Protesters and Police Clash as Armenia Unrest Grows

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

YEREVAN, Armenia — The largest crowds this tiny, mountainous country has seen in years have clogged central streets here for 11 days, as Armenians of all ages have protested the results of a presidential election they say was stolen.

But what had begun as relatively routine demonstrations, featuring a daily march to a government building and some slogan shouting, took a more ominous turn on Saturday when the authorities began using nightsticks, tear gas and water hoses to break up crowds. By the end of the day, rioting and looting had begun in some areas of the capital, and the government imposed a state of emergency.

“The mood of the people is one of major resistance,” said Vardan Oskanian, Armenia’s foreign minister. “It’s a critical moment.”

Around 9 p.m., lines of military policemen moved toward the crowds in the center of the city, firing rubber balls and tear gas canisters at them, and shooting bullets into the air. Rioters carrying pipes and stones set fire to dozens of cars, smashed windows, and, in one area, looted alcohol and food.

The crowds first gathered after the presidential election on Feb. 19, the fifth since this landlocked country in the Caucasus Mountains gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It pitted a political insider, the current prime minister, Serge Sargsyan, against Levon Ter-Petrossian, an academic who was the country’s first elected president. Term limits barred the current president, Robert Kocharian, from running.

While Mr. Ter-Petrossian, 63, put up a real opposition with an aggressive campaign, the rest of the election was straight out of the post-Soviet playbook. Votes were bought. Television coverage was embarrassingly skewed. Big men in large cars bossed vote counters. As a result, the party in power stayed in power, with 52 percent of the vote.

Until now, Armenia has been a relatively bright example among countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Its government allows more dissent than most, and journalists rarely disappear and turn up dead.

That is why the actions of the police officers on Saturday — and last month’s election, whose results have still not been fully recognized by the United States — were so jarring.

On Saturday morning, Armenian authorities, saying they suspected a coup attempt, used a favorite method of crowd dispersal: placing hand grenades and guns near some of the protesters as they slept, witnesses said, and then confronting them. A fight followed, and the authorities said 31 people were hurt, 10 of them hospitalized.

Obedient state television showed contrived scenes of police officers and sniffer dogs walking up to small piles of shiny grenades and handguns, nestled like Easter eggs in the grass.

“It’s a completely artificial reason,” said Boris Navasardian, president of the Yerevan Press Club. “They had plans to disperse the crowds by force from the very beginning.”

By early afternoon, crowds had reassembled, and by evening, they had turned violent, dragging burned cars and windowless city buses to block streets. Men threw rocks and bricks at police officers in riot gear.

The officers withdrew from the crowded areas toward midnight, leaving strange scenes in the moonlight. An elaborately decorated cake was atop an upside-down car; loaves of bread spilled out of an open trunk of a car on its side. Drunken men gobbled up expensive chocolates.

“The owner of this store is a very bad person,” said Arsen Sarkisyan, 20, who was walking out with a bag of sour cream containers.

The election was troubled from the start. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent 333 observers, concluded that 16 percent of the count was “bad” or “very bad.” At one polling station, a quarter of all ballots were declared invalid. At another, all but one of 1,449 votes were for Mr. Sargsyan.

“I told the government that the probability of this is as high as the birth of a dog with five legs,” said Geert Ahrens, head of the organization’s Election Observation Mission here.

There were moments of drama straight out of Gogol. In one recount witnessed by a Western observer, some members of a counting committee, apparently in an attempt at filibustering, wandered off and were missing for hours. The committee chairman was declared sick. Then came a rumor he had had a heart attack.

Finally, in sheer frustration after hours of waiting, an official ripped open an envelope marked as containing ballots for Mr. Sargsyan. The ballot on top of the pile was for his opponent, Mr. Ter-Petrossian, and other officials immediately rushed to close the envelope. “I can only assume it was a bad count that someone did not want reopened,” the observer said.

Even so, when seen in the context of the broader region, Mr. Ahrens said, “I’ve seen worse.”

“We won the election,” Mr. Ter-Petrossian said Thursday, sitting in a cafe, the Swan Lake. He added that he had received 65 percent of the vote, a figure that Mr. Ahrens said was “not grounded in any factual evidence.” Mr. Ter-Petrossian’s aides, who refer to him as “the president,” seemed to have fully internalized the figure nonetheless.

The crowds have only seemed to grow since the first post-election rallies, particularly since the day last week when a government-organized rally broke ranks to join them.

Mr. Ter-Petrossian, who is fond of dramatic entrances, rushed onto the stage, as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” blared from loudspeakers. He spoke for hours, revving up the crowd of angry grandmothers, bored young men eating sunflower seeds and a variety of Armenian professionals.

Mr. Ter-Petrossian, who was president from 1991 to 1998, presents himself as the one to rescue the country. For nine days he has slept in his Lincoln Town Car, parked near the protesters’ camp, and he calls the protests “a clear, classic bourgeois, democratic revolution.”

“To keep this regime is a catastrophe for Armenia,” he said last week, smoking a cigarette in a gilded holder. “It’s a pyramid scheme. An eastern monarchy from the Middle Ages.”

Though many Armenians share his frustration, fewer think he is the man capable of making real changes. As president, he relied on the very methods he is now criticizing, they say, arresting opposition figures, closing news organizations and sending armored vehicles into the streets after a tainted election in 1996.

“A revolution means there is a principled person from outside the system who wants to change it,” said Avetik Ishkhanyan, chairman of the Armenian Helsinki Committee. “But this opposition created the system. It is identical to the people in power.”

Part of the problem is Armenia’s Soviet past. Legal institutions like courts became instruments of state power, and even after 17 years, people are still suspicious of them.

“The Soviet Union is dead, the Soviet man is not,” an Armenian government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is still no trust.”

Mr. Sargsyan, for his part, said that his opponent seemed to be more interested in street protests, which have paralyzed life in the capital, than in following the tedious procedure to challenge the results in court.

“If they had something to claim, they could do it,” he said, sitting in his lofty office in central Yerevan. “Why didn’t they? O.K., it was hard. They weren’t in the mood. But they could still do it.”

As for the crowd, he predicted that “step by step, it will die out.”

Johan Spanner contributed reporting.