anniversary of the election

So you'll probably remember the Iranian elections last year, charges of corruption. Protesting in the streets. Excessive force and police brutality? Yeah?
Well, the same thing on a smaller and quieter scale happened here in Armenia two years ago. Charges of voter fraud for the winning party. Demand of a recount.
So this went down in Armenia in 2008 and people took to the streets and occupied the main city square and camped there, refusing to leave for like (2 weeks?). The military finally gets the go-ahead to clear em out and does so with clubs and mace and firehoses, beating the tar out of peaceful protesters. 10 people died. No police were ever charged with excessive force or misconduct. (See: http://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/armenia)
So last year there was an anniversary protest and more clashes. Some arrests. Some estimate there were 15,000 protesters.

Today was the second anniversary and there was a protest scheduled to take place at the Matenadaran, a national museum. I had forgotten about it til I was heading home on foot and walked past a dozen army dudes in camo, loitering next to a park outside of their paddywagon. I decided to take a detour and go check out the demonstration.
The goal was to be kind of an observer and should shit go down between the police and protesters, I had my camera. Try to document from the fringe without getting involve. I stood there a while and watched the crowd listen to speakers. Don't know what they were saying but the crowd was getting a little fired up. I was kind of waiting to see, because I had heard they were supposed to march through the city, but as it started to get dark, I eventually got sick of waiting for something to happen, as I've been to enough protests where all you end up doing is wait for something to happen. But I caught a video of the crowd and the police and military in their furry soviet-style hats and old men eating and spitting sunflower seeds. Very popular here. If the video goes through, it might give you a view of a little slice of Armenian life.

Its interesting to see something like this firsthand. I have to remind myself...this is all new in Armenia. I mean, democracy is only about 20 years old here. And the development of freedom of the press, freedom to protest. These are still being contested. And they are sometimes trampled by the government. Media is Armenia is kind of considered to be a joke. I went to a conference last week put on by the Open Society Institute about media coverage of news etc (well, that was one part of the conference. The conference was regarding the protection and monitoring of human rights in Armenia, which is a slightly bigger can of worms). But my point is...this was all really shaky. Meaning that nobody really seemed to know or trust what the other side was going to do. They haven't gotten used to this whole democracy thing yet. Either side. The government or the opposition.

I do wonder if anything happened. Keep you posted.

here are a few miscellaneous pictures as well:





yeah, thats a stray feral dog on a fuckin roof. i saw that and its like "great, now i don't only have to worry about them coming out of the alleys at me, snarling. I have to fear them coming down from above? Awesome."