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| Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan |
Ararat Mirzoyan, 33, has lectured at Yerevan State University since last year. This March, he discovered that his contract was not being renewed.
He said the dean of his faculty – history and art theory – had approved another year’s tenure, and the contract had been duly sent off to the rector’s office for processing. “Yet in mid-March, when I was supposed to start, it turned out my contract had not been agreed,” Mirzoyan said.
The university denies ever agreeing to renew the contract, which it says expired in December. But Mirzoyan points out that he continued working into this year, and no one said anything about it.
He believes university officials had a change of heart when he posted comments on Facebook criticising staff for trying to stop students from protesting against the re-election of Serzh Sargsyan as Armenia’s president in February.
Mirzoyan said the university’s rector, Aram Simonyan, was keen to avoid any fuss over the election result. President Sargsyan is chair of the university’s council. “When they saw the student protests, the university heads decided that the situation might run out of control and cause them problems,” Mirzoyan said.
According to Anna Khechoyan of Armenia’s National Academy of Sciences, “What’s happened to Ararat Mirzoyan is an attempt to crush freedom of thought.”
She says the true sequence of events began with “an attempt to prevent student protests, even though they have the right to express themselves. Then a lecturer tried to defend the students.”
“The situation is now terrible,” she added. “A significant number of the lecturers are criticising what happened, but many are afraid to speak out because they could lose their jobs, just like Ararat.”
Read more: Armenian University in Political Row - Institute for War and Peace Reporting - P212
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