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No to Plunder, No to Maidan

 By Markar Melkonian  

Whether or not the demonstrators understand it, they are repudiating the generation of pro-Western leaders who long ago set the stage for the privatization of the energy sector in Armenia—and of the public transport system, agriculture, and pensions, too.  

No Soviet-era poster of square-jawed mechanics marching arm-in-arm with women in overalls could better depict the struggle of the have-nots against the haves than did yesterday’s smart phone photos of demonstrators on Baghramyan Avenue in Yerevan. 

Teenagers and 20-somethings lock arms in a nightlong vigil.  A young woman stands up to a phalanx of shields and cops in full battle dress.  Protesters huddling against a water cannon give the cops “the finger,” while others pull themselves under the prow of an armored van, too close for the water cannon to hit them. 

Readers are aware of events of the last week that lead up to the demonstrations: 

On June 17, Armenia’s Public Services Regulatory Commission (PSRC) made clear its intention to permit the Electricity Networks of Armenia (ENA) to raise electricity fees in Armenia by another 16%, starting August 1.  

The fee increase of 7 drams, or 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, would amount to an estimated $85 a year for an average household.  It is the latest of three price rises in as many years. 

Poor and working-class households, already hard-pressed by rising costs of housing, public transportation, healthcare, and higher education, are now expected to pay more than 50% more for electricity than they did three years ago. 

Protests against the electricity fee hike escalated on Monday, June 22, when several thousand protesters set off from Yerevan’s Liberty Square to march towards the Presidential Palace on Baghramyan Avenue.  

As they approached their destination, a large phalanx of police brought the march to a halt, and the protesters staged a sit-in.  Police arrested more than two hundred protesters that day and attempted to disperse the protesters by blasting the peaceful sit-in with water cannon.  Word spread by word-of-mouth and social media, and thousands more joined the protest. 

Armenia’s electrical grid was privatized as part of the free market mania that swept the country after the final demise of Soviet Armenia.  The country’s post-Soviet leaders, like their counterparts in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, set the stage for massive theft of formerly public property. ENA is owned by RAO Unified Energy System (UES), a giant Russia-based electric power holding company.  ENA describes itself as under “non-governmental ownership,” and UES executive officer Yevgeny Bibin was quoted as saying that the price hikes in Armenia were part of a “fair market reform” in the energy sector. 

To the extent that the demonstrations in Yerevan have to do with rising electricity costs, then, they have little at all to do with Russia, and a whole lot to do with capitalist plunder. 

For a quarter of a century, Armenians have been living under a political and economic state of affairs in which capitalists have been free to ravage the country, with the full support of the state and with very little in the way of organized opposition.  The ravagers have been native oligarchs, of course, as well as foreign capitalists, from Russia and from the West. 

The “No to Plunder” (Voch Talanin) protest comes on the heels of three years of escalating grievances by workers, the youth, and the poor.  

In May, 1,500 workers at the Nairit chemical plant went on strike to demand months of unpaid wages.  Last year, young activists of the “Dem Em” group staged sit-ins and occupations to protest privatization of pensions (an unpopular proposal supported by USAID and the U.S. embassy).The year before that, young activists in Yerevan launched a campaign against announced bus fare hikes demanded by the privatized bus system, and protests spread citywide.  

Protests have taken place against private seizure of land in Mashtots Park and other public land in Yerevan, against strip mining in Teghut and elsewhere, against the poisoning of rivers and the illegal logging of forests, and against election fraud, patronage, impunity, corruption, and massive theft of public resources. 

Once again, the grievances and the protests have had little to do with Russia, and everything to do with the capitalist plunder that Western agencies prescribed for Armenia twenty-five years ago. 

Whether or not the demonstrators understand it, they are repudiating the generation of pro-Western leaders who long ago set the stage for the privatization of the energy sector in Armenia—and of the public transport system, agriculture, and pensions, too.   

Back then, the counter-revolutionaries assured us that privatization would increase productivity and lead to greater affluence. Instead, it has impoverished and diminished the country. The protesters on Baghramyan Avenue came of age in a country of betrayed promises, a country that capitalism ruined. 

