A spokesman for former President Robert Kocharian said on Monday that he is ready to answer questions from a law-enforcement agency investigating the 2008 post-election crackdown on opposition protesters in Yerevan.
The Special Investigative Service (SIS) said last week that it wants to interrogate him as a witness and has summoned him for questioning.
Victor Soghomonian, the head of Kocharian’s office, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am) that it received an SIS summons on Friday. Soghomonian said he notified SIS investigators that the ex-president is not in Armenia at the moment but is ready to return to the country and answer their questions “after July 25.” He said the office also proposed that the interrogation be fully recorded and made public “if need be.”
Soghomonian insisted that Kocharian will not be worried about being indicted by the investigators as long as they act in accordance with Armenia’s laws. In that context, he denounced as a “mockery of the law” grave accusations levelled by the SIS against Mikael Harutiunian, a retired general who served as defense minister during Kocharian’s 1998-2008 presidency.
Last week, the SIS accused Harutiunian of having illegally used the Armenian armed forces against opposition supporters who demonstrated in Yerevan in the wake of a disputed presidential election held in February 2008. The official vote results formalized the handover of power from Kocharian to his preferred successor, Serzh Sarkisian. The main opposition presidential candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosian, rejected them as fraudulent.
Eight protesters and two police servicemen were killed as security forces quelled the daily protests on the night from March 1-2, 2008. Kocharian declared a state of emergency and ordered army units into downtown Yerevan amid vicious clashes between protesters and security forces trying to disperse them.
Issuing an arrest warrant for Harutiunian on June 3, the SIS charged that the former defense chief began illegally deploying troops in the Armenian capital a week before the unrest. It also said that the 2008 presidential ballot was marred by “large-scale irregularities.” The military’s involvement in the ensuing crackdown on the Ter-Petrosian-led opposition therefore amounted to an “overthrow of constitutional order,” claimed the law-enforcement body.
“So it means that the ‘victorious’ opposition was the carrier of constitutional order,” scoffed Soghomonian. “That is not corroborated by the [2008] decisions of the Central Election Commission or the Constitutional Court.”
Kocharian has repeatedly defended the post-election crackdown in the past, saying that it prevented a violent of seizure of power by Ter-Petrosian.
The SIS decided to charge Harutiunian and interrogate Kocharian shortly after the appointment of its new head, Sasun Khachatrian. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian told the agency to finally identify those responsible for the ten deaths when he presented Khachatrian to senior SIS officials on June 12.
Pashinian was a key backer of Ter-Petrosian in 2008. He was also the main speaker at the anti-government protest broken up on March 1-2 2008.
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