Prime Minister and Assassination
Despite ensuring that President Ter-Petrosyan's side won the disputed 1995 election, and crushing street protests against the manipulated results, Sargsyan abandoned him in late 1997 and switched his support to prime minister Robert Kocharyan, who soon took over as president.
After serving as defense minister, he was appointed prime minister on June 11 by President Kocharyan. Sargsyan was killed, however, along with parliament speaker and former communist leader Karen Demirchyan and several other politicians when gunmen, headed by journalist Nairi Hunanyan, took over the parliament building.
The other parliament members were held as hostages until the next day. A week later, Vazgen's brother, Aram Sargsyan became prime minister until May 2000. He was buried at Yerablur military cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Vazgen Sargsyan
Famous quotes containing the words prime minister, prime and/or minister:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“He had a gentleman-like frankness in his behaviour, and as a great point of honour as a minister can have, especially a minister at the head of the treasury, where numberless sturdy and insatiable beggars of condition apply, who cannot all be gratified, nor all with safety be refused.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)