The latest targets of the continuing crackdown on Mayor Vartan Ghukasian’s supporters are female employees of the municipal administration’s education department. Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC) claims that they illegally ordered kindergarten directors and staffs to join the protests on Monday.
Curiously, one of the women is the mother-in-law of Karen Sarukhanian, a controversial Gyumri-based member of the Armenian parliament affiliated with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party. She joined the municipality years before Ghukasian became mayor as a result of a local election held on May 30.
“My mother-in-law shares our political views,” Sarukhanian, who is a vocal critic of Ghukasian, said after her arrest. “If anything like that indeed happened, it was the result of coercion, to say the least.”
The head of another municipality division as well as an adviser to the arrested mayor were arrested on Wednesday in a separate criminal investigation into “mass disturbances” and obstruction of justice conducted by another law-enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee.
Security forces met with strong resistance from hundreds of Ghukasian’s supporters when they raided the municipal administration building in order to demonstratively detain him. The Armenian police had to send reinforcements, including its main riot police units, from Yerevan to overcome that resistance. They clashed with protesters both inside and outside the building.
At least 33 protesters were arrested on the spot or in the following hours. The total number of the arrests strongly condemned by the Armenian opposition surpassed 40 following the prosecution of the three female officials.
It remained unclear on Friday how many of those individuals remain under arrest. The Investigative Committee reported on Wednesday evening that it has already indicted 29 suspects. Fifteen of them were remanded in pre-trial custody.
Ghukasian, the city’s chief architect and six other persons are facing separate corruption charges levelled against them three weeks after Pashinian publicly pledged to oust him. Ghukasian rejects the charges as politically motivated. Opposition leaders likewise claim that the crackdown is part of Pashinian’s efforts to overturn the results of the Gyumri election collectively won by four local opposition groups.