Online NewsHour: Attack in Armenia



	ATTACK IN ARMENIA

October 27, 1999

Armed gunmen stormed Armenia's parliament, assassinating Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian and nine other government officials. Harry Gilmore, the first U.S. ambassador to the independent Armenia from 1993 to 1995, discusses the situation there.

Oct. 27, 1999:
An Online Report on the attack on Armenia's parliament

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Aug. 12, 1999:
A new revolt begins in Dagestan.

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The Armenian Parliament RAY SUAREZ: Gunshots went off inside the parliament of Armenia today. The prime minister, Vazgen Sarkisian, the number two in the government after the president, was killed, along with six other top officials. Before long, hundreds of police and soldiers surrounded the building, negotiating with the gunmen, who had taken dozens of hostages. It was the latest eruption in a decade of violence in the landlocked country in the Caucasus Mountains, smaller than the size of Maryland. Its population of three and a half million people is overwhelmingly Christian.

The Armenian people, who lost as many as two million of their kin in massacres by the Turks during and after World War I, fulfilled an ancient dream of nationhood when an independent state was created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Armenian independence came as the country was trying to recover and rebuild from the devastating earthquake of 1988 that killed 25,000 people.

Armenia's transition to nationhood has been marked by political infighting, much of it the product of war. For nearly six years, Armenia fought a war with neighboring Azerbaijan over a disputed piece of territory known as Nagorno-Karabakh. The land is inside Azerbaijan, but with a majority ethnic Armenian population. The war and halting negotiations to convert a 1994 cease fire into a durable peace have helped roil Armenian politics.

The late prime minister Sarkisian led a nationalist group composed of veterans of the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting. In the Soviet era, Armenia was among the wealthiest and most productive of Soviet republics. But since independence, its economy has sunk. The war with Azerbaijan cut it off from overseas energy supplies, and corruption and bribery are said to be widespread.

A bolt out of the blue

RAY SUAREZ: For more on the Armenia crisis, we turn to Harry Gilmore, who served as the first U.S. ambassador to the independent Armenia from 1993 until 1995. He now chairs the Caucasus Department at the Foreign Service Institute. Ambassador Gilmore, I guess the first question is, is there any tradition or recent precedent for political violence of this kind in Armenia?
HARRY GILMORE, Former U.S. ambassador to Armenia: No. Of course, Armenia has only been independent, again, since 1991. But no.

RAY SUAREZ: So this is something that comes to you as a bolt out of the blue?

HARRY GILMORE: Right. The only thing that there was, that even closely resembled it, there were some demonstrations that involved large crowds outside the parliament, and the delegation going inside the parliament. But that didn't involve any shootings, and it certainly didn't involve the kind of tragedy we are aware of today.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, in addition to the prime minister, reports coming out of Yerevan say the finance minister, speaker of the parliament, and his deputy may have also all died in this assassination attack.

HARRY GILMORE: It seems the gunmen were pretty bloody, and I've heard as many as nine, the number of as many as nine killed.

The losses are heavy

RAY SUAREZ: Do they have a political culture there developed to the point where a government can quickly coalesce, can move on, where these key officials can be replaced? Or, without sort of a deep bench, are they really in for a tough patch right now?

HARRY GILMORE: Well, the president is alive and well, and that's important. He's the head of state. He'll obviously have to elect a new prime minister and a new speaker of the parliament as well as appoint some new ministers, but the mechanism is there. I assume they will have a deep enough bench to elect competent people. On the other hand, the losses today are heavy. These are important leaders and they were working together, the speaker of the parliament and the prime minister, very well -- they're from different parties -- and they promised more stability for Armenia than we'd seen maybe over the last couple of years.

RAY SUAREZ: Initial reports are pointing to an Armenian, someone who is associated with the Nationalist Party, who has a past as a journalist. I guess, does this point us to look for domestic sources for this violence, or might there have been threats from outside the country, given the recent war with Azerbaijan?

