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.