For many, the news of the assault on a police station in Yerevan over the weekend brought back memories of the two-week siege of another station back in 2016. The reasons were similar too. Eight years ago, just a few months after the four-day war, rumours spread throughout Armenia that then President Serzh Sargsyan was under pressure to accept the so-called Lavrov Plan in which five out of seven regions then occupied by Armenian forces would be handed back to Azerbaijan as part of an anticipated peace deal. The remaining two would follow later without any guarantees that the status of Nagorno Karabakh would be resolved to the satisfaction of Yerevan and Stepanakert (now usually referred to as Khankendi).
There were also calls for the release of Lebanese-Armenian Jirair Sefilyan, the then-imprisoned former military commander and ultra-nationalist. Last weekend, in another deja vu moment, what sparked the violence concerned recent statements from Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan that four Azerbaijani villages located in what he recognised as de jure Azerbaijani territory outside Armenia’s own border would be returned.
This recent incident in the Nor Nork district of Yerevan came after 49 members of the “Combat Brotherhood” militia were detained by police on their way to Voskepar, an Armenian village on that same border with Azerbaijan in proximity to the now uncontested non-enclave villages. The similarities with the 2016 terrorist action that resulted in the murder of three policemen were even more striking when it became known that six supporters of the National Democratic Pole, a minor but radical ultra-nationalist extra-parliamentary coalition, had also been detained.
The National Democratic Pole is made up of several Armenian political parties but most notably includes Sasna Tsrer (Daredevils of Sassoun), the group that carried out the 2016 attack in Erebuni, and which has now transformed into a political party that claims to renounce violence as an operational tactic. Sefilyan is considered Sasna Tsrer’s de facto leader. Now no longer imprisoned, he again made headlines a week ago when he called on the Armenian military to disobey any orders from Pashinyan to withdraw from positions that could make such a handover possible.
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Vulnerable individuals among current and future generations can still fall prey to nationalist and extremist militias or narratives that could again encourage real-life action. Once radicalised, such groups and individuals will also represent a clear and present danger to a still fledgling process of democratisation over the coming years.
The full opinion piece can be read online here.
