On the evening of August 18, as the ceremony of the opening of the 4th pan-Armenian games was taking place in Vazgen Sargsyan stadium, an incident broke out between the representatives of the Alternative Civil Movement, members and supporters of the Heritage party, and the Armenian policemen.
The reason of such an incident was the distribution of leaflets, which was being done in our legal, democratic and sovereign country, which claims it has conducted elections conforming to international standards. But compared to the past, the level of democracy in Armenia has considerably risen and is chasing the tiger leap of the Armenian economy growth. In order to make the last statement more clear it’s enough to only mention the last Parliamentary elections, which according to reports proceeded in a free, impartial and transparent environment. So after such progress it was quite unexpected to find out that the level of democracy in our country still remains as it was in 2003. Several opposition activists, among them a parliament deputy, accused the Armenian police of illegally using force to stop them from distributing leaflets demanding the release of prominent government critics. The opposition movement "Alternative" said three of its members were detained by the police late Saturday while they handed out leaflets to participants and spectators at the official opening of the Fourth Pan-Armenian Games. The week-long games are attended by some 2,500 amateur athletes from Armenia and Armenian Diaspora communities from around the world. The Alternative leader, Nikol Pashinyan, said the activists were released from a police station in central Yerevan several hours later, after his personal intervention. One of them, Vardges Gasparyan, told RFE/RL that officers there confiscated all of the leaflets. The Police Service refused to confirm or deny this. A spokesman said the police are investigating similar claims made by Zaruhi Postanjyan, a parliament deputy from the opposition Heritage party. In Postanjyan’s words, she and her aide Seda Melikyan were jostled by police officers as they distributed the same leaflets outside Yerevan’s Republican Stadium, the venue of the opening ceremony attended by President Robert Kocharyan and other top government officials. She said they then went into the stadium only to be surrounded by two dozen police officers trying to forcibly detain them. “We stepped aside and said we wouldn’t follow them,” Postanjyan told RFE/RL. “They were using force to take us away.” Postanjyan, who is also a well-known lawyer, added that the law-enforcement authorities wrested a bag containing leaflets and legal documents from her hands in the process. “The bag contained many important documents relating to my former clients,” she said. The two women visited a police station in Yerevan’s central Kentron district later in the evening to demand that the police apologize and return the bag. “When we demanded our package back they said it was gone,” said Melikyan, also a lawyer. The leaflets condemned the imprisonment of four “political prisoners” highly critical of Armenia’s leadership and urged Armenians to campaign for their immediate release. Three of the jailed individuals have already been controversially sentenced to between 18 months and three-and-a-half years in prison. The fourth detainee, former Foreign Minister Aleksandr Arzumanyan, is awaiting trial on charges of being illegally financed from abroad. All four men have rejected the charges brought against them as politically motivated and baseless. The authorities, however, deny any political reasons for their high-profile prosecution. Yesterday the group of the protection of political detainees, named “the four”, made an announcement about the incident. The announcement reads, “The RA Police openly hinders the implementation of the Constitutional Right of RA citizens to disseminate information”. According to the author, the day when the people started to spread leaflets with the pictures of the political prisoners the police surrounded them and escorted them to the police department or illegally held them in the stadium for hours. The police took the leaflets away from them. The authors have condemned the behavior of the RA police and demanded to immediately punish the police officers, who have violated constitutional rights.