Two revolutions for a "new Armenia
Presented as the most loyal of the Soviet republics, Armenia put an end to 70 years of Soviet rule with a revolution, the "Karabagh Movement", which mobilised a million demonstrators in Yerevan from February 1988 onwards, demanding the attachment of Nagorno-Karabagh, an autonomous region of Azerbaijan with a majority Armenian population, and then very quickly independence. Under the leadership of the Orientalist Levon Ter Petrossian, the "Karabagh Committee", a group of ten or so opponents who had taken over from the moribund CP, began the "de-Sovietization" process in 1990, by passing democratic laws in the local parliament, notably on the multiparty system, before calling a referendum on independence on 21 September 1991 (99% "yes"!) Claiming its right to secede from the USSR, which was enshrined in the Soviet Constitution but the mere mention of which was punishable by the Gulag, Armenia followed its own legal agenda, while the leaders of the other republics of a decaying USSR were proclaiming an independence that some of them had never wanted. It is from this referendum born of this revolution that the Armenian Republic derives its legal, political and moral legitimacy, as does Karabagh, which after a referendum also proclaimed its independence in September 1991, although it was not recognised. But these good democratic intentions did not resist the hegemonic temptations of a power that exalts national unity around Nagorno-Karabakh, which won the war against Azerbaijan in 1994. The first president elected by universal suffrage in October 1991, Ter Petrossian was re-elected in 1996 against a backdrop of contestation after having had a referendum approved in 1995 to strengthen a presidential system suspected of encouraging an authoritarian drift that had cost the Dashnak Party, which had returned from exile, and of benefiting the ruling party (then the MNA, which was the offspring of the Karabagh Committee), which was supported by a caste of oligarchs who shared the country's meagre wealth. Accused of defeatism in Karabagh, Ter Petrossian resigned in February 1998, but these suspicions of authoritarianism and corruption weighed even more heavily on his successors, Robert Kocharian and then Serge Sarkissian, both of whom were originally from Nagorno-Karabagh, where they had held high positions. For 20 years, they exercised an undivided power at the head of the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), dominating a Parliament where the oligarchs made a strong entry, thanks to elections which were each time contested by an Opposition whose impotence was palliated by eruptions of violence: the killing of the Parliament in October 1999, a wave of demonstrations violently repressed after the election of S. Sarkissian in February 2008 against Ter Petrossian, or the occupation of a Yerevan police station by a commando of Karabagh veterans, the Sassna Tsrer, in July 2016. But the manoeuvre of S. Sarkissian, who intends to remain in power at the end of his second and final term in April 2018 by assuming the role of Prime Minister, and thus of No. 1 of the executive, by virtue of the constitutional reform that he had approved by referendum in December 2015 converting Armenia to a parliamentary system, will crystallise the anger of the people, exasperated by corruption and poverty. In March 2018, the journalist and opponent Nikol Pachinian launched his "Velvet Revolution", a triumphal march to power, from which he ousted S. Sarkissian, defeating the well-trodden path of the ex-President who was Prime Minister for only 6 days. A new revolution supposed to give birth to a "New Armenia" whose leader, N. Pachinian, invested Prime Minister in January 2019 thanks to early legislative elections that were largely won and uncontested for once by his "Im Kayl" (My Step) alliance, is laying the foundations by leading a merciless fight against corruption and the former leaders of a HHK rejected from Parliament, starting with ex-President Kotcharian, arrested in July 2018 for corruption and for the repression of March1, 2008 that left 10 dead in Yerevan. N. Pachinian was then at the head of the demonstrations in favour of Ter Petrossian, an activism that he paid for with 2 years in prison, which will make people say that the case, at the origin of a historic trial, is a settlement of accounts. But inaugurating a parliamentary system presented as more democratic, N.Pachinian relies on a renewed Parliament which he controls to complete a revolution begun in 1988, and in 2019 he is undertaking a judicial reform which has earned him accusations of authoritarianism and populism.This new Armenia is sorely tested by the defeat suffered by the Armenians in the Karabagh war in the autumn of 2020 in the face of Azerbaijan, which is recovering a number of territories by virtue of the ceasefire that N.Pachinian had to sign with Azeri President I.Aliev under the aegis of Russian President V.Putin; discredited, accused of treason during demonstrations by the opposition demanding his resignation, N.Pachinian was nevertheless re-elected, but without enthusiasm, in the early legislative elections of 20 June 2021, at the head of his Civil Contract party, which dominates a Parliament where the opposition is represented by the alliances formed around former presidents Kotcharian and Sarkissian, confirming the polarisation of the political scene between "democrats" and "populists".
