Asbed Kotchikian

In Oliver Stone’s movie ‘Nixon’, when the title character is faced with a group of young anti-war protestors in the middle of the night in front of the Lincoln memorial and questioned as to why he did not end the war in Vietnam as he promised during his campaign, Nixon is not able to give an answer, to which one of the protesters says ‘You can’t stop it, can you? Even if you wanted to … The system won’t let you stop it....

The announcement of Armenia’s only former President Levon Ter-Petrossian that he is a candidate for the upcoming presidential elections raised many speculations about the election process and at the same time ended other speculations regarding the nature of those elections before Ter-Petrossian announced his candidacy. Before the announcement that he is a candidate on October 26, media and political observers in Armenia considered the presidential race as a one-man show where the election of the current Prime Minster Serge Sargsian was a done deal, however now the speculations and the bets have changed considerably as any observer of Armenian politics and media would concur....

The assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on January 19 in Istanbul galvanized two nations in ways that no analyst or political leader could have fathomed. While all the sides, Armenian or Turkish, agree that what happened was a tragedy, there have been many different interpretations and reactions to Mr. Dink’s assassination. It should be pointed out that while most of the reactions and actions were spontaneous, there were cases where a conscious attempt was discernible by groups to appropriate this tragedy for political ends....

The announcement on May 11, that Artur Baghdasarian will resign from his post as the speaker of Armenia’s parliament and that his party, Orinats Yerkir (Country of Law) will withdraw from the ruling coalition has redrawn Armenia’s political landscape significantly. The schism between Orinats Yerkir (OY) and the ruling coalition - comprised of the Republican Party of Armenia and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) - has been escalating over the past several weeks when Baghdasarian stepped up his criticism of the government on the latter’s both foreign and domestic policies....

Over the past several weeks the Armenian political landscape has been filled with calls for power change. These calls made by the opposition might not have been taken seriously by many political analysts however the way the government and the ruling coalition has been reacting to it tells a different story. The super-charged political atmosphere is also marred by incidents of beatings and arrests of not only opposition party members but also independent human rights activists - an event which might be an indicator of the governments’ nervousness and inability to deal with dissent....

The brutal murder of the Armenian army Lieutenant Gurgen Margarian in Budapest in the hands of his Azerbaijani colleague Lieutenant Ramil Safarov on February 19, 2004 raised many questions and eyebrows. The nature and context of the killing itself were both horrendous and indicative of the continued hatred and mistrust between the two nations. The killing also occurred while the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations on Karabakh have been in stalemate and it symbolizes the difficult path that both countries face to reach a peaceful resolution of the conflict....

After elections concluded in Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia held its parliamentary elections on November 2. The three countries of the South Caucasus came under immense scrutiny by international observers for violating a set of rules and for holding unfair and fraudulent elections. It should be noted that in all three countries, the government and pro-government parties and presidents have witnessed an increase in activism by their respective oppositions. What varied in the three countries was the method by which the oppositions were handled....

In Armenian reality the issue of integrating all aspects of life into a common and mainstream national rhetoric is an obsession. This is not surprising since like many small nations, which have faced mass extinction and managed to avoid it, national or nationalist rhetoric seems to provide some comfort and at the same time explain things in simple terms for mass consumption. The Western academia (mostly social sciences) is one of the main challengers of any conventional wisdom and national rhetoric....

The definition of foreign policy is a very broad one. It may be implemented on groups, organizations (political or otherwise), nations, and in the most common and traditional sense, states. In our modern world, the need to conduct foreign policy has become one of the most pressing issues for any government. Foreign policy is the method the major venue through which countries engage in self-promotion, pursuing political, economic or other agendas....

During the past four decades, the study of small states within the US academia has seen some resurgence. Most of the studies however were form a security perspective (starting with Anette Baker Fox’s ‘The Power of Small States’) and disregarded a set of concerns that dealt with the domestic concerns of small powers. Later on there were attempts to ‘fix’ this problem by concentrating on the study of small states from domestic perspectives by studying the relations between size on the one hand and democracy (Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte, ‘Size and Democracy’), political and economic development on the other....

On June 28, 2003 President Robert Kocharian of Armenia paid his first official state visit after his controversial re-election as president. During the visit Kocharian met with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze as well as with the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Nino Burjanadze and discussed a host of issues relevant to the two countries. At the end of the two-day visit the two presidents signed a series of cooperation agreements mostly in the spheres of economy, education and culture....

Since the independence of Armenia, over twelve years ago, the Armenian Diaspora was mobilized in an unprecedented way in support of the new Republic. Although fragmented in their agendas, the various Armenian organizations in the Diaspora (both in the Western and Eastern hemispheres) realized that they are facing a challenge for which they should have been preparing for over the seventy years when they existed and operated as Diasporan organizations....