Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has issued a stern warning to a newly formed nationalist party whose members stormed a police base in Yerevan more than two years ago.
Pashinian said on Monday that the Sasna Tsrer party and its supporters will “feel the taste of asphalt” if they attempt to destabilize the political situation in Armenia before or after the December 9 parliamentary elections.
Sasna Tsrer is a rebranded version of Founding Parliament, a radical movement that challenged the former Armenian government. It is one of 11 political forces running in the elections.
Sasna Tsrer’s list of election candidates is topped by Varuzhan Avetisian, the leader of an armed group that seized the police base in Yerevan’s Erebuni district in July 2016. The three dozen gunmen demanded that then President Serzh Sarkisian free Founding Parliament’s jailed leader, Zhirayr Sefilian, and step down.
They laid down their weapons after a two-week standoff with security forces which left three police officers dead.
Despite standing trial on serious charges, Avetisian and the vast majority of the other arrested gunmen were set free shortly after Pashinian came to power in May in a wave of anti-Sarkisian protests.
Sefilian was also released from prison following the “velvet revolution.” The Lebanese-born activist, who received Armenian citizenship only this month, is not eligible to run for the parliament. But he is participating in the election campaign of his and his allies’ party strongly opposed to any Armenian concessions to Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Avetisian has stated during the campaign that the National Assembly to be elected on December 9 will have to be dissolved within two years because Armenia is now in a post-revolutionary “transitional period.”
Pashinian, whose My Step alliance is expected to win the upcoming polls, reacted furiously those statements when he campaigned in Armenia’s northwestern Shirak province on Monday.
“Have you have decided that you have a right to determine the length of the parliament’s and sometimes even people’s life?” he appealed to the Sasna Tsrer leadership during a campaign rally. “I’m telling you: make no mistake, this is not Serzh Sarkisian’s weak and spineless government.”
“Let nobody interpret our smiles and courtesy as weakness. There have been several such cases, and those who thought so felt the taste of asphalt,” Pashinian said, alluding to high-profile detentions of some members of Sarkisian’s entourage and their bodyguards.
The prime minister added that the new parliament will fully serve its five-year term set by the Armenian constitution.
Sasna Tsrer condemned the premier’s remarks in a statement issued on Tuesday. “Pashinian made unfounded statements, using threats and phrases having an offensive subtext,” it said.
Avetisian defended his statements. He said they do not mean that Sasna Tsrer is now demanding the holding of fresh elections by 2020.
“It is first and foremost a prediction,” Avetisian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service. “Many other politicians and political forces have made the same forecast.”
The 2016 attack on the Yerevan police base was condemned by the United States and the European Union. “We abhor the actions of Sasna Tsrer and others who use violence or who threaten to harm others to serve their political agenda,” Richard Mills, the former U.S. ambassador to Armenia, said in March 2018.
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