Armenia’s government has barred yet another Diaspora-based activist of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) from entering the country, again drawing strong condemnation from the opposition party.
U.S. citizen Areni Margossian was deported back to Lebanon on Thursday one day after arriving at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport on a flight from Beirut. In a live video aired from Zvartnots, she said immigration officers there took away her passport and refused to explain why she is not allowed to enter the country.
The National Security Service (NSS), which is in charge of border control, also did not provide such an explanation to the office of Armenia’s human rights defender. The office said it was only told that Margossian’s “entry to Armenia is prohibited.”
Kristine Vartanian, a Dashnaktsutyun member of the Armenian parliament who visited the airport in a bid to prevent her deportation, said the Armenian-American woman was denied entry because of being affiliated with the pan-Armenian party highly critical of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Margossian has attended anti-Pashinyan protests and “not shied away from expressing her views about those in power in Armenia,” the lawmaker said.
Margossian defended her participation in the protests staged outside the Armenian Embassy in Washington and elsewhere in the United States. “We are fighting so that Armenia doesn’t hand over Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) to the enemy,” she told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“I don’t know why they think that we are dangerous people,” she said. “We only hold demonstrations and don’t harm anyone.”
Margossian is the sixth Dashnaktsutyun member known to have been banned from visiting their ancestral homeland over the past year. The other blacklisted members include Mourad Papazian, one of the leaders of France’s influential Armenian community.
Dashnaktsutyun, which is a key member of the main opposition Hayastan alliance, has accused Pashinyan of ordering the travel bans to try to silence his vocal critics in the worldwide Armenian Diaspora.
“It’s absurd that we see this precedent under a government that talks the most about democracy,” said Vartanian.
Under Armenian law, foreign nationals can be banned from visiting Armenia if they pose a threat to its “state security” and “constitutional order” or plan to carry out terrorist attacks there.
Source: Azatutyun.am
