The Criminal Executive Service of the Ministry of Justice of Armenia has already provided explanations: allegedly, Armen Grigoryan, who had been kept in the Armavir pretrial detention center since May 18, had no health complaints, a doctor examined him on admission and diagnosed high blood pressure, and the film producer received appropriate treatment… Only for some reason, even lavished with the care and attention of Armenian prison healthcare, Grigoryan suddenly expired right in the courtroom.
Armenian Ombudsperson Kristine Grigoryan had to mutter through clenched teeth: “It is extremely unacceptable and disturbing that the human right to healthcare is not guaranteed in pretrial detention and that health conditions are not properly identified and treated, leading to such tragic outcomes.”
The Yerevan opposition is speaking up as well. The Armenia bloc issued an appeal: “Armen Grigoryan, who had been under arrest since May 17 at the request of the National Security Service of Armenia, fell another victim to the regime, a tyranny that grows stronger by the day in the country.”
Of course, the Armenia bloc, headed by Robert Kocharyan, can hardly be classified as a healthy political force. It is even more unlikely that this party can arouse any sympathy of the Azerbaijani audience. However, there are no doubts about the accuracy of the “diagnosis” given to Pashinyan’s government by the parliamentary opposition. Over the four years that have passed since the “kebab revolution”, Pashinyan has really built a regime of rigid personal dictatorship in Armenia.
At the very beginning of Armenia’s “revolutionary” history, Mher Yeghiazaryan, head of the Armenian Eagles party and Hayinfo website, dies in Nubarashen detention center after a 44-day hunger strike. In 2019, Pashinyan’s war against the Constitutional Court and its chairman Hrayr Tovmasyan begins. The latter’s family members, including his elderly father, are summoned for questioning. And then comes the attack on the Zerkalo website and the press club of the same name headed by Hrayr Tovmasyan’s sister Angela. She told the journalists openly at the time: “The attack on the website, the press club and me personally has to do with my opposition stance. I was warned that they could start pressuring our family, given my brother’s situation. This is absolutely typical of the current government. Today’s act of hooliganism proved that.”
In 2020, during the 44-day war, Nikol Pashinyan introduced strict Internet censorship in Armenia. The citizens were expressly forbidden, on pain of criminal prosecution, to criticize the actions of the government. Theoretically, one could still try to chalk it up to “wartime laws,” but now the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office is proposing to introduce permanent Internet censorship in the country.
One might also recall the crackdown on the local authorities in West Zangezur for failing to secure enough votes for Pashinyan’s bloc in the 2021 early parliamentary elections.
And then, of course, there is another remarkable feature of Armenian political life: the persistent use of “non-government” violence against political opponents, as was the case recently in the streets of Gyumri, where pro-Propashinyan thugs beat up elderly opposition activists. This is by no means a complete list of the realities of present-day Armenia, where Pashinyan, having overthrown the criminal dictatorship of the “Karabakh clan”, is building his “thug dictatorship”.
The fact that Karabakh thugs have been replaced by Ijevan ones does not change much.
