Today a few environmentalists convened a press conference at Asparez Club of Gyumri journalists. One of them, Mariam Sukhudyan, informed that they had fixed a time and date for the establishment – if they hadn’t cleared Mashtots Park from illegal booths by Tuesday, the environmentalists would organize twenty-four-hour sit-down strikes and would dismantle the booths by themselves. In response to a question of www.aravot.am how would the police behave in that instance, whether they would attack the environmentalists or they would sit idly, being with the protesters at heart, one of the environmentalists, Yeghia Nersisyan said, “I am convinced that one should first of all awaken the human in a person, regardless of what uniform he wears. And given the past experience, my friends can witness, everyone who was there can witness that we at least do not treat police officer as enemy, first of all one tries to find the human, the Armenian in him. There are a lot of police officers there that say these days ‘When your Teghut struggle commences we will take off our uniforms and will come and struggle with you.’”
Yeghia Nersisyan is more than convinced that in case of environmentalists’ dismantling the booths, police officers will not repress them, “When we take an aggressive step, I am convinced they will not harm us, they may come, because we destroy business interest, although we won’t destroy, we are ready to bring laborers from among our friends who will know how to dismantle Eurostans and will dismantle them and I am convinced that police officers will not harm us in any way, on the contrary, perhaps a few police officers will come and help us dismantle those. I am convinced that the majority of the police officers standing there want the park to remain and they realize that not only is it an issue of the park, but it is also national self-determination – one becomes the master of his country, one who doesn’t long for either power or money, he wants his country, he wants to live normally in his country. Don’t infringe my right and that’s all!” said the environmentalist.
Nune AREVSHATYAN