HARRY GILMORE: From all I can tell, this is a domestic event. I don't see any indications that are at all credible that there were outside factors. Also on the domestic scene, it looks to me like this was an isolated group. It looks to me like they have no echo in the city. I've had some chance to follow events the last few hours. It looks to me like they have no movement, really, outside the parliament. At least there is no evidence of that yet.

Armenia has had its challenges

RAY SUAREZ: Tell us a little bit about Prime Minister Sarkisian himself. What part of the Armenian political spectrum did he represent?

HARRY GILMORE: He was defense minister when I was ambassador, and he had become the head of the Republican Party. He is a popular fellow, had a certain charisma. In fact, he has a beard very much like yours -- had -- and seemed to be enjoying being prime minister and seemed to be building some careful policies, particularly dealing with corruption and some of the other problems that all the post-Soviet states inherited -- also, a man with a beautiful smile, jovial man, a man who, I think, had perhaps a long future in Armenian politics were it not for today.

RAY SUAREZ: Armenia, like some others of the former Soviet republics, just has had a terrible time getting some traction, getting going as a country, yet it would have seemed blessed at the outset by some pretty good strength, including a very well-organized exile community.

HARRY GILMORE: Yes, the Armenian world is a large one and the Armenians outside Armenia, in the so-called Armenian Diaspora, are very capable people who have done well in almost every country they've settled. Basically, Armenia has had its challenges, like all the former republics, and the Karabakh conflict has been a very heavy burden for Armenia and for neighboring Azerbaijan, but there has been a cease-fire since '94. And also, Armenia has done pretty well economically on reforms, better than one might think without looking at it closely, but still there are heavy problems. The population really has suffered grievously from power shortages, et cetera, and the economics in the country was just beginning to turn the corner.

A long way to go

RAY SUAREZ: In a recent speech the late prime minister referred to corruption as endemic. And he said, "Well, you know, maybe we can understand it because of the neighborhood that we live in, but still it's something that we have to root out." Could he have been making domestic enemies?

HARRY GILMORE: Possibly. Corruption is a major problem and he'd been attacking it head-on lately. It's not a new phenomenon and it's not peculiar to Armenia. Of all the post-Soviet states, the new states that emerged from the former Soviet Union, corruption is a problem for various reasons, but it was a problem in Armenia, and he certainly was attacking it.

RAY SUAREZ: And what forms would this corruption take? I mean, if you had to explain it to an outsider, what are some of the examples you might use?

HARRY GILMORE: It's hard to say specifically. Partly, it would have to do with contracts going to people who were, shall we say, connected by some friendship or previous ties. It would also possibly take the form of kickbacks; also, bribery. But in some cases, people hadn't been well paid so the bribes were their source of income. It also has a broader dimension. That is, the old system collapsed and the new system was just being created, is just being created. Armenia had done better in many ways than some of its sister states that emerged from the former Soviet Union in terms of laws, et cetera, but they all have a long way to go and Armenia surely does too.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, as the smallest of all the former Soviet republics, I guess it was heavily dependent on good relations with its neighbors as well. It's between two giants, Iran and Russia, but also some ...

HARRY GILMORE: Turkey as well.

RAY SUAREZ: Right, some pretty potent states in the neighborhood. Has it managed to do well?

HARRY GILMORE: It's done better on the reform front than many others that have emerged from the former Soviet Union. There are problems. The disruptions in communications, transportation, the conflict with Karabakh, and the fact that the petroleum exports it used to have from the Azerbaijan then-republic, now Azerbaijan independent nation, have been impossible. The border is closed. The Azerbaijanis have closed the border because of the Karabakh conflict. The border with Turkey is closed. Turkey does not allow any exports, any trade across that border. So Armenia has been in tough shape. On the other hand, they're a very well-educated population, and to the degree that just plain stick-to-it-iveness and intellectual kind of attainments will get you somewhere, they're not doing badly. But clearly they've suffered heavily from the Karabakh conflict and the closed borders.

RAY SUAREZ: Ambassador Gilmore, thanks for coming by today.

HARRY GILMORE: It's been a pleasure, Mr. Suarez. Take care.