OSCE envoy visits Armenia after riots kill eight

By James Kilner

YEREVAN, March 3 (Reuters) - A European envoy met Armenia's government and opposition on Monday in a hastily organised mission to defuse a standoff that has boiled over into riots in which eight people were killed.

Soldiers patrol Yerevan's streets after President Robert Kocharyan imposed emergency laws during Saturday's clashes between police and protesters who say his ally, Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan, rigged last month's presidential election.

Heikki Talvitie, a special envoy for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), flew into Yerevan on Sunday night and met Kocharyan and Sarksyan for talks that resumed on Monday.

Armenia is a country of around 3.2 million people on the edge of the Caucasus -- an oil transit route to Europe from the Caspian Sea where the United States and Russia battle for influence.

Neither side has shown any willingness to back down, with opposition leader and former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan pledging to continue protests and Sarksyan promising to punish trouble makers.

"Organisers of disturbances will answer before the law, history and generations," Sarksyan said in a statement after meeting Talvitie.

Witnesses saw police fire tracer rounds above the heads of protesters and lob teargas into the crowd. Protesters armed with metal bars and petrol bombs torched cars and looted shops in the worst violence in the ex-Soviet state since 1998.

The 20-day emergency laws ban public meetings and restrict media reporting. Although armoured personnel carriers guard the main square, traffic has returned to the streets and the shops are open.

"It was very bad on Saturday," Sahak, a 25-year-old unemployed man, said as he watched workers hammer together a broken metal shelf in a looted supermarket.

"But we now really hope that is all over."

Kocharyan officially won 53 percent of the vote in the election and Ter-Petrosyan won 21.5 percent in a vote the OSCE described as flawed but sufficient for Armenia to fulfil its international obligations.

But a Western diplomat said another OSCE report on the election this week would be far more critical.

"Since the election there has been a lot more information coming out of stuffing ballot boxes and bribery," he said.

Kocharyan and Sarksyan have presided over a period of economic growth although detractors accuse their government of corruption and nepotism.

Ter-Petrosyan was Armenia's first president after it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 and although street demonstrations forced him to resign in 1998 he is still revered by many who want an alternative to the current government. (Additional reporting by Margarita Antidze and Hasmik Mkrtchyan)