Epress.am News from Armenia
“APRIL 10: Rally outside Matenadaran. If you don’t come, you’ll lose. 5 pm. People’s Party leader Tigran Karapetyan.” These words were written on A4-sized light pink pieces of paper (which changed color under the rain) plastered on lampposts around the intersection of Mashtots Ave. and Koryun St. in downtown Yerevan. At 5 pm on Apr. 10, the Epress.am team was standing outside the Matenadaran; however, Tigran Karapetyan was nowhere to be seen. Also absent were police officers and loudspeakers (those things emblematic of a rally), and there were only about 22 people gathered at the Mashtots-Koryun intersection.
A 65-year-old man began to walk up toward the platform and we began to follow him.
“Will there be a rally, are you still waiting?” we asked.
“Yes, well it will be, see, it’s written on all the lampposts,” he said.
“But there’s no one here,” we said.
“Well they’ll come; if it’s written, they’ll come,” responded the man and continued along his way.
We were already near the platform outside the Matenadaran when a second man of about the same age began to walk up toward the platform.
We asked, is he too waiting for the rally to start?
“Yes, I’m waiting, well it might happen,” he responded.
We called Tigran Karapetyan and asked, why hasn’t the rally happened, there are people waiting.
“Well don’t you see the rainstorm, people would’ve gotten wet, right; I don’t think it’s right to gather people under this rain. There are children there, things there, they’ll get wet, right? We thought the weather would improve, but no, Manvel [the representative of the People’s Party press department] sent a message to news outlets at 2 pm. And if you’re there, tell people that it won’t happen today. We’re postponing the rally to May 3 at 6 pm,” he said.
By this time, the number of those gathered had drastically reduced to 5 people. At that moment a man of about 60 approached us and we told him there won’t be a rally today.
“They called, they said it was at 5 [pm] and I came,” he said.
Then one of the older men that had walked up to the platform began his descent back to the street.
“It was written on the posters: if you don’t come, you’ll lose. So does that mean we’ve lost?” directing his question to the old man asked a young man, who had just come out of the entrance of a nearby building and approached us to find out why the rally hadn’t happened.
“It’s been a long time that we’ve lost, dear boy,” responded the old man.
“Well, why do you come?”
“Well, what should we do?”
We waited a bit, informed two other men who came outside the Matenadaran that there won’t be a rally.
The young man bid adieu and with a smile on his face as he was leaving, said, “The important thing is that we were here and so we won.”
At 5:28 pm we came back to the office. Checking email, we found that, along with other news outlets, the People’s Party had sent us an email at 5:39 pm.
“Taking into consideration bad weather conditions, particularly the incessant heavy rains since this morning, the People’s movement’s planned rally has been postponed and will take place on May 3 at 6 pm, about which the movement’s activists have already been notified,” read the message.