The Founding Parliament, a radical Armenian opposition group, will rally supporters in Yerevan on Friday to demand the immediate release of its five leading members arrested last week on what it considers trumped-up charges.
It has also reaffirmed plans to begin a campaign of nonstop street protests against President Serzh Sarkisian on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide to be officially marked on April 24.
Zhirayr Sefilian, the Founding Parliament’s top leader, and his four associates stand accused of planning to exploit the high-profile commemorations to provoke “mass disturbances” in Yerevan. Sefilian’s movement as well as Armenia’s mainstream opposition parties and human rights activists have dismissed these allegations as baseless and politically motivated.
Avetik Ishkhanian of the Armenian Helsinki Committee raised the matter with Anne Brasseur, the visiting president of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), when he and a group of other civic activists met her in Yerevan on Tuesday. “I told her that I consider [the detained oppositionists] prisoners of conscience and I explained why,” Ishkhanian said afterwards.
The Founding Parliament leaders remaining at large reiterated, meanwhile, that their push for “regime change” will go ahead as planned despite what they described as government “repressions.” “The physical isolation of Zhirayr Sefilian has produced opposite effects,” one of them, Alec Yenigomshian, told a news conference. “People who sympathized with us from afar are now saying that they too will attend [the rallies.]”
Just days before the arrests, municipal authorities allowed the Founding Parliament to hold rallies in Yerevan’s southern Erebuni suburb on April 24-25. The group planned to take its campaign to the city center afterwards.
The municipality has also sanctioned a Founding Parliament protest slated for April 17. According to Yenigomshian, its supporters will rally in Liberty Square and march through central Yerevan to voice their “solidarity” with the detainees and demand that they be set free.
Yenigomshian also insisted that the April 24 protest will not interfere in any way with the events dedicated to the centenary of the genocide.
The timing of the campaign has been criticized by not only the ruling Republican Party of Armenia but also some opposition groups represented in parliament.