Caucasus Report

Over the past 2 1/2 years, the Armenian authorities claim to have identified and thwarted no fewer than four conspiracies by armed militant groups to overthrow the country's leadership. Two of those groups are currently standing trial, and in both instances the prosecution's case against the accused is perceived as less than convincing.

This perception serves to substantiate the widely held belief that, in the words of the opposition Zharangutiun party, the Armenian leadership is engaged in "isolating, bullying or morally degrading by means of fabricated accusations politicians, freedom fighters, and [other] persons respected and trusted by the public.”

One of the two groups involved is the so-called Armenian Shield Regiment, whose members are accused of amassing weaponry with the intention of seizing government buildings and assassinating President Serzh Sarkisian.

ALSO READ: Trials Of Armenian 'Armed Groups' Reflect Leadership’s Fear Of Destabilization

The other comprises Zhirayr Sefilian, leader of the radical opposition movement 100 Years Without The Regime, and six other men accused of forming an illegal armed group with the aim of instigating mass unrest and seizing government facilities, charges they deny. In February the prosecution demanded an 11-year sentence for Sefilian and prison terms ranging from two to 4 1/2 years for his six co-defendants, one of whom denies even knowing Sefilian.

The charges against Sefilian are partly the result of his radical views. He has repeatedly criticized the current Armenian leadership and called for its replacement. But lawyers for the accused say the prosecution has not produced sufficient evidence to substantiate the charges against him or his co-defendants. The trial has been overshadowed by, and formally linked to, events that took place weeks after Sefilian's arrest in June 2016 -- namely, the seizure and occupation by an armed group with links to Sefilian of a police station in Yerevan, in the course of which three police officers were killed.

Sefilian, 50, is a Lebanese-born Armenian who participated in the 1992-94 fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh and was awarded one of Armenia's most prestigious military medals. He was first arrested in 2007 on a charge, which he rejected as politically motivated, of illegal possession of arms, and was jailed for 18 months.

In 2014, he established the radical opposition group Founding Parliament that launched a campaign for President Sarkisian's resignation timed to coincide with the April 2015 ceremony to mark the centenary of the Armenian genocide. Sefilian then cofounded, together with former presidential candidate Raffi Hovannisian, the New Armenian Public Salvation Front that in late 2015 staged several poorly attended protests against the planned constitutional amendments that transformed Armenia from a presidential to a parliamentary republic. He was summoned for questioning in November 2015, and again in January 2016, and warned that he risked being jailed if he did not give up his political activity.

Sefilian was arrested again in June 2016, just weeks after he had criticized Sarkisian for ruling out any attempt to recapture a small part of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh district regained by Azerbaijan in an offensive in April. Sefilian had also announced plans to create a National Resistance Committee with the stated aim of ridding Armenia of what he termed "a treacherous government” and of "taking over as soon as possible, with the help of the people and the army, the function of governing the country.”

Sefilian's arrest served as the catalyst for the most serious challenge to political stability in recent years. On July 17, 2016, a group of 31 gunmen, most of them affiliated with Founding Parliament, stormed a police station in Yerevan's Erebuni district, killing one police officer, fatally injuring a second, and taking five more hostage to demand Sefilian's release and Sarkisian's resignation.

Sefilian's offer to try to mediate a peaceful solution to the standoff went unheeded. On July 30, a third policeman was killed in an exchange of fire. The gunmen finally surrendered the following day.

Initially, Sefilian was charged only with illegal possession of weapons and planning to stage mass unrest. Then a further charge was brought against him in November 2016 of forming one year earlier a number of illegal armed groups with a total strength of 200 to 300 men with the intention of seizing a TV tower and other government facilities in Yerevan in December 2015 and May 2016. According to the prosecution, that plot was foiled when police discovered and confiscated the arms Sefilian had purportedly amassed for that purpose. The case against Sefilian was combined with that against the Sasna Tsrer gunmen.

The trial of Sefilian and his six co-defendants opened in Yerevan in late May 2017. The defendants and their lawyers sparred repeatedly with the presiding judge over procedural issues. Only one -- Hovannes Petrosian -- testified against Sefilian, who he said ordered him to reconnoiter the TV tower. All seven men pleaded not guilty. One of them, Nerses Poghosian, twice went on hunger strike, protesting that he did not know Sefilian personally and was never affiliated with Founding Parliament.

Sefilian's lawyer Tigran Hayrapetian pointed out that the 200 to 300 members of the armed groups Sefilian has been accused of setting up have not been identified and apprehended, and that the prosecution failed to explain why, given that those groups had allegedly been established in late 2015, Sefilian had still not implemented his plans to seize government facilities before his arrest in June 2016.

