Vice President of the RPA Armen Ashotyan received calls from several schools in Yerevan that they have been ordered and advised to participate as a collective in Nikol Pashinyan’s march scheduled for November 24th.
“They are recruiting participants and telling them that their participation in the march is encouraged. They’re told that things will be good for them if they gather as a collective and take part in the march. These warnings have been confirmed and those people reconfirmed the information they received, that the authorities want to gather the largest number of people possible for the march, and it is relying not only on its political appeals, but specific administrative levers as well. The current administration is repeating the same working style that it accused us of having. It does not have an aversion to using administrative levers,” Armen Ashotyan said during a Facebook live stream.
He encouraged the mayor of Yerevan and other people responsible for education to look into this issue. “If they were able to raise some questions in educational policy, it was depoliticization, but that is not the case. Political interests in this sector have been upheld.”
The authorities want to make a show of their power, according to Ashotyan. “They want to show their muscles, so to speak, before the election campaigns, and show how many people they can gather. They want to change the political agenda into campaign-like mass events and they are not avoiding using administrative levers in order to show off their muscles in the best way possible tomorrow.”
Arpine Simonyan
