The FINANCIAL — YEREVAN. Armenians are marking the anniversary of the World War I-era massacre of their ancestors in Ottoman Turkey, in a change of pace a day after longtime leader Serzh Sarkisian stepped down as prime minister amid street protests.
The solemn April 24 ceremonies marking what Armenia calls the genocide come a day after thousands of jubilant demonstrators celebrated Sarkisian’s unexpected resignation in the streets of Yerevan and other cities.
Opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian, who spearheaded 11 days of protests and urged Sarkisan to resign in a tense meeting on April 22, is to lead supporters in a procession to a hilltop memorial complex in Yerevan in the afternoon, according to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
After what may be a pause for the memorial ceremonies, high politics will begin again on April 25, when Pashinian is set to meet with acting Prime Minister Karen Karapetian to discuss the next steps in the South Caucasus country of some 3 million.
Speaking to a huge crowd on Yerevan’s central Republic Square after Sarkisian announced his resignation in a web statement on April 23, Pashinian said that the “revolution” must not stop there but continue until “final victory” is achieved.
He said he planned to discuss the “peaceful transfer of power” with Karapetian, who is a member of Sarkisian’s long-ruling Republican Party, and that snap parliamentary elections should be held “within a reasonable time frame.”
“I hope that the leaders of the Republican Party will unequivocally and unconditionally recognize the victory of people’s velvet, nonviolent revolution,” he said.
Pashnian’s remarks suggested that he wants to serve as prime minister for a transitional period, followed by elections that could reduce the Republican Party’s dominance and bolster the position of his own party — which now holds four mandates in the 105-seat National Assembly.
Under Armenia’s constitution, when the prime minister leaves office political factions in parliament have seven days to put forward the name of a new one for a vote in the legislature. But new parliamentary elections do not necessarily follow, and it was not immediately clear whether the Republican Party will support Pashnian’s plans.
Sarkisian’s resignation came shortly after talks between Pashinian and Karapetian — who was prime minister from September 2016 until early April — but the details of the discussion have not been revealed.
That leaves questions about the future in the former Soviet republic, where Sarkisan’s resignation was a relatively rare case in which street protests prompted a longtime leader to step down.
The catalyst for the protests was Sarkisian’s shift to the newly powerful post of prime minister after a decade as president — a move critics charged was a blatant bid to cling to power when he reached the limit of two straight presidential terms.
Sarkisian was elected prime minister by parliament on April 17, eight days after his presidency ended on April 9.
Under constitutional changes that he pushed through in 2015, the prime minister is now more powerful than the president, who is more of a figurehead.
Protesters charged that Sarkisian violated previous pledges not to seek to become prime minister under the new system, claiming the shift threatened to make the 63-year-old the leader for life.
Sarkisian’s resignation came one day after he suggested that he would not step down, telling Pashinian that demands for him to do so were “blackmail.”
But in the statement on April 23, Sarkisian acknowledged that “the street movement is against me” and suggested that he did not want to resort to disperse protesters.
“Nikol Pashinian was right. I got it wrong,” he said in the statement. “The situation has several possible solutions, but I will not take any of them. That is not my way. I am leaving office of the country’s leader, of prime minister.”
Ahead of Pashinian’s planned procession to the memorial complex, thousands of others streamed to the site and laid flowers around a flame at the center of a stark, towering monument.
On April 24, Armenians around the world commemorate the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during the World War I era.
Twenty-seven other countries and the majority of U.S. states have joined Armenia in formally considering the killings to be genocide.
Turkey rejects the term, claiming that the death toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest rather than a systematic plan to exterminate the Armenian population in Ottoman Turkey.
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