Yesterday the rally of the Armenian National Congress (ANC) took place near the Matenadaran, which as expected turned out to be sensational. Opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan called a “temporary” halt to his year-long campaign of anti-government demonstrations, citing the need to stave off greater Armenian concessions on Nagorno-Karabakh which he said are sought by the West. “Taking into account the disconcerting fact that after the recognitions of Kosovo, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia the problem of Karabakh in a certain sense has been left out of the general context of resolving the frozen conflicts, perhaps it is time to think about the possibility of the National Assembly putting forward an initiative to recognize Karabakh’s independence. Serzh Sargsyan should not feel obligated to react to that initiative. But having the National Assembly’s decision, while leaving the question of ratifying that decision suspended, he will get a big opportunity to maneuver in response to the external pressures during the upcoming negotiations. The situation is not an ordinary one, and hence it demands extraordinary steps, diplomatic magic and flights of imagination. To appreciate that need we have to take into account the following: the activity of the movement automatically weakens Sargsyan’s positions and expands the opportunities for putting pressures on him from the outside in the current context of a sharp turn in the process of resolving the Karabakh conflict following the Russian-Georgian conflict. In other words, there is danger that the opposition can unwittingly become a tool in the hands of the external forces. The behavior of these forces, therefore, could be considered as doubly immoral: on one hand they tolerate, or one could even say they encourage the repressions unleashed against the opposition by the Armenian authorities, and on the other hand they are trying to exploit that same opposition’s activity to their sinister ends.” When analyzing the current geopolitical situation of Armenia and especially the recent developments in the region he stated that the resolution of the NKR conflict will most probably take two-three months. This is how long Ter-Petrosyan thinks the ANC halt will take.
