Robert Kocharyan
Robert Kocharyan was president of Armenia from 1998 to 2008, the first president of the Karabakh republic, from 1994 to 1997, whom Ter-Petrosyan brought to Yerevan as prime minister in 1997 and who, with the defence minister Sargsyan, refused the peace plan that would have given the occupied districts back and forced Ter-Petrosyan out in February 1998. He won the election that March in a run-off. His ten years were the Karabakh clan's rule of the country. There was the shooting in the parliament on 27 October 1999 in which gunmen killed the prime minister, the speaker and six others, of which the investigation never reached the question of who had sent them. There was the economy that grew at twelve per cent a year on construction, diamonds, copper and the remittances of the diaspora and the emigrants, and the oligarchs who took the sugar, the fuel and the flour. There was the Russian ownership of the power grid and the railway taken in payment of the gas debt, and the election of 2003 that the constitutional court said was flawed. There was the election of February 2008 that his prime minister Serzh Sargsyan won and that Ter-Petrosyan's supporters contested in the streets for ten days until, on 1 March, in the last weeks of his term, the police and the army cleared them and ten people died, for which he was charged in 2018 with overthrowing the constitutional order. He was born in Stepanakert in 1954, studied electrical engineering at the Yerevan Polytechnic, and worked at the Karabakh silk factory. He was the Communist Party's secretary there when the Karabakh movement began in 1988, which he joined and then led. He ran the enclave's war as chairman of its state defence committee from 1992 and became its president in 1994. After the presidency he was a Russian mining company's director and the opposition's patron. The charges of 2018 under Pashinyan's revolution put him in pre-trial detention three times and were dropped by the constitutional court in 2021 on the immunity of his office. He led the Armenia alliance to second place in the election of June 2021, after the lost war, on the argument that Pashinyan had thrown away what the Karabakh generation had won. He sits in the parliament. He is the friend Putin has in Yerevan, and is the face of the years the country now blames for the defeat.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Armenian
- Roles: president, politician
