Image: A protester on a street of Yerevan on Saturday night. After the government announced a state of emergency on Saturday, Mr. Ter-Petrossian called losing the street “losing the connection to the people.” By Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Avoiding to report directly about Armenia’s post-election political developments and clashes that left nine people dead – as the state emergency bans media from publishing information outside government releases – a blogger from Armenia informs of the illegal blockade of several websites in Armenia. He then offers tips on how to access banned information in Armenia:

In the evening of March 2, the Internet Society of Armenia (ISOC) has ILLEGALLY stopped the maintenance of several domains, including A1+ – www.a1plus.am, Haykakan Zhamanak – www.azatutyun.am, E-channel – www.echannel.am. In the database of ISOC- https://www.amnic.net/whois/ , they are registered as “on hold.”

With that step, A1+ has been deprived not only of his site but also if its mail service.

The domains have been “frozen” without the decision of the ISOC board – either by the instruction on behalf of the presidential office, or the National Security Service.

In the decree of president Kocharyan, there was nothing about freezing the domains, closing web sites and the media.

We would like to provide some help to those, who still want to access the above mentioned websites. Firstly, Echannel.am and Azatutyun.am have their backup DNS records. You can access Echannel.am also at E-channel.am (e-channel with a -) and Azatutyun.am at armenialiberty.am. At the moment we are negotiating with the ISOC board to urge them to stop this illegal blocking of our domain names. However, there is a possibility, that the backup domain names (E-channel.am and armenialiberty.am) will also be blocked. For that case, I will be posting a list of IP names for the servers, where these and other blocked information websites are located, and you can access them by clicking the links in the list below (I’ll update the list as soon as colleagues let me know the relevant IP addresses):

  1. a1lus.am – 75.125.179.218:8080
  2. echannel.am – 76.163.218.144
  3. azatutyun.am – 193.111.134.85

Let me remind everybody, that A1plus YouTube channel and Asplus blog are still functional. There is also an Armenian Newspaper Electronic Archive, where you can find Archived publications from some of the blocked newspaper websites.

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