YEREVAN, Armenia -- Twelve armed men's seizure of a police station in Armenia's capital of Yerevan has put President Serzh Sargsyan in a bind.
On the one hand, he needs to resolve it as soon as possible to demonstrate to the many Armenians who disagree with the takeover that no one is above the law.
On the other hand, he needs to be careful not to be so heavy-handed in his response that it fires up a public that already resents Armenia's deteriorating economic situation and gap between the small number of rich and everyone else. That could spark a general uprising against his government and a response from Russia, which