{"id":84161,"date":"2011-04-11T12:29:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T07:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=84161"},"modified":"2011-04-11T12:34:26","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T07:34:26","slug":"if-you-dont-come-youll-lose-how-tigran-karapetyans-april-10-rally-did-not-take-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/04\/11\/if-you-dont-come-youll-lose-how-tigran-karapetyans-april-10-rally-did-not-take-place.html","title":{"rendered":"‘If You Don’t Come, You’ll Lose’: How Tigran Karapetyan’s April 10 Rally Did Not Take Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

“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.<\/p>\n

A 65-year-old man began to walk up toward the platform and we began to follow him.<\/p>\n

“Will there be a rally, are you still waiting?” we asked.<\/p>\n

“Yes, well it will be, see, it’s written on all the lampposts,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But there’s no one here,” we said.<\/p>\n

“Well they’ll come; if it’s written, they’ll come,” responded the man and continued along his way.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We asked, is he too waiting for the rally to start?<\/p>\n

“Yes, I’m waiting, well it might happen,” he responded.<\/p>\n

We called Tigran Karapetyan and asked, why hasn’t the rally happened, there are people waiting.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“They called, they said it was at 5 [pm] and I came,” he said.<\/p>\n

Then one of the older men that had walked up to the platform began his descent back to the street.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“It’s been a long time that we’ve lost, dear boy,” responded the old man.<\/p>\n

“Well, why do you come?”<\/p>\n

“Well, what should we do?”<\/p>\n

We waited a bit, informed two other men who came outside the Matenadaran that there won’t be a rally.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84020,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[65942,16686,16685,10355],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}