Questions also arose with regard to the weapons said to have been acquired: two Kalashnikov rifles plus 120 bullets, which would appear to be woefully inadequate for the alleged purpose. An eighth man, Artur Movsisian, who like Poghosian denied having ever met Sefilian, went on trial in the town of Hrazdan in August 2017 on a charge of storing some of those weapons – even though he was living in Russia at the time. He was found guilty and jailed for three years, RFE/RL's Armenian Service reported on December 4.

In December, following repeated verbal clashes with the presiding judge, for which he was removed from the courtroom several times for contempt of court, Sefilian denounced the trial as stage-managed on orders from the country's leadership and refused to testify. He then boycotted the next hearing, the news portal Caucasian Knot reported on January 12.

As for the Sasna Tsrer fighters who actually occupied the Yerevan police precinct, they were divided into three groups that are currently being tried separately, as is opposition politician Andreas Ghukasian. Ghukasian, 47, went on hunger strike in early 2013 in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to persuade Armenia's Central Election Commission to bar Sarkisian from the February ballot in which he sought reelection on the grounds that his Republican Party of Armenia is "abusing its position in the state and cannot be an honest rival to other participants of the elections," RFE/RL's Armenian Service reported on January 21, 2013.

Ghukasian was arrested in late July 2016, together with three prominent Zharangutiun members, and charged with inciting to "mass disturbances” the more than 1,000 people who congregated close to the besieged police station in a mark of support for the Sasna Tsrer gunmen's demands. Ghukasian has consistently rejected that charge as politically motivated. In November 2017, a witness at his trial claimed that Ghukasian urged protesters to throw stones at police, and that he intended to join Sasna Tsrer. Ghukasian challenged the prosecution to prove video evidence substantiating the former allegation, which it has not done to date.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.

Armenia’s National Security Service announced in early December that an arrest warrant was issued for a U.S. citizen of Armenian descent who allegedly set up a radical group named Fighters For Justice and plotted terrorist attacks against senior Armenian officials.

If those allegations prove true, Fighters For Justice would be the fourth group in two years to be implicated in an alleged attempt to undermine or overthrow Armenia's ruling regime.

Dozens of people affiliated with three separate groups are currently on trial on such charges.

That trend suggests either that latent discontent with the country’s leadership has reached a dangerously high level or that the Armenian authorities harbor a chronic mistrust of any person, informal organization, or group perceived capable of mobilizing broad popular support and thus posing a threat to political stability -- even though most political analysts consider such fears misplaced and unfounded in light of widespread public apathy and resignation.

ALSO READ: Sentence Imminent in Trial of Radical Armenian Oppositionist

One prominent case involves Lebanese-born Zhirayr Sefilian, who heads the radical political formations 100 Years Without The Regime and Founding Parliament.

Sefilian was arrested in June 2016 and charged with establishing an illegal armed formation, illegal possession of weapons, and plotting to instigate mass unrest and seize government facilities. The case against him was subsequently merged with that against a separate armed group calling itself Sasna Tsrer (Daredevils Of Sassoun). It stormed a Yerevan police station in July 2016 to demand Sefilian’s release and President Serzh Sarkisian’s resignation. Three police officers were killed before the gunmen surrendered two weeks later.

The second case centers on the Armenian Shield Regiment group, which was apprehended on suspicion of amassing weaponry with the intention of carrying out political assassinations and other terrorist acts.

Eleven members of that group, including its leader, Artur Vartanian, were arrested in November 2015. More suspects, including former Deputy Defense Minister Vahan Shirkhanian and an elderly Armenian Catholic priest, were arrested in the following weeks, bringing the total in custody to 33.

In March 2016, senior National Security Service official Mikael Hambartsumian divulged details of the investigation, which he said had established that the group was plotting to seize the presidential palace and other government buildings. He said group members had also discussed the possibility of shooting down Sarkisian’s plane, although Vartanian had not made a decision on whether to do so.

Vartanian’s lawyer, Levon Baghdasarian, admitted that its members had acquired the weapons (which included 10 automatic rifles, pistols, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 60 hand grenades, explosives and explosive devices, and several types of ammunition, together with communications equipment) confiscated during a search of the house they had rented in Yerevan, but categorically denied they had any intention of seizing government buildings and ousting Sarkisian, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reported on November 21, 2016.

But Baghdasarian declined to clarify for what purpose Vartanian had stockpiled the weapons and explosives.

Four members of the group were sentenced in September on charges of illegally acquiring weapons on Vartanian’s orders. Twenty more -- including Vartanian and Shirkhanian -- were formally charged with membership in a criminal group, illegal possession of weapons, and plotting to seize power.

They went on trial in early December 2016, at which point the priest, Father Anton Totonjian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that “the entire case is fabricated.”

