By AVET DEMOURIAN Associated PressDemonstrators protesting higher household electricity rates blocked the Armenian capital’s main avenue on Sunday for a seventh straight day, but they planned to decide in the evening whether to call a halt to their protest after the president promised to suspend the rate hikes.
If the protesters don’t leave by late Sunday, the Yerevan police warned that they would take steps to disperse the demonstrators and open the street to traffic.
After nearly a week in which the number of protesters grew steadily to reach about 15,000, the turning point came late Saturday when President Serzh Sargsyan announced that the government would bear the burden of the higher electricity costs until an international audit of the power company could be done. The protesters claim the Russian-owned utility is riddled with corruption.
The unrest is the most serious that the former Soviet nation has seen in years, posing a challenge to Sargsyan’s government and causing great concern in Moscow. Russia maintains a military base in Armenia and Russian companies control most of its major industries.
Protest organizer Vaghinak Shushanian said Sunday that the president did as much as he was able to do legally, and while it was not a complete victory for the demonstrators, it made sense for them to take a break. But he said the decision on whether to halt the protest would be made by the demonstrators themselves as the crowds returned for the evening rally.
The city’s deputy police chief, Valery Osipian, said his officers were prepared “to try to restore social order” if the street weren’t cleared by the end of the night. After an initial attempt to disperse the protesters through the use of water cannons, which only angered them and brought international condemnation, the police have stood by peacefully.
During the heat of the day, as usual only a few hundred protesters remained on the street, separated from the police by a line of large trash containers. They were joined in the afternoon by a newlywed couple, who carried signs calling for the electricity company’s debts to be paid by its Russian director and for the utility to be nationalized.
Sargsyan said Saturday that he wouldn’t exclude the nationalization of the Armenian power company, a subsidiary of the Russian electricity company Inter RAO UES.
The president’s focus, however, was on plans for an audit, which he said would be conducted by an international company with input from some of the protest organizers. If the audit showed that the rate hikes were justified, they would be passed on to consumers, he said.