The Armenian government introduced the two-month ban on November 20 in an effort to protect the vast lake’s endangered fish stocks during the annual spawning period. But it was not until this month that it began enforcing the measure extremely unpopular in Sevan’s coastal fishery-dependent communities.
Officers of a newly established water patrol unit of the national police and representatives of the Sevan National Park clashed with residents of one of those villages, Noratus, during a joint patrol on Tuesday.
According to a police report cited by Armenia’s Investigative Committee, their two patrol boats were surrounded by as many as 200 smaller boats carrying angry local fishers. The latter threw Molotov cocktails and other objects before some of them boarded a Sevan National Park vessel and beat up its crew, the law-enforcement agency said on Wednesday. The statement added that 26 attackers were arrested and charged with “mass hooliganism” and violent assault after the incident.
Noratus residents denied the official version of events as they blocked on Wednesday a nearby highway to protest against the arrests and the fishing ban. One of them said that the fishers themselves were attacked by the police while trying to retrieve their fishing nets from the lake. Others accused the police of sinking one of the fishing boats during the clash.
The protesters also argued that fishing has long been their main source of income in their community which is officially home to some 6,800 people.
“There is no other work here,” one middle-aged man told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Let them [the authorities] give us jobs, and everyone here would love to stop fishing.”
“There is no spawning at the moment,” claimed another fisher. “The scientists who say that are wrong. Spawning happens from January 1 to January 20.”
The authorities say that earlier this month they offered to delay the enforcement of the ban by several days but were rebuffed by the locals.
Decades of overfishing are believed to have taken a heavy toll on Sevan’s main species: trout and whitefish. The Sevan trout, an Armenian delicacy, became all but extinct even before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing upsurge in poaching. The lake’s whitefish population has also declined significantly since the early 1990s.
Fishing bans repeatedly imposed by the current and former Armenian governments have not been vigorously enforced until now.