Totonjian later admitted in court to having given Vartanian $60,000 but denied the money was meant to finance the alleged coup, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reported.

Shirkhanian, 70, who is in failing health, rejected as untrue and politically motivated the claim that he suggested to Vartanian that the group should assassinate the president rather than simply seize government buildings, RFE/RL’s Armenian Service reported on July 24, 2016.

Given that Armenia was ranked in 2014 by a German think tank as the third-most militarized country in the world (after Israel and Singapore), the fact that both Sasna Tsrer and Vartanian’s group had weaponry at their disposal is hardly surprising. But possession of arms, although itself a criminal offense, does not necessarily imply the intention to resort to force and stage a coup, even if, as in the case of Sefilian, the accused had publicly advocated bringing about regime change.

However incautious or inflammatory their rhetoric, it is incumbent on the prosecution to provide convincing evidence that the accused intended to move from words to deeds. But in the cases of both Sefilian and the Armenian Shield Regiment, the prosecution’s case appears to have been based on incomplete or dubious evidence. That perception, together with numerous alleged procedural violations formally protested by defense lawyers, in turn fuels suspicions that the objective in bringing at least some of the accused to trial may have been to intimidate or silence outspoken critics of the ruling regime or people believed capable of mobilizing opposition to it.

The latter category also includes Samvel Babayan, the charismatic former commander of the armed forces of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, who was affiliated with an opposition grouping established by three former government ministers in the run-up to the Armenian parliamentary election last year. Babayan was arrested in March 2017 and accused of money laundering and acquiring through intermediaries -- at a price of $50,000 -- an Igla ground-to-air missile.

The prosecution never specified for what purpose Babayan wanted the missile, and one of his associates, Sanasar Gabrielian, admitted that it was he who sought to buy it from Robert Aghvanian, an Armenian living in Georgia, with the intention of making it available to the Nagorno-Karabakh army.

But Aghvanian sold the weapon to another man who did not implicate Babayan in the deal.The court nonetheless jailed Babayan in November 2017 for six years.

In a December 2017 statement cited verbatim by the news portal Caucasian Knot, seven Armenian human rights organizations alleged that “the persecution of people for political reasons, judicial investigations with a predetermined verdict, a wave of pressure and defamation at the behest of the authorities, have become the norm in Armenia.”

That tactic of arresting groups of people whose political affiliations were deemed to pose a threat to the regime dates back to the early years of Armenia’s post-Soviet history.

In December 1994, President Levon Ter-Petrossian ordered the arrest of 32 members of the then-opposition Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutiun for their alleged links to a clandestine terror organization code-named Dro, the existence of which was never definitively demonstrated. Some were released in the summer of 1995; others who were tried and sentenced were pardoned shortly after Ter-Petrossian’s resignation in February 1998 by his successor, Robert Kocharian.

The Armenian authorities’ continued acute sensitivity to the threat of political destabilization is nonetheless understandable in light of two factors.

The first is the October 1999 attack by armed gunmen on the Armenian parliament that left the prime minister, the parliament speaker, and six others dead. At their trial, which began two years later, the self-styled leader of the five gunmen said he intended to seize the parliament building and overthrow the government.

The second is the state of undeclared war with Azerbaijan over the predominantly Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh region, which following a referendum in 1991 proclaimed itself a republic and declared independence from Azerbaijan, of which under international law it is a constituent part.

Although that state of “not peace, but not war” has continued since a 1994 cease-fire agreement, the underlying, persistent fear of renewed hostilities was reinforced by the political impact of the fighting in April 2016 along the 230-kilometer Line of Contact separating Armenian and Azerbaijani forces dug in east of the disputed territory. Some 70-80 Armenian servicemen died during the fighting, in which Azerbaijan succeeded in retaking a very small part of the territory over which it had lost control in the early 1990s.

The Armenian losses were in part the consequence of conscripts being issued insufficient equipment and being hampered by shortages of ammunition and weapons.

Those failures reinforced the perception that official corruption, which the authorities have for years downplayed and sworn to curtail, has become entrenched and endemic to the point that it now poses a direct threat to national security.

That military vulnerability has, in turn, been exacerbated, first by Russia’s perceived flouting of Armenian strategic interests in pursuit of a rapprochement with Baku, and second, by the ongoing uncertainty over how the configuration of power within the ruling elite will change in April 2018 following the end of Sarkisian’s second presidential term and the transition to a parliamentary republic in which the prime minister becomes the country’s most powerful political figure.

Despite those legitimate concerns, the authorities’ reliance on countering perceived threats to political stability with poorly substantiated criminal charges seen as politically motivated is likely, in the long-term, to compound long-standing public frustration at the seeming impossibility of bringing about political change by means of free and fair elections.

The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of RFE/RL.