Levon Ter-Petrosyan
Levon Ter-Petrosyan was the first president of independent Armenia, from October 1991, when he was elected with eighty-three per cent, to February 1998, when his own ministers forced him out for proposing to give back the occupied districts around Karabakh for peace. He was the philologist of the Matenadaran manuscript library who had been one of the eleven members of the Karabakh Committee arrested by Gorbachev's government in December 1988 after the earthquake. He led the Armenian National Movement from prison to the parliament's chair in 1990 and the country to independence in the referendum of September 1991. His seven years were the war in Karabakh, won on the ground by 1994 with the enclave and seven Azerbaijani districts held and the ceasefire signed in May, and the blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey that has never been lifted. There were the dark years of 1992-94 in which Yerevan had two hours of electricity a day and the trees of the city were cut for firewood and a third of the population left. There was the nuclear plant at Metsamor restarted in 1995 against Europe's advice, and the constitution of 1995 and the election of 1996 that the observers found flawed and that brought tanks into the streets against the protesters. There was the peace plan of 1997, the OSCE's step-by-step proposal, that he accepted and that his prime minister Kocharyan, the defence minister Sargsyan and the interior minister rejected. He resigned rather than fight them. He was born in Aleppo in 1945 to a family of survivors of the genocide, and was brought to Soviet Armenia in 1946 in the repatriation. He studied oriental philology at Yerevan and Leningrad, and spent twenty years on Armenian and Syriac manuscripts before the Karabakh movement of February 1988 made him a politician. In it he was the moderate voice who argued that Armenia must live with its neighbours. He returned to politics in 2008 to run against Sargsyan, and lost with twenty-one per cent. He led the protests in Yerevan on 1 March 2008 in which the police killed ten. He ran again in 2013 without success, and after the defeat of 2020, in which Azerbaijan took the districts and in 2023 the enclave itself, he has said that the war was lost in 1998, when the country refused the peace he had offered. He has been listened to more than he was then.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Armenian
- Roles: president, scholar, politician
