Opposition Forces Seek Meetings with Western Diplomats
YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Police in Armenia detained early on Thursday dozens of people in a border village in the northern Tavush province trying to prevent the controversial handover of adjacent border areas to Azerbaijan.
The village of Kirants has been the epicenter of protests against the territorial concessions announced by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government on April 19. Many of its residents joined by people from other parts of the country have since been camped out in and outside the community, preventing officials from proceeding with preparations for the handover.
Security forces cleared the protest camp early in the morning. They also closed all roads leading to Kirants, allowing only its residents to enter and leave it. The roads remained closed as of late afternoon.
In a statement, the Armenian Interior Ministry said the police are “performing enhanced service” to allow relevant authorities to clear the area of landmines and carry out “geodetic measurements” at the new local section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.
“That’s why the guys were detained,” the head of the Kirants village administration, Kamo Shahinyan, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“They came early in the morning and rounded up and took away all young guys keeping a vigil to defend our village,” said one local woman whose grandson was among the detainees.
According to Garnik Danielyan, an opposition lawmaker actively involved in the protests, the police made at least two dozen arrests. He said that many protesters were injured during the arrests. One of them clarified afterwards, though, that the injuries are not serious.
“They got out of buses and attacked us, beating, dragging away and reminding everyone of what happened last time,” said another.
All of the three dozen or so protesters were released from custody later in the morning.
“We call on our compatriots to continue peaceful disobedience actions in all regions and places of the Republic of Armenia in response to these brutal and illegal actions of the police,” read a statement released by the Tavush for the Homeland movement leading the protests.
Artur Sakunts, a human rights activist, criticized the police crackdowns on protesters in Kirants and elsewhere in the country, saying that seems to be becoming a pattern.
“The police continue to violate Armenian citizens’ freedom of assembly,” Sakunts told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Even if some participants of rallies do not act peacefully, only they should be detained.”
Pashinyan effectively defended the use of force when he chaired a weekly session of his cabinet in Yerevan on Thursday.
“The police are a security agency, which means that they must have a legitimate right to use force,” said the prime minister, who himself had been jailed for inciting deadly clashes between security forces and antigovernment protesters in Yerevan in 2008.
The latest crackdown came just hours after Armenian state television aired an interview with Pashinyan in which he again defended the territorial concessions. He said that he is stripping Azerbaijan of a reason to invade Armenia.
Opposition leaders say that Pashinyan’s government is on the contrary encouraging Baku to demand more territory from Armenia and take or threaten military action for that purpose. Many affected Tavush villagers say the land handover will leave their communities dangerously exposed to Azerbaijani attacks.
Armenia’s two main opposition groups on Thursday asked the Yerevan-based ambassadors of the United States and major European countries to urgently meet with them to discuss what they called growing human rights abuses committed by the Armenian authorities.
Senior lawmakers from the Hayastan and Pativ Unem alliances appealed to the U.S., French and British ambassadors and the head of the European Union Delegation in Armenia just hours after the Armenian police used force against protesters in the northern Tavush region trying to prevent the handover of adjacent border areas to Azerbaijan.
“Recent reports from several human rights organizations clearly highlight the increase in police violence, attempts to limit freedom of speech and the right to peaceful assembly, control of the judicial system, and widespread recourse to arrests,” they said in a joint letter. “Many activists and opposition politicians are now in prison on trumped-up charges.”
They said they want to discuss with the Western envoys their countries’ “tolerance” of these practices.
“We want to receive from them an answer to a very clear question: is the end result of ‘reform’ programs financed by them the establishment of a police state in Armenia?” Hayastan’s Artsvik Minasian told reporters.
“It seems that these [Western] representatives simply do not understand the situation created in Armenia or trust in fake news which these authorities and their satellites are trying to communicate to them,” he said.
The authorities deny using excessive force against the protesters. Three dozen of them were arrested early on Thursday from the epicenter of the protests in the Tavush village of Kirants.
Both the United States and the European Union have welcomed a controversial Armenian-Azerbaijan border delimitation deal that commits Armenia to making the territorial concessions to Azerbaijan opposed by many Tavush residents.
The Western powers have supported Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and what they call democratic reforms implemented by his administration throughout his six-year rule. As recently as on April 28, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Pashinyan’s “vision for a prosperous, democratic, and independent future for Armenia.” Armenian opposition and other critics of Pashinyan’s government have accused the West of turning a blind eye to its undemocratic practices for geopolitical reasons.
