Armenian police dismantle energy protest barricades

Police in the Armenian capital on Monday routed anti-government protesters who had blocked the city’s main thoroughfare for several weeks over a hike in energy prices.

Riot police detained dozens of protesters and dismantled a barricade of garbage bins they had built across an avenue close to the presidential palace in Yerevan, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

“Police briefly detained 46 protesters, they have now all been released,” an Interior Ministry spokesman told AFP.

Protesters in the impoverished ex-Soviet state had been demonstrating since June 19 against a 16-percent hike in electricity tariffs, although numbers had dwindled since the start.

On Monday morning, some 50 protesters were maintaining their vigil on Bagramyan Avenue near the presidential palace when the police moved in.

At the protest movement’s peak, over 10,000 people took to the streets in the biggest anti-government demonstration seen in Armenia in years.

In late June, hundreds of riot police moved in against the demonstrators, using batons and water cannon to quell the protests.

The authorities on Friday launched a criminal investigation into the crackdown, which sparked condemnation from Washington, Brussels and the OSCE, a pan-European rights watchdog.

In an earlier failed attempt to appease the protesters, President Serzh Sarkisian announced that the government would temporarily “bear the burden” of the higher prices.

Armenia’s cash-strapped power distribution company, which is owned by the Russian state holding Inter RAO, said the hike was needed due to a sharp devaluation of the national currency, the dram.

Anger has long simmered in Armenia over the government’s failure to lift the Caucasus nation of 3.2 million out of poverty and the decision to raise household electricity prices from August proved the last straw.

Armenia, an ally of Moscow, has been hit hard by the economic crisis in Russia brought on by falling oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine.