Law-enforcement authorities could bring criminal charges against over a dozen men arrested during ongoing protests in northern Tavush region against the Armenian government’s decision to hand over four contested border areas to Azerbaijan.
Riot police arrested five of them late on Tuesday while clashing with protesters who blocked a road junction close to Armenia’s main border crossing with Georgia. They remained in custody as of Wednesday evening.
The detainees included Suren Petrosyan, a Yerevan-based political activist and analyst who has emerged as one of the leaders of the protests mainly involving residents of four Tavush villages that would be seriously affected by the planned handover. News reports said that he could be charged with “hooliganism.”
Armenia’s Investigative Committee did not clarify whether Petrosyan and the four other men will be indicted or released without charge.
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Another active participant of the protests, retired army Colonel Mihran Makhsudyan, was hospitalized shortly after the dispersal of Tuesday’s protest. According to his wife Rita Grigoryan, he suffered a serious injury to his head while being taken to a local police station.
Makhsudyan is a resident of Voskepar, one of the border villages in question. He bitterly argued with Interior Minister Vahe Ghazaryan on Monday at a section of a national highway passing through Tavush.
Azerbaijan is due to gain control over the road section adjacent to the village of Kirants and three nearby areas under the terms of a controversial border delimitation deal announced by Baku and Yerevan last Friday. Hundreds of protesters continued to block the section for the fifth consecutive day on Wednesday. Security forces have so far made no attempts to disperse them.
“We drew the border in the 1990s,” one of the protesters told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Our older generation did that. People, young men died for that.”
Also risking prosecution were seven other men affiliated with Combat Brotherhood, a Yerevan-based group also strongly opposed to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s fresh territorial concession to Baku. They were arrested on Monday after clashing with the driver of a military vehicle that tried to drive through another road blocked by protesters. Videos posted on social media showed the driver jumping onto the crowd from the roof of the SUV belonging to the Yerkrapah militia led by Sasun Mikaelyan, a political ally of Pashinian.
