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Opinion
May 18, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 24
– notably with Russian help. Even Georgia, arguably the most successful of the non-Baltic post-Soviet states, failed to appreciably democratize until the Rose Revolution government was pushed from power in 2012, with the present government in- creasingly mired in its own moment of stagnation.
Whose Side
From that perspective, it’s no wonder that Armenia’s protest leaders have avoided colour revolution no- menclature, but that does not make the Velvet Revo- lution any less susceptible to the colour revolution blues. As recent history has shown, the euphoria that tends to accompany successful colour revolu- tion events rarely translates into major, lasting policy accomplishments – at least not without significant additional disruption – and the afterglow of societal unity, and commensurate political capital for the new government, is typically ephemeral.
This may be particularly true in Armenia, which, despite longstanding single party domination, is comprised of a fractious landscape of oligarchic interests, ideologies, and groupings of varying de- grees of radicalism. Pashinian and his confeder- ates managed to pull together an impressive alli- ance to dislodge the ancien regime, built with not just a few defections from the HHK’s own sprawl- ing coalition. But these are organizations with their own demands and agendas; can Pashinian’ satisfy them all? What happens if he does not?
As if on cue, the ultranationalists responsible for storming and occupying a Yerevan police station in 2016 are now hitting the streets to demand their comrades be released from prison. While it is true that the 2016 protests were, in many respects,
an important step in the opposition’s journey that culminated in Pashinian’s rise, it is also true that Erebuni gunmen’s use of radical violence caused the deaths of two police officers and triggered protests amid calls for territorial maximalism – an untenable strategic option for Armenia.
Another obvious point of contention relates to how Pashinian’s anticorruption drive might be interpreted in Moscow. While Pashinian’s artful
handling of the Russia question has managed
to keep relations with Moscow stable, his policy agenda may inherently conflict with Russia’s perceived interests in the country, which often interact and overlap with the same oligarchic interests that have throttled Armenia’s progress for so long. More broadly, many of the major preceding mass protests that contributed to Armenia’s Velvet Revolution – Electric Yerevan, the Gyumri massacre, and even the Erebuni police hostage incident – had more than a twinge of Russia-sceptic overtones.
Pashinian’s cautious embrace of Russia in Sochi, where the two leaders met for the first time during a meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (which Pashinian has previously called for Armenia to leave), seemed to telegraph amity, but also recalled another notable past post-revolution meeting.
Mikheil Saakashvili, freshly minted as Georgia’s president following the 2003 Rose Revolution, began his administration with a program of outreach to Russia, even famously announcing in his inau- guration speech that he was “not pro-American or pro-Russian,” but “pro-Georgian”— a near-exact formulation that Pashinian himself used during the April protests. Like Saakashvili, Pashinian’s first trip abroad was to Russia, where hope for positive rela- tions, and not mutual acrimony, was the dominant theme. Of course, Pashinian is hardly doomed to repeat Saakashvili’s many mistakes, but it is hard to ignore the comparable slate of structural conflicts that plagued Georgia-Russia ties are also a factor in the new Armenia currently under construction.
All of this looms beneath the long shadow of Azerbaijan and Armenia’s tense standoff over Nagorno Karabakh – and the complex strategic variables it implies. While Armenia has accom- plished what weeks ago may have widely been seen as the unbelievable, the long road only gets rockier from here. In an era of declining Western engagement in that region and worldwide, Arme- nia’s revolutionaries will have to rely on their wits and savvy to succeed. But Armenia has faced off bigger adversities before, and persisted.