Arman Sargsyan, a young man from Artsakh, has always participated in protests and gatherings for the salvation of Artsakh after the war. He was once arrested for three hours in 2023, during the days of the blockade, when he and other activists were blocking a road, demanding that the Armenian authorities intervene and give the people of Artsakh a way out.
At that time, the police took him to the department, but they treated him well. One of them even said: “Dear Arman, we are with you, don’t suddenly fall into the hands of the ‘berets’. It’s better that we catch you.”
This time, the 19-year-old boy was unlucky: he fell into the hands of “berets”. They beat him with hands and feet, they trampled him, he does not remember how many feet hit him. A photo of him with a policeman’s shoe print tattooed on his face quickly spread across the internet, causing a stir.
“How could he stand on his face?” Arman’s mother, Naira Grigoryan, was astonished. On May 31, on the day of the protest near the Foreign Ministry building, her friend called her and said that Arman was in the hospital with many injuries.
“He was hit, and the place of the hit remained; there was a print on his forehead. At first, I thought that they hit him with something, it was a mark of a baton. I cried at that moment: I could not imagine that they put their foot on my child’s face. Miraculously, nothing was broken, but what if his eye exploded?” Naira Grigoryan told Forrights.am.
The boy’s bloodied face, the stitches on his head… Naira was shocked for a moment, but quickly gathered herself.
“At first I was afraid, then I thought that he was fighting for the homeland, there are people who did not return from the war, there are people who returned as half-persons; how about them? I cried, I cried, then I kept silent,” she says.
She has several children. shee used to live with her 4 children in the village of Mahavuz, Martakert region of NK. Arman came to Armenia after the war to study in high school and stayed because he liked the quality of education. “He was always an excellent student. He especially loved physics. He had decided mto stay at a YSU student’s house in Yerevan until everything is settled. But he would definitely return to Artsakh. As a good student, they offered him to go to Moscow to study, he refused: he wanted to gain knowledge and go to Artsakh to live there. But… all this happened. He took it hard… From the first days of the “Tuvush for the Motherland” movement he was with them. He is a young, smart boy who can’t refrain from the movement to save the motherland. He always says, “Mom, if not us, then who?” Naira tells about the boy.
During the May 31 protest, Arman was standing on the steps of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Suddenly, someone from the gathered crowd, whom he did not know and had never seen during the demonstrations, threw a bottle at the police, and the police took the bottle and threw it at the protesters.
“The police suddenly started coming forward with shields. Until then, I was standing in front of the line, the police were looking at us very calmly. When they threw thea bottle, I started to go down the stairs, tried to leave the area, but a policeman caught me and threw me beyond the shields, where the black berets were. The same policeman was standing peacefully by my side the whole time, and suddenly he grabbed me and dragged me beyond the shields,” Arman recalls the events of that day.
Law enforcement officials claim that the protesters gathered near the MFA building were planning to attack the MFA building, and their actions were legal.
Arman Srgsyan claims as an eye witness that there was no attack. “The attack can be by order. I can clearly say that there was no attack order from the Bishop [the movement leader] and there could not be. When they took me and threw me into the bus, I saw that there were many people there, who were brought and thrown in the same way,” says Arman Sargsyan.
According to him, the many injuries he received have been recorded in the hospital, he has a certificate regarding them and is going to file a crime report.
Arman Sargsyan claims that he does not know whether there is a proceeding in the case of beating him. “A person from the police came to the hospital, from some department that deals with police discipline, but he did not approach me, investigators did not come to me. I think there are no proceedings,” he said in a conversation with Forrights.am.
This 19-year-old describes the police atrocities committed against him and other protesters as “hooliganism that has no justification.”
To remind, the Investigative Committee reported on June 4 that within the framework of the “Tavush for the Motherland” movement, during the action organized in front of the building of the RA Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 31, 2024, “a group of people, with the direct intention of emphasizing their perceived advantages and committing hooliganism , showing disrespect towards the society, openly disrespecting legal and moral norms, ignoring the demands of the police officers to show proper behavior and not to violate the public order, uttered obscene expressions and curses, threw bottles and various objects at the police officers of the RA Ministry of Internal Affairs and external in the direction of the building of the Ministry of Affairs”.
Criminal proceedings under the article “Hooliganism” were initiated, but no legal evaluation was given to the actions of the police. Arman Sargsyan was visited by the Ombudspan’s office and the physical injuries caused to him were recorded.
Syuzan Simonyan