Caucasus because of the region’s oil resources and proximity to the Middle East. The United States considered the Caspian region strategically significant because of oil interests and, after the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, also for its war on terrorism. The European Union (EU) viewed the Caucasus as potentially a viable economic zone where it could expand its influence, as the three republics sought membership in the Union or, short of that, close association with it. Azerbaijan launched a major lobbying campaign in the United States beginning in 1994 to secure billions of dollars’ worth of investments in its oil fields, a lucrative prospect that Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev

hoped to utilize in order to win U.S. support in negotiations regarding the status of Karabagh. Azerbaijan and the United States signed a security agreement in 1996, establishing a bilateral working group on mutual security concerns, and Baku expressed its determination to withdraw from the CIS security system. Azerbaijan had signed the CIS Collective Security Treaty in 1993 but refused to renew its membership and officially withdrew in 1999.71 Similarly, having gained the confidence of Germany, Turkey, the EU, and the United States, Georgia announced its intention to leave the CIS. In November 2004, Defense Minister Giorgi Baramidze publicly expressed his preference for closer relations with NATO, and in February 2006 his government formally withdrew from the CIS Security Council. This was followed, in May, by President Mikheil Saakashvili’s indication that his government would reassess its membership in the CIS. The United States increased its military presence in Georgia beginning in 2002, when the Pentagon stationed nearly 1,000 military “advisers” there to counter Iran’s potentially destabilizing influence in the region.72 Complicating matters was the security, ideological, and economic alignment between Israel and Turkey since their bilateral agreement of 1996, as the former sought allies against radical Islam. Closer ties between the two nations led Israel to lend strong support to Azerbaijan both in issues pertaining to the resolution of the status of Karabagh and in the wider international community. As of this writing in early 2007, Armenia finds itself nearly isolated in the region, with close ties only with Russia and Iran, although membership in numerous key international organizations, including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Council of Europe, and the World Trade Organization, may cushion the fluctuations in fortune.

THE KOCHARYAN GOVERNMENT AND

DIASPORAN RELATIONS

The economic and political difficulties in Armenia continued to press the policymakers in Erevan to pay close attention to their relations with the diasporan communities. Upon entering office, Kocharyan had sought to undo the damage caused by his predecessor, and unlike Ter Petrosyan’s more ad hoc style, Kocharyan adopted a more systematic approach to create a structured formulation for that relationship. In December 1998, he called for the first Armenia-diaspora conference, which met in Erevan on September 22–23, 1999, with the participation of about 800 people from the diaspora. Although it did not produce any breakthroughs in policy, the conference nevertheless set a precedent in homeland-diaspora relations and provided a forum to integrate the diasporan voices into the

public debate on various issues on the national agenda. Diasporan communities clearly welcomed the initiative, and the conference perhaps would have even helped to enhance Kocharyan’s international prestige. The assassinations in the parliament in October, however, eclipsed his initial efforts. Further, the new president reinstituted the legitimacy of the Dashnaktsutiun. That the second Armenia-diaspora conference was held on May 27–28, 2002, the anniversary of the first republic’s independence day, carried symbolic significance in reconfirming Kocharyan’s willingness to cooperate with the Dashnaktsutiun, although at the same time the latter’s opposition to the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission, as discussed below, remained a serious problem. By September 2006, when the third conference met, relations between the republic and the diaspora seemed to have recovered.

Beginning in the late 1990s, homeland-diaspora relations witnessed fundamental changes. For earlier generations in the diaspora, the “homeland” referred to the lost territories in historic or Ottoman Armenia, their families’ place of origin. The new generation of diasporan Armenians had little or no familiarity with the land of their forebears and saw the postSoviet republic as the Armenian homeland. Independence from Soviet rule stimulated wide interest in travel to the republic, but with mixed results. On the positive side, the diaspora developed closer ties with Armenia and viewed the republic as the epicenter of collective national identity and aspirations; individual Armenians gained greater familiarity with the country, its problems, and its interests, a process that also demythologized the idealized Armenia that they had imagined for decades. Some Armenians even immigrated to the republic, purchased or rented houses, and established businesses. On the negative side, the economic hardship and corruption they witnessed created a certain measure of cynicism toward the country. Some Armenians who had celebrated from afar the republic’s independence in 1991 grew disillusioned after they visited the country. Would diasporan Armenians hang on to the imagined republic and abandon the real, or embrace the real republic and abandon the imagined? Despite the difficulties, some organizations, such as the Land and Culture Organization, encouraged the diasporan youth to become involved in the construction of the homeland. Diasporan remittances represented a significant aspect of relations with the republic. For example, the annual telethons held by the Hayastan All-Armenia Fund (Hayastan Hamahaykakan Himnadram) between 1991 and 2006 reportedly contributed more than $160 million in various forms of assistance to Armenia and Karabagh.73 Financial support totaling about $25 million enabled Karabagh to construct the north-south road linking Lachin and Stepanakert. These and similar diasporan contributions to the republic and Karabagh were clearly major successes in diaspora-homeland cooperation.

The Armenia-diaspora conferences also resolved to support efforts toward securing international recognition of the genocide, but such declarations were meant for diasporan consumption rather than guiding policy. The Kocharyan government appeared to follow a two-pronged approach to this issue. Its public announcements at times supported and at times refuted the claim that Erevan would insist on Turkish recognition as a precondition for normalization of relations. The Kocharyan government, however, could not control lobbying efforts and political campaigns in diasporan communities. Lobbying host governments for the recognition of the genocide had gained backing from all Armenian communities during the Cold War, when Moscow determined Armenia’s foreign policy and shielded the republic from the pressures of international political economy and geopolitical competitions. In the 1990s, however, Armenia, now a sovereign state, had to assume direct responsibility for its own domestic and foreign policies. The continued practice of lobbying in diasporan communities for genocide recognition placed enormous pressure on the government in Erevan, and the Kocharyan government appeared to adopt a balanced approach to domestic economic priorities and demands to place the recognition of the genocide on the nation’s foreign policy agenda.

Armenians generally believed that successes in securing recognition by host governments and international bodies would pressure Turkey into recognizing the genocide and accepting responsibility. Foreign governments adopted such resolutions for their own domestic political gains and, in the case of Europe, raised the issue within the context of debates regarding Turkey’s admission to the European Union. European countries that adopted some form of resolution recognizing the genocide include Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland. In September 2005, the European Parliament, echoing similar declarations adopted in 2002, 2000, 1998, and 1987, approved a resolution calling on the Turkish government to recognize the genocide “as a prerequisite for accession to the European Union.” It further urged Ankara to work toward establishing diplomatic relations with and to terminate the economic blockade on Armenia.74 Ostensibly a moral stance insisting on accountability for the crime of genocide, such resolutions manifest European reluctance and even opposition to the admission of Turkey (which is seen as a Muslim country) into the European Union.75 Nevertheless, most Armenians would have been satisfied if the 2005 resolution served as a basis for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation.

The Kocharyan government attempted to normalize relations with Turkey through the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC), established in 2001 as a track-two, unofficial diplomacy under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State. The TARC process lacked the