Sari Tagh residents: They do not care a damn about you or your relative who is in custody
No official has shown up to talk to residents of Yerevan’s Sari Tagh district who have been staging a sit-in protest outside the Office of Prosecutor General since Monday, March 28. “No matter where you sit – on the ice or in the rain… It is all the same to them. They [authorities] do not care a damn about you or your relative who is in custody,” says Narine Ghazaryan, the wife of Hrachya Boyajyan, who was arrested in the wake of last year’s clashes between demonstrators and riot police in Sari Tagh neighborhood following the seizure of a police station in Erebuni district. The protesting residents demand that the police set free their relatives detained in the unrest that erupted late on July 29 when demonstrators tried to approach the police station where gunmen from the Sasna Dzrer stayed barricaded for about two weeks. The detainees were immediate charged with using violence against government representatives. Residents of Sari Tagh district claim that the clashes were triggered by the police. “Even if they threw stones at the rows of riot police, I do not think that they should be sent to prison for 5-10 years. They panicked after security forces pulled out their guns. Had they gone to the border to fight with the enemy, they would not have gone empty-handed; they would have taken sticks or knives with them but they went to solve their community problems,” said Aghavni Jamkochyan, the grandmother of Hrachya Boyajyan. The group demands that the ten detainees be released as soon as possible.
