Asia Times: Attack on Karabakh president raises tension in Armenia


	April 5, 2000	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

Attack on Karabakh president raises tension in Armenia
By Liz Fuller

Investigators in the Karabakh capital Stepanakert announced on March 27 that the botched attempt five days earlier to assassinate Arkadii Ghukasian, president of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, was planned and carried out by persons close to Samvel Babayan, the enclave's former army commander and defense minister.

Babayan is Ghukasian's most formidable political opponent. Ghukasian dismissed Babayan as defense minister last July, triggering protests by other senior generals and precipitating a political standoff that was defused only by the intervention of Armenian President Robert Kocharian. Five months later, in December 1999, Ghukasian also replaced Babayan as commander of the Karabakh Defense Army. But Babayan nonetheless remained one of the unrecognized republic's most influential political figures, enjoying the support of many local parliamentary deputies and of the Karabakh-based Armenian National Democratic Party.

Three of the five persons named on March 27 as having confessed to the attack on Ghukasian are members of Babayan's bodyguard, and a fourth is his wife's brother. Babayan was taken into custody within hours of the attack, as was his brother Karen, who has since been suspended as mayor of Stepanakert. As of March 30, neither brother had been charged with involvement in the assassination bid. But the unrecognized enclave's prosecutor-general told RFE/RL's Stepanakert correspondent the same day that other charges could brought against Samvel Babayan, in addition to illegal arms possession, abuse of power, and tax evasion.

Senior officials in Stepanakert and the Armenian capital Yerevan say that the motives for the attack on Ghukasian are to be sought in the local political situation. The unrecognized republic's foreign minister, Naira Melkumian, was quoted by Armenpress on March 24 as saying that ''I do not think that there is a force outside Karabakh and Armenia that was interested in the elimination of President Ghukasian.'' Speaking in Tbilisi on March 28, Armenian President Kocharian attributed the attack to ''internal processes that take place in post-war countries and regions when order is being restored''.

In view of his months-long standoff with Ghukasian, Babayan was the most obvious suspect in the attack on the Karabakh president. Babayan's extensive power can be partly attributed to his control over dubious economic interests on which Ghukasian now plans to crack down. The attack on Ghukasian thus presented the Karabakh leadership with a cast-iron excuse to detain the renegade general and, by extension, hamstring the opposition to Ghukasian in the runup to this summer's elections for the enclave's new parliament, which Babayan's supporters stood a good chance of winning.

Noyan Tapan's veteran political commentator David Petrosian observed that the primary beneficiary of the attack is Karabakh Premier Anushavan Danielian, who would have lost his post in the event of an election victory by Babayan's supporters. Danielian is currently discharging the duties of Karabakh president.

But whether despite or precisely because of the fact that Babayan was the most obvious suspect, an increasing number of Armenian politicians from across the political spectrum are expressing doubt at his personal involvement in the attack and are warning against making him a scapegoat.

Those skeptics include not only leading members of the nationalist ''Right and Accord'' bloc, which supports Babayan and is believed to receive funding from him, but also Kim Balayan, a Karabakh-born member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation - Dashnaktsutiun, National Democratic Union chairman Vazgen Manukian, who characterized Babayan as too intelligent to issue direct orders for an attempt on Ghukasian's life, and Andranik Markarian, head of the Miasnutiun majority parliamentary bloc.

If Babayan is formally charged with the assassination bid, President Kocharian's failure unequivocally to condemn that charge could exacerbate the rift that already exists between the Armenian president and Miasnutiun, and broaden it into one between Ghukasian and Kocharian, on the one hand, and Babayan's sympathizers and supporters in Yerevan and Stepanakert, on the other. But if Kocharian were to fail to endorse Babayan's indictment, the ensuing perceived lack of solidarity between Yerevan and Stepanakert could, at the very least, negatively affect the ongoing search for a political settlement of the Karabakh conflict.

Meanwhile, the circumstances of the attack, specifically the use of automatic rifles against a moving target, raise the question of whether the intention was in fact to eliminate Ghukasian or simply to create a pretext for neutralizing Babayan. Like some other observers, Lenser Aghalovian, chairman of a small Armenian party composed mainly of Karabakh-born intellectuals, reasoned that if an experienced warrior like Babayan had indeed wanted to get rid of Ghukasian, the latter would not have survived. A single shot from a grenade-launcher would have left Ghukasian with no chance of survival, Aghalovian told ''Haykakan Zhamanak''.

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