Levon Ter-Petrosyan: president, politician, scientist, eminent personality
By Susanna Petrosyan, exclusively to VK
Armenian ex-president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who occupied the office in the 90s and has now returned to mainstream politics after 10 years of silence, is quite an ambiguous figure. Members of the Armenian political, expert and general communities have quite different opinions on Ter-Petrosyan: some respect him, others despise him for the ‘cold and lean years of war’ and his personnel policy. However, despite all the negative aspects of Ter-Petrosyan’s image, even his political rivals have a great deal of respect towards him, and the attitude of the public towards the first President of an independent Armenia can in no way be compared to the hatred towards his successor, Robert Kocharyan.
So what is the source of this ambiguous attitude then?
First of all, the legitimacy of Ter-Petrosyan’s election in 1991 has never been put in question; he gained power not through intrigues and schemes, but through the will of the people.
Secondly, Ter-Petrosyan was in the office of the President and Commander-in-Chief when the war in Nagorno-Karabakh ended in the victory of the Armenian army. And even Ter-Petrosyan’s most radical rivals acknowledge (even if not publicly) his services to the statehood of Armenia.
Thirdly, the majority of Armenian society considers a high level of education and intellectual ability to be essential for a high-ranking politician. And finally, while Ter-Petrosyan occupied his post, he conducted an independent policy – much more independent than the second and the third presidents. He always proceeded from Armenia’s interests, and during the early ears of his presidency there was almost no talk of pro-Western or pro-Russian orientation.
Ter-Petrosyan was a supporter of western democracy, a market economy, developmentof civil society, human rights and independent courts. But of course, while trying to realize these ideals into life he had made a number of mistakes.
As far as Armenia’s state security was concerned, the first president supported the idea of a military and political alliance with Russia. It was Ter-Petrosyan who signed the ‘big agreement’ with Russian in 1997, as well as the treaty on the Russian military base in Armenia. So in his geopolitical strategy he didn’t try to choose ‘Russia or the West”, he chose “Russia and the West”.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan is a scholar who studied the history of the First Armenian Republic and analyzed the reasons for its demise, one of which was a one-sided pro-Western political doctrine.
Ter-Petrosyan championed not only military cooperation with Russia, but also cooperation in the spheres of economic and energy security. At the same time, he advocated broad cooperation with western states. For some reason the experts who tired to determine, which ‘pole’, Russia or the West, attracted Ter-Petrosyan, most overlooked yet another important pole in his policy – that of the East. According to Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who was an expert in oriental studies, Armenia, a Christian state, should still be a part of the Middle East.
Ter-Petrosyan managed to establish political and personal contacts with oriental leaders like Syrian president Hafez Assad, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov, Chinese and Iranian leaders. The same leaning towards the East could be seen in the eastern tradition of respect for elders that dominated Ter-Petrosyan’s relationship with Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev. Their personal contacts based on mutual respect began when Aliyev became an MP of the Nakhichevan Autonomous District in 1991. It is this personal relationship that finally stopped the bloodshed between the two peoples in 1993 without any intervention by international mediators. And of course the ability to reach an agreement with a rival is a very important trait for a politician.
Ter-Petrosyan and Heydar Aliyev reached another agreement in 1997: they negotiated the ‘step-by-step’ plan for a Nagorno-Karabakh settlement. Back then it was the Nagorno-Karabakh state that opposed the plan.
To be continued
