Does forcing stability cause instability?

So Secretary of State Clinton was in Armenia, trying to push "stability" and the protocols.
So she went to Tsitsernakaberd.
So she talked about promoting Democracy and human rights.

“And as a friend and a partner who believes in Armenia’s future, we will continue to support Armenia’s civil society and efforts to promote good governance and transparency,” she added

.

She did not meet with the opposition.
Neither she nor her administration have uttered the word Genocide.
She met with some human rights groups and NGOs, but it was off the record.
She did not mention publicly March 1, or the political prisoners.
Border aggression has only gotten worse, not better, since the US, and other western governments, got involved with the protocols and such issues.



Neither the US nor the West have supported democracy in Armenia, and in fact they turned their back on democracy and human rights in Armenia on March 1, 2008, and have done so since then.

To the West, this is a game, a bunch of deals. Armenia, and the human rights and democracy of the people of Armenia, are a means to an end. Democracy is not made when human rights and fair elections are used as bargaining chips for other political motives.

As I have said before, stability does not come from forcing two sides to smile and make nice. It doesn't work for fighting schoolchildren, and it doesn't work for countries. It doesn't work for Turkish-Armenia relations, or Genocide recognition, or the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The issue of Nagorno-Karabakh has been there all along - many of Kocharyan's policies were aimed at acting like it didn't exist, or at least, maintaining the status quo, postponing and trying to play the other sides. And that is what Sargsyan inherited, along with so many other problems, in a presidential legitimacy whose foundations make jello look like reinforced concrete. The US, and the other involved western governments, took advantage of that to push their agendas - Reconciliation, and the rest of the package...

And perhaps pushing the protocols and bringing NK to the forefront (as it has become a major obstacle in a set of protocols in which there has been so much pride and financial investment) just served to make things more unstable...



P.S. Thinking through all of this, I remembered an article from Massis Weekly written on the occasion of Clinton's meeting with Armenian-American organizations - it voices many of the same viewpoints I hold, and is an interesting read looking back, 5 months later, with where things are now. Digging through their archives I found it in one of the February editions (Page1, Page 2 of the article).