It is too early to say for sure, but maybe, just maybe, a new generation has started to fight back in the class war that the oligarchs have been waging against consumers, workers, and the poor.  

Maybe, just maybe, a new generation is claiming the streets--a generation that will not accept the passivity of their parents, that is not impressed by the old opposition politicians and their one-man-shop political parties, and that has grown tired of the endless talk about Free Market Reform, NGOs, civil society, and all the other hopelessly ambiguous catchphrases prescribed by Radio Liberty. 

But the demonstrations take place within a larger context of escalating East-West tension.  

For the past year and more, on top of everything else, Armenians have been forced to endure the effects of EU and U.S. sanctions against Russia, as well as low oil prices due to deliberate overproduction in the midst of a glut, and devaluation of the currency.  

Now the U.S. embassy in Yerevan has announced that it is “concerned” about police reaction to the protests in Yerevan.  This is a bad sign.  The United States has similarly been “concerned” about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and it is always “concerned” about Iran.  

Such “concern” has been the prelude to foreign invasion, civil war, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, and the creation of millions of refugees. 

Meanwhile, the US and NATO are escalating tensions against Russia in Ukraine.  On Wednesday, June 24, NATO announced that it will triple the size of its “Reaction Force” in Ukraine from 13,000 to 40,000 troops, and the United States announced that it is committing more armor to be based in six NATO-affiliated states. 

Armenian diplomats like to talk about a moderate and judicious foreign policy that balances the West against the East.  But Western plans for Armenia have nothing to do with moderation or balance.  

George W. Bush, the architect of the slaughter in Iraq, was quite clear about this:  “If you are not with us,” he said, “then you are against us.”  

Long before Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” strategic planners in the West have dreamed of pushing a wedge between Yerevan and Moscow and pushing Armenia under the control of America’s regional-superpower surrogate, the Republic of Turkey. 

There are planners in Brussels and the U.S. State Department who, for the sake of removing Armenia from its economic and military-defense alliance with Russia, would love to do to Armenia what they did to Syria. 

So far, “No to Plunder” has resisted the provocations of the police and also rebuffed the old opposition parties and their megalomaniacal leaders…So far. 

“Instead of looking toward charismatic leaders or foreign governments for their salvation,” an astute reporter wrote, “this new generation is looking toward local, non-partisan grassroots action. They are not politicized or tied to any NGOs and categorically reject the concept of a leader.”  

This refusal to become “politicized” is refreshing, but it is not sustainable.  Moral idealism requires clear-sightedness.  The longer the demonstrations continue, the more difficult it will be to remain clear-sighted, to remain united and focused on the (necessarily political) slogan No to Plunder.  

The rallying cry on Baghramyan Avenue is:  “We Are the Owners of Our Country” (Menk Enk Teruh Mer Yerkri).  If in fact a new generation is truly to make itself the owners of the country, then their longer-term demand should be to re-nationalize the energy sector. 

Over and over again, from Georgia and Ukraine to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, we have witnessed Western agencies and their local collaborators perverting and destroying movements for justice, turning them to the advantage of those who were responsible for creating the worst injustices in the first place.   

In Yerevan today, there are well-funded NGOs, politicians, and online media outlets that will do everything they can to channel attention away from capitalist plunder and to divert it instead to their own anti-Russian agendas. 

The longer the protests endure, the higher the stakes become.  One week into the protests, “No to Plunder” has exercised exemplary discipline, resisting police provocation and violence.  But experience has amply demonstrated that when thousands of people are in the streets, events can whip around in any direction.  

If the protesters are to succeed in the medium-term, they must create a sustained organizational presence on the ground.  They may claim to “reject the concept of a leader,” but if the protests endure, then they WILL HAVE LEADERSHIP in one form or another and the character of that leadership will determine which of two very different directions the protests take.  

Either the leadership will be young, open, democratic, and genuinely opposed to plunder, or it will be old, secretive, manipulative, and conducive to even worse plunder. 

What is at stake here, then, is whether “No to Plunder” will add up to something or not, and if it does add up to something, whether it will stay true to the slogan “We Are the Owners of Our Country”, or rather allow itself to be perverted into an Armenian Maidan

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author.  His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005). 

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