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Armenia Clamps Down After A Deadly Protest

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  • Armenia Clamps Down After A Deadly Protest

    ARMENIA CLAMPS DOWN AFTER A DEADLY PROTEST
    By Sabrina Tavernise

    International Herald Tribune
    March 3 2008
    France

    YEREVAN, Armenia: Tanks blocked central streets in the capital of this
    tiny mountain country Sunday, a day after the Armenian authorities
    clashed with demonstrators in a violent confrontation that left at
    least eight dead and more than 130 wounded.

    The government imposed a state of emergency here Saturday, and for
    the first day since a contested Feb. 19 presidential election, the
    streets and central squares in this ancient capital city were empty
    of the crowds that had become a daily fixture.

    Levon Ter-Petrossian, the opposition leader who has led the crowds,
    and whose failed candidacy was the reason for the protests, told
    journalists in his three-story house on Sunday that he would not
    encourage his supporters to defy the curfew and gather.

    "Losing the square means losing the connection to the people," said
    Ter-Petrossian. "Now they have taken this away from us."

    Television stations, totally controlled by his opponents, Prime
    Minister Serge Sargsyan and President Robert Kocharian, have virtually
    ignored the rallies, which often numbered in the tens of thousands,
    and protesters said attending them was the only way to get news.

    While some organizations condemned the violence - including the United
    Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Organization for
    Security and Cooperation in Europe, which dispatched a special envoy to
    Yerevan on Sunday - the reasons behind it remained unclear on Sunday.

    Protesters had begun tearing up bricks from the sidewalks, parking
    city buses as roadblocks and assembling gasoline bombs for much of the
    afternoon on Saturday, and it was clear to most in the crowd that a
    fight was brewing. A group of protesters set fire to a police vehicle
    after it bumped into a woman, and when a fire truck arrived to put
    out the blaze, someone threw a rock and shattered its windshield.

    Ter-Petrossian blamed the government for the violence, saying it had
    sent provocateurs into the crowd.

    "It's their people," said Ter-Petrossian. "All the pogroms were
    carried out by them."

    According to the rules of martial law, local journalists are barred
    from disseminating any information that is given by a source other
    than the government. Shortly after 6 a.m., two soldiers accompanied
    a cameraman from Armenian state television as he filmed shots of the
    aftermath. CNN segments about Armenia were clipped from television
    programming.

    Despite opposition to the government, Ter-Petrossian said that he
    accepted the state's casualty count - which included seven protesters
    and one security officer - and that was not gathering information to
    compile one of his own.

    City workers swept shards of glass and towed burned carcasses of cars
    off of central streets, still slick from gasoline fires, as passers-by
    came to gape at the damage.

    The tensions started with the presidential election on Feb. 19,
    the fifth since this landlocked country in the Caucasus Mountains
    gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Sargsyan, a
    political insider and the prime minister, ran against Ter-Petrossian,
    an academic who was the country's first elected president.

    Term limits barred Kocharian, from running.

    While Ter-Petrossian offered an aggressive campaign, the rest of the
    election conformed completely to the old Soviet standards.

    Votes were bought. Television coverage was embarrassingly skewed.

    Big men in large cars bossed vote counters. As a result, the party
    in power stayed in power, with 52 percent of the vote.

    Tucked between Azerbaijan and Turkey, two sworn enemies, and without
    any natural resources, Armenia has to rely on outside help to survive.

    Its government usually allows more dissent than most. Journalists
    rarely disappear and turn up dead.

    Which is why the actions of the police officers on Saturday - and
    the elections last month, whose results have still not been fully
    recognized by the United States - were so jarring.

    >From the beginning, there were disturbing signs about the presidential
    election.

    The OSCE, which deployed 333 observers, concluded that 16 percent of
    the count was "bad" or "very bad."

    At one polling station, a quarter of all ballots were declared
    invalid. In another, all but one of 1,449 voters in a set of polling
    stations were for Sargsyan.

    "I told the government that the probability of this is as high as
    the birth of a dog with five legs," said Geert Ahrens, head of the
    organization's Election Observation Mission here.

    "We won the election," Ter-Petrossian said Thursday.

    He added that he had received 65 percent of the vote, a figure that
    Ahrens said was "not grounded in any factual evidence."

    Ter-Petrossian's aides, however, refer to him as "the president."
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