An activist of the Armenian opposition movement Founding Parliament was stabbed at the weekend as government loyalists attempted to disrupt a rally held by it in Gyumri.
The group rallied about 300 supporters in Armenia’s second largest city in preparation for its upcoming campaign of nonstop protests in Yerevan which it says will be aimed at forcing President Serzh Sarkisian to resign.
The rally got off to a tense start, with a group of thuggish young men heckling speakers and quarreling with the small crowd that gathered in a central city square. Police officers at the scene stood by and looked on until the youths started hurling eggs.
Some of the protesters responded by chasing away the men. One of them, Founding Parliament member Hrach Mirzoyan, was stabbed in the abdomen in the melee. The stab wound initially appeared to be light as Mirzoyan was able to stand on his feet and talk to reporters.
“I ran after them with the policemen,” he said. “Then one of them hit me with a knife and fled.”
The middle-aged activist was taken to a Gyumri hospital shortly afterwards, however. He underwent surgery and had his spleen removed by doctors there later on Saturday.
The Founding Parliament leaders blamed the police inactivity for the violence, saying that the authorities were behind the “provocation.” The radical opposition group also posted on the Internet a photograph of a man who it said stabbed Mirzoyan.
Law-enforcement authorities launched criminal proceedings in connection with the incident. But they reported no arrests as of Monday evening.
Many of the pro-government youths who tried to disrupt the rally were also seen by journalists three weeks ago among several dozen men who gathered just outside Gyumri to stop a motorcade of Founding Parliament cars from entering the city and holding a rally there. The opposition group cancelled that rally to avoid violence.
The latest incident occurred less than a month before the start of the Founding Parliament’s planned push for “regime change” in Yerevan. None of Armenia’s leading opposition parties represented in parliament has decided to join the campaign.
One of them, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), has denounced the Founding Parliament for timing it to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey that will be marked on April 24. A Dashnaktsutyun leader, Armen Rustamian, last week called on the authorities to take “preventive” measures against the Founding Parliament.
Another parliamentary opposition force, the Armenian National Congress (HAK), was quick to strongly condemn the Gyumri violence as “yet another act of government terrorism” and accuse the Sarkisian administration of resorting to “criminal and thuggish methods.”
Also decrying the incident was Nikol Pashinian, an opposition parliamentarian currently setting up his own political party. In a Facebook post, Pashinian said he has phoned the top Gyumri-based law-enforcement officials to express his “indignation” and demand that those responsible for the trouble be punished. He said they assured him that they will save no effort to do that.
“It is not encouraging, however, that none of the participants of the incident has been caught, even though their identity is known to the law-enforcers,” added Pashinian.