Deputy Police Chiefs Attempt to Justify Their Actions
During the past few days the authorities have focused their attention on just one objective – to convince the people that they were correct in resorting to violence and shooting down demonstrators. The authorities do not wish to ‘understand’ that the eye-witnesses to those events wasn’t just one, two or even ten people, but rather tens of thousands of citizens and thus, that their attempts to prove the exact opposite to the people are doomed to failure.
On March 4th, on Armenia’s Public T.V. station, Deputy Police Chiefs Ararat Mahtesyan and Hovhannes Hunanyan presented their take on developments leading to the events of March 1st. The Vice Ministers did ‘succeed’ in confess sing to two facts. During his broadcast on “Haylur”, Mahtesyan confessed that they assumed the people would return to their homes out of fear after the troops dispersed them from Freedom Square and that security forces didn’t foresee the possibility of people gathering in the vicinity of the French Embassy. Three days after the fact, according to Mahtesyan, it turns out that the protestors were quite well organized and that they reassembled very quickly.
The authorities thus do not wish to accept the fact that there was no ‘organized’ effort to bring people to the rallies, unlike the rallies staged by Serzh Sargsyan, and that the people were struggling in defense of their rights. The authorities also cannot fathom the fact that tens of thousands of people took to the streets not for the sake of Levon Ter-Petrosyan, but because they felt themselves as free citizens and that they wished to transform the rights and freedoms they enjoy on paper into reality.
Hovhannes Hunanyan, the other Deputy Chief, made the second confession when he stated, “We didn’t originally intend to resort to violence…” In essence, by uttering these words, he confessed that the troops indeed did resort to extreme brute force.
Even more absurd was the news broadcast over “Haylur” that hand grenades and one revolver was found in the bushes in Freedom Square. To date it seems that the members of the Police, along with their ‘professional’ Generals, don’t understand that such items are to be used as evidence which is neither to be handled nor put on display before the H2 T.V. cameras. Such items must be removed from the scene with gloved hands and placed in proper packaging.
This must be done, Mister Policeman, so that the fingerprints of the protestors and not yours are later found on the evidence in question.
