The police released Ani Gevorgian along with her brother Sarkis on Thursday afternoon on the grounds that they don’t leave Yerevan until a “final decision on the case” has been made. Apparently they are still potentially looking at jail time–up to five years.
Video taken by the police apparently shows Ani knocking off the hat of a police officer, thus the accusation of assault. Again, no one can say what he exactly said to her, but it’s obvious it was harmful enough to make her irate.
Armenians get emotional fairly quickly and can start arguing 10 seconds into a conversation without a second thought. They can also be antagonistic and downright rude in their verbal approach to situations, which judging from what I saw in the posted video was certainly the case in these forced evictions from Liberty Square and the arrests made by the police. Now, assuming protesters and even innocent bystanders refrained from arguing with the cops and simply walked away, would anything have changed, in other words would some people have been detained regardless? According to an account told by a woman that was cited in a previous post, the answer is no. That is, unless the police knew who her son was and was believed to have had some kind of role to play in the oppositional protests. There has to be a good (not necessarily justifiable) reason why he was beaten and taken away, according to the woman’s description of the events.
No one can say because the police haven’t made any public statements regarding the specific reasons for the arrest of each person there. And even if they do speak up, their reasons will most likely be inaccurate or totally fabricated, since this is a common practice.
I still think that more protesters need to get arrested in order to wake up the general public from its apathetic slumber. Simultaneously, the opposition parties have to get their act together and start figuring out what they want to do next, aside from calling early elections. Right now, there seems to be only malcontent and disorganization among the opposition, and until they put their houses in order, nothing can change. Assuming, of course, the majority of Armenian citizens really want “change”…
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