Epress.am News from Armenia
The management of the Sotk gold mine refuses to rehire sacked locksmith Armen Yeranosyan, despite the availability of jobs at the mine. The man insists that he is being “punished” by the management for holding a number of protest actions outside the Government building in Yerevan in 2016.
Yeranosyan, a 41-year-old native of the town of Vardenis, had worked at the mine for 4 years, but was fired early last year for drinking on the job. “It was my [late] father’s birthday, and I drank two shots of vodka to my father at the end of the work day. However, just as I was leaving, management representatives came and fired me on the spot, saying that I smelled of alcohol,” the man, who has been unemployed for around 1.5 years, had said in a previous conversation with Epress.am.
Recall, in October 2016, Armen Yeranosyan was forcibly admitted to Yerevan’s Nubarashen psychiatric hospital after staging a 5-day hunger strike and stitching up his lips outside the Government building in protest of his unfair dismissal. The Vardenis resident was allowed to leave the mental hospital only after the intervention of human rights activists from the Armenian Helsinki Association. Following his release, Yeranosyan wrote an appeal letter to prime minister Karen Karapetyan and received a response, which said the locksmith should be reinstated in his job.
On November 27, 2016, representatives of the Sotk management and Yeranosyan gathered at the Gegharkunik governor office to discuss the letter, and subsequently decided that the locksmith would be rehired. The management, however, have yet to follow through with the promise.
“The former director of the mine, Armen Melkonyan, kept promising that he would take me back as soon as possible, but he never did,” Yeranosyan told us today. Six months after the meeting at the Governor’s office, he added, Melkonyan passed away: “The new director, Arayik Midoyan, has told me that they could not rehire me because I’ve staged protest actions in Yerevan. He said, ‘The Russians’ [mine shareholders] do not want you here.’”
Yeranosyan is not the only former Sotk employee who has been trying to get the management to rehire him. Earlier this week around 4 dozen former employees blocked a road in Vardenis to demand that they given a job at the mine. Some of the protesters have since been reinstated; the majority, however, including Yeranosyan, were not so lucky.
Vardenis does not offer many job options to its natives; the majority of young people either enlist as contract servicemen or look for a job at the Sotk mine. Yeranosyan himself had taken out an AMD 3-million loan to buy a house and a piece of land, both of which have now been put under an arrest by the Judicial Acts Compulsory Enforcement Service Of Armenia.
Details in the Video: