Robert Kocharyan

Biography

Robert Kocharyan was born in Stepanakert, in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, in 1954. He served in the Soviet Army in 1972–74, worked as an engineer at a Stepanakert electrical plant and graduated in electrical engineering from the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute in 1982, then held posts in the region's Komsomol and Communist Party.

From 1988 he was one of the leaders of the Karabakh movement for unification with Armenia, founding the Miatsum organisation. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet of Soviet Armenia in 1989 and of the new Nagorno-Karabakh Republic in 1991. In 1992 he became head of the republic's State Defence Committee and prime minister, directing its war effort until the 1994 ceasefire, and in December 1994 he became the republic's first president.

In March 1997 Levon Ter-Petrosyan made him prime minister of Armenia. In early 1998 Kocharyan and the defence and interior ministers forced Ter-Petrosyan out over his acceptance of a phased Karabakh peace plan, and Kocharyan won the presidential election that followed. His presidency saw the 1999 parliament shooting, in which he negotiated the gunmen's surrender, a disputed re-election in 2003 and years of rapid economic growth, alongside accusations of corruption and oligarchy.

In the final weeks of his second term, in March 2008, protests against the disputed election of his successor Serzh Sargsyan were broken up, ten people died and he declared a state of emergency. He was charged over the crackdown in 2018, but the case ended in 2021 when the Constitutional Court struck down the law under which he was tried. That year he returned to politics at the head of the opposition Armenia Alliance.