Unravelling Armenia's Referendum

Armenia's opposition parties boycotted the weekend referendum on a substantial constitutional reform, and now they are insisting the turnout was nothing like the high number of voters who officials say were overwhelmingly in favour of the reform.



The official results say turnout on November 27 was an impressive 65 per cent of those eligible to vote, and a whopping 93 per cent voted yes. Just over five per cent voted against the revised constitution.



"There can be no doubt about the results of the referendum,” said Tigran Torosian, deputy chairman of Armenia's National Assembly and a member of the Republican party.



Opposition parties had joined forces to boycott the referendum, but did deploy their own monitors at polling stations. Having collated their own results, they insist that turnout was no more than 20 per cent.



“The polling stations have never been so empty,” said National Democratic Union leader Vazgen Manukian at a press conference. “Never before has it been so clear to our people that the results have been rigged.”



In a report issued the day after the vote, the opposition said, “The referendum was conducted using force, intimidation and vote rigging. The main form of fraud noted during voting was the stuffing of ballot boxes on a massive scale.”



Artak Zeinalian, the coordinator of the public information centre for the opposition's no vote campaign, reported cases where observers had to leave polling stations after being threatened or assaulted.



There were few international observers, but the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, CoE, did send 14 monitors, who made serious criticism of the way the voting was run, and suggested that the high turnout figure was questionable. The constitutional reform has been driven by the need to comply with the membership conditions of the CoE, which Armenia joined in 2001.



While the monitors concluded that "the referendum generally reflected the free will of those who voted," they reported "serious abuse in several polling stations which cast a shadow over the credibility of the officially announced turnout".



"In a significant number of polling stations in Yerevan and other regions… the extremely low voting activity did not correspond to the high figures provided by the electoral commissions. There were also clear instances of forged additional signatures on the voters register and of ballot stuffing. The electoral regulations, requiring the stamping of the ballot after completion, created numerous situations where the secrecy of the vote was not respected."



The US State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs voiced similar concerns, saying, "We share the regret of the Council of Europe, whose observers called into serious question the voter turnout figures for the referendum reported by the Armenian government.



"We also regret that the government of Armenia chose not to invite observers from the OSCE´s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, who could have given greater credibility to the results of the voting."



The US statement concluded by urging the authorities to investigate "reports of serious abuses and fraud".



The authorities insist there were no significant violations. “We have concrete information – from the Central Election Commission and about 2,000 local election committees that show that to date we have not received any complaint from a single observer working there,” said the president's national security adviser Garnik Isagulian.



President Robert Kocharian managed to personally incur the opposition's wrath by casting his vote in public, saying that anyone had the right to do so if they wanted.



“The president has contravened the constitution as well as the electoral code," Vardan Pogosian, an expert on constitutional law who heads the non-government group Democracy, told IWPR. "Secrecy is a mandatory part of one's electoral rights; it is compulsory.”



The opposition has attempted to mobilise against the government by calling for the referendum result to be overturned in view of the alleged fraud.



When the authorities failed to comply, the opposition called a demonstration at the Matenadaran square in Yerevan on November 29, with the much more ambitious aim of ousting what it termed an “illegitimate government”.



The authorities grew jumpy and tried to clamp down on the protests. Although the opposition had got prior permission to hold daily demonstrations on November 27-29, Yerevan city council annulled the approval, and police car drove around the city broadcasting messages to the public not to attend the rally.



More practically, they cut off electricity around the square temporarily to make it harder for opposition leaders to use public address systems.



In the end, opposition sources said 10,000 people turned up, while the authorities said it was half that number.



Independent political commentator Alexander Iskandaryan believes the opposition would look a lot more credible now if it had focused its efforts on actively securing a no vote.



“The opposition could have united, chosen a leader, decided which was the best reason to vote against the amendments and then run a nationwide campaign. They could have got a 70 per cent no vote and the constitution would not have passed," said Iskandaryan. "They could have offered serious competition, but the current opposition is not capable of anything.”



Iskandaryan , however, is no admirer of the government either, and believes the referendum was fixed "to a significant extent".



“This is a government which has no competition, and which understands that Europe will let them get away with a lot, while the opposition lets them get away with absolutely everything," he continued. "What we see after the referendum is a classic Armenian situation – the clash between a weak opposition and a weak government.”



Iskandaryan explained what he meant by saying that on the one hand, there is an "opposition which says 90 per cent boycotted the vote…, but can't bring out 3,000 people" for a demonstration. On the other, there is a government whose attempt to curb public protests "superficially looks like strength", but are in fact "a sign of weakness".



As for the opposition's wish to mimic the Georgian, Ukrainian and Kyrgyz popular revolts, Iskandaryan says, "Of course there isn't going to be any revolution."



Zhanna Aleksaniyan is a journalist with the Armenianow online weekly in Yerevan.