Bradley Jardine
For many of the activists who
took to Yerevan's streets in recent weeks to overthrow long-time leader
Serzh Sargsyan, his Republican Party of Armenia – which has ruled since
1999 – is the only leadership they've ever known.
The heavy participation of young Armenians
was one of the most striking features of the protest movement.
University and high school students took to the streets en masse and
young working class men with their white Lada Nivas blasting rabiz music
became a common backdrop to the protests. In one image that went viral,
children emulated their elders by erecting roadblocks with toy cars.
As a result, the relatively middle-aged Nikol
Pashinyan, at 42, is expected to be elected prime minister on May 8,
taking over leadership of the country from the 63-year-old Sargsyan. The
transition has renewed hope among young people in a country that has
long offered them few prospects.
“The brain drain was a huge blow to the
country – we didn’t want to leave but we also didn’t see a future here,”
said Grigor Yeritsyan, 28, head of Armenian Progressive Youth, an NGO.
“Pashinyan has brought back hope – and young people are now talking
about staying here to rebuild their country.”
Dissatisfaction among Armenia's youth has
been steadily growing, as has their organizational strength. One key
learning experience was the 2015 protests known as Electric Yerevan,
which started as demonstrations against high energy prices but grew
into a broader movement akin to the global Occupy movement.
“The protests didn’t start overnight,”
Yeritsyan said. “Years of activism and hard work finally coalesced into a
single movement.”
“I had been actively involved in politics
since 2012,” said Sona Ghazaryan, 24, an activist in the #RejectSerzh
movement, one of the youth-led groups that drove the protests.
“But it was Electric Yerevan that changed everything. That movement’s
use of social media was unprecedented and really gave use an idea of
what we were capable of.”
This
time, organizers took it to a different level: “We are extremely
organized,” she added. “Entire teams designed logos, monitored web
traffic and arranged the best times to launch certain information.
Others worked on targeting different segments of society to make our
message stick.”
“We got to practice real active citizenship. It was like a school for democratic engagement,” said Yeritsyan.
One major complaint among young people was the devaluing of education. In November 2017, new legislation made it more difficult
for students to defer military service. Armenia, which uses conscripts
to guard its borders in its conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan, has
become one of the world’s most militarized societies under Republican leadership.
“It is important to keep the country safe,
but the military should not dominate society,” said Davit Petrosian, 25,
a student activist who led protests
against the new concept last year and who has been actively organizing
students in support of Pashinyan. “The concept was only designed to help
the previous government keep power – it did not improve national
security.”
Petrosian complained that the government has
been underfunding universities to the point that some can’t afford soap
or toilet paper in the bathrooms. “The Republican Party has no respect
for education,” he said.
Lara
Brattea, 20, a musician and activist on Republic Square says today’s
young people are a forgotten generation. “The [Republican] party has no
understanding of youth culture and they haven’t been investing in its
development,” she said. “We want leaders who take notice of us and help
young artists and musicians to thrive.”
The youth-heavy protests also allowed some
marginalized groups in Armenia’s conservative society – such as
feminists – to take to the political front lines.
“Young women were out chanting, ‘Serzh is not our father, we don’t need a father,’ mocking
the ruling party’s patriarchal notion that Serzh would protect the
country as ‘father of the nation’,” said Anna Zhamakochyan, a
sociologist working for the liberal think tank Socioscope.
“Marginal views got to become part of the
mainstream,” Zhamakochyan said. “Everyone from feminists and LGBT groups
to bikers and religious conservatives took part.”
There were limits to the inclusiveness, however.
LGBT activists participated in the protests,
but deliberately kept a relatively low profile. “Often the LGBT
community is talked about as if it’s invisible,” said Mamikon Hovsepyan,
an LGBT activist and founder of PINK Armenia. “Participating allowed
the LGBT community to show people that they are students, shopkeepers,
bus drivers and activists just like them.”
But Hovsepyan said the community made a
strategic decision not to fly LGBT banners for fear of “harming”
Pashinyan’s movement in the deeply conservative country. He believes
nationalistic elements would have used the participation of the LGBT
community to “discredit the protests.”
Sasha
Sultanyan, 23, an activist for the country's small Yezidi religious
minority, said the protests also brought Armenia’s national minorities
out onto the streets to show that they share in the same wider struggles
against corruption and nepotism.
But he also noted that the dominant message
of the protests was about Armenianness. “I support the movement, of
course, but the leaders have not really been thinking about minorities
and often talk about the Armenian nation rather than a more inclusive,
civic movement,” Sultanyan said. Part of the reason, he argues, is that
Armenia needs to appeal to its large diaspora, and that talk of the
Armenian people rather than citizens gains more traction overseas.
Nevertheless, on balance Sultanyan was
optimistic: “Pashinyan’s team is young and well educated – we hope they
will have intelligent solutions to these issues.”
The success of the movement has inspired young activists to keep pushing.
“The new authorities will struggle to
contain the expectations of the youth, who have acted as the engine of
the revolution,” Yeritsyan of the Armenian Progressive Youth NGO said.
“The bars and cafes in the city are alive
with serious discussions about how best to organize our society,” added
Ghazaryan of the #RejectSerzh movement. “We can't afford to lose this
momentum.”
"Eurasianet" (eurasianet.org), May 7, 2018
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