Vartan Matiossian
It has been a constant since the mid-1990s to expect an election marred by fraud in Armenia. If the fraud has not been visible (ballot
stuffing and all), it has just been of the invisible type (I pay you this
amount of money and you go and vote for me). The claims of fraud, justified or
not, have ended sometimes in violent ways; one may remember the storming of
the National Assembly building and the beating of its speaker in 1996 or, even
more unjustified, the death of 10 people (eight demonstrators and two
policemen) on March 1, 2008 in the repression after ten days of peaceful
demonstrations.
We
will not comment on the events in Armenia after the presidential election of
February 18, 2013, as they are still evolving. Suffice it to say that they
showed a very strong performance by the main opposition candidate, Raffi
Hovannisian, who officially obtained 36.75 percent of the votes, against 58.64
of the incumbent, President Serge Sargsian. Denunciations of fraud have been
made—we assume that, justified or not, there may be some grounds for them--and heavily crowded meetings at Freedom
Square have followed, including the support of some opposition forces that had
neither participated in the election not thrown their support behind
Hovannisian, namely the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Armenian
National Congress.
People
have started to fill mailboxes with their conspiracy-theory rants, as the
one who had sent the following morning-after pill:
