23 July 2016: members of Sasna Tsrer stand outside the police compound in Erebuni, Yerevan. (с) Asatur Esayants / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.This month, Armenia tipped into violence, experiencing its worst political crisis in eight years. On 17 July, a radical armed group seized and held a police station on the edge of Yerevan for two weeks. The group took several hostages and killed two policemen before they eventually surrendered. To the surprise of many, thousands of Armenians were so disgruntled with the ruling regime that they supported the hostage-takers in a series of demonstrations, at least one of which was suppressed with brutality.
The roots of this crisis lay in the failure by many governments in Armenia to fill a deficit of trust. They have not tackled key problems such as unemployment, corruption, emigration and a political culture of impunity. Of course, these problems are common to many countries — it was the form the confrontation took which was specifically Armenian.
Indeed, the stand-off amounted to a clash between two sets of victorious veterans of the Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan during the early 1990s. That intractable conflict and Armenia’s inability to find a path out of it remain a heavy legacy that blocks the country’s development.