Between Russia and the West
If there is one area that the Velvet Revolution has not affected, it is diplomacy, which obeys the same rule of 'complementarity' between Russia and the West that has been followed since independence, even though N. Pachinian questioned it when he was in opposition. Pachinian when he was in the Opposition. By joining the concert of nations in 1991, Armenia refused to allow itself to be locked into the logic of war into which the conflict with Azerbaijan was leading it, and strengthened its diplomatic foundations, while maintaining close ties with Russia, within the CIS, under whose aegis a cease-fire agreement in Karabagh was concluded in May 1994, pending a lasting settlement of the conflict which Russia mediated, together with France and the United States, at the head of the OSCE Minsk Group. Faced with the threat posed by Turkey, which showed its solidarity with its "Azeri brother" by imposing a land blockade on Armenia in 1993, Yerevan developed its relations with Iran, its only gateway to the world along with Georgia, and placed its security in the hands of Russia, which protects Armenia's external borders and maintains military bases there, under the terms of the 1997 defence agreement, consolidated in 2010. Armenia is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), a Russian-led military alliance of six former Soviet republics, and most of its arsenal is supplied by Moscow at knock-down prices. Armenia also drew closer to the EU as part of the Eastern Partnership programme launched in 2009 by Brussels in response to Russia's war with Georgia, which rekindled a Cold War climate, while at the same time sketching out a normalisation with Turkey, which was frozen in 2010. Under pressure from Moscow, it renounced in September 2013 the association and free trade agreement it was to sign with the EU to join Putin's Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), of which it became a member in January 2015. While criticizing Russia for failing in its duties of solidarity within the OSTC by selling Azerbaijan, which is not a member, billions of dollars worth of weapons used against Armenians in the April 2016 "4-day war," Yerevan is renewing dialogue with the EU for a Comprehensive and Enhanced Cooperation Agreement (CEPA), signed in November 2017. Since his accession to power in May 2018, N. Pachinian has followed the same line, claiming to want to strengthen ties with Russia, which does not hide its distrust of this leader who was still advocating in 2017, the withdrawal from the EEU, while developing relations with Europe, the United States and Iran. But the war won by Azerbaijan, with the help of Turkey, on November 9, 2020, after 45 days of fighting in Karabagh, by showing the isolation of Armenia, confirmed the limits of this diplomacy: Russia, which has become the guarantor of the security of a diminished Karabagh and of Armenia's disputed borders in the face of the Azeri/Turkish threat, exerts increased influence in Yerevan while seeking to maintain good relations with Baku.
An "economic revolution
The end of monopolies in an economic context rid of the endemic scourge of corruption and cleaned up, more conducive to investment, such are the stakes of the "economic revolution" advocated by N. Pachinian. The economic situation indeed requires more than the "systemic changes" announced in 2017. Armenia, which approached independence with the heavy liabilities of a Soviet system at the end of its rope with obsolete infrastructures, aggravated by the earthquake of 1988 which destroyed Gyumri, the2nd city and the north-west of the country, making 500,000 homeless, in addition to the refugees from the war against Azerbaijan, the country has overcome the shortages of the 1990s, at the cost of shock therapy and with the help of the diaspora, which has contributed to the renovation of the road network, as well as the World Bank, the IMF and the EBRD. But privatisation has mainly benefited the oligarchs, who hardly redistribute the fruits of double-digit growth until 2008, driven by mining exports (copper, molybdenum, gold) and by the real estate boom. With no energy resources other than the white gold of hydroelectric power stations and the electricity produced by the Medzamor nuclear power station, which dates back to the Soviet era and is kept alive with Russian help, Armenia is dependent on natural gas from Russia - which has loosened its grip on its energy sector, if not its economy - even though since 2011 it has also been getting its gas supplies from Iran, to which it pays in the form of electricity. Despite the Turkish-Azeri land blockade, it has been able to develop its agri-food and mining exports, to which entry into the EEU and CEPA open up larger markets, and returned to growth in 2017, while focusing its efforts on high-tech and digital, less subject to the vagaries of geopolitics. Developing a more environmentally conscious mining sector, as evidenced by the 2018-2019 blocking of an American-British multinational's mega-project exploiting the Amulsar gold deposit, it is on this path, opened by the TUMO creative technology centers training tomorrow's elite and confirmed by a world IT congress in October 2019 in Yerevan, the Ararat plain will be designated as an Armenian-style Silicon Valley, and Armenia is resolutely moving in this direction, also located on the Chinese "new silk roads", while at the same time moving into the era of renewable energy. However, these prospects have been overshadowed since 2020 by the economic difficulties caused by the pandemic and aggravated by the consequences of the last war in Karabagh.
