General Amnesty for Political Prisoners?

(summarized from various articles and Radio Liberty Radio broadcast, May 7, 2008)

With a new, full-blown wave of witch-hunts, arrests and harassments under way, the European Union’s special representative to the Caucasus arrived in Yerevan to remind the Armenian government of the PACE demands of just a few weeks ago.

Tigran Torosyan, speaker of the parliament, was ready for the challenge! First, he complained that alas, Ter-Petrosyan continues to blame the authorities for the slaughter of March 1. The first president of Armenia is too outspoken, he said; how could he blame the government.

But lest the government of Armenia be misunderstood as undemocratic, Tigran Torosyan assured Mr. Semneby that the government was addressing PACE’s demands post haste: only last week, he pointed out, it created a presidential commission to make sure that the PACE demands are being attended to. Then there’s another body that’s looking at ways of improving future elections. And who knows what other committee would be pulled together to make sure that the issue is diffused, diluted and confused.

We don’t know if the speaker of the house mentioned the scores of new arrests to Mr. Semneby. We wonder if he told Mr. Semneby about today’s trials in Gyumri where witnesses were harassed for speaking the truth and where the defendants’ families and friends could not attend the proceedings because the chosen courtroom was too small, but not for the scores of policemen there to protect the judge? Did he tell Mr. Semneby that just the day before he arrived, 12 people who were rounded up and interrogated for having participated in the peaceful demonstrations? We wonder if he told Mr. Semneby about the 20 new veterans who joined the hunger strikers because they simply don’t understand why they are being treated as Enemies of the State when less than two decades ago they were decorated heroes of the Nagorno-Karabagh war and are now planning to return their medals to the government. And, did Torosyan tell Mr. Semneby about the woman who returned from mourning the victims on April 24 only to find policemen tearing her kiosk apart and to be told by them that she could not return to her kiosk—her only source of income—because she participated in the peaceful demonstrations?

We don’t know the details of what transpired at that meeting, but we do know that very few, if any, in Armenia have faith in the so-called attempts. One such person is Zharangutyun MP and a well-known lawyer, Zaruhi Postanjyan, who has no faith in the committees and working groups springing up in Yerevan these days to address the PACE demands. In her interview with Radio Liberty today, May 7, she stressed:

As a citizen, I need to be able to feel that people are no longer being persecuted, that no longer people are being dragged out of bed early in the morning to be taken to the police station with no warrant, kept there for hours and days, and then released.

She went on to say that the authorities have not taken any concrete steps to deal with the crisis, but have rather begun a new wave of persecutions against the opposition. She continues to say that for the government to show its commitment to the PACE demands, it should issue a General Amnesty to the more than 100 political prisoners now in Armenia’s prisons. According to her, this would allow both the authorities and the opposition to emerge from the current crisis. As for the conditional release of some prisoners, she thinks the government is just trying to look good and is simply sending a false message to show the European Union that they

…have shown benevolence and have punished them only conditionally…

She added that some of the victims of March 1 are planning to plead their cases before the European Court of Justice. And, she thinks, along with many other cases that have been sent to the European Court, these will receive a higher priority.

[interpretation mine]
Examples of related articles:
From armenialiberty.org: EU insists on end to Armenian crackdown
a1plus.am: Detained Without Explanation
a1plus.am: New Tricks
e-channel.am: A Hero Shall Not Be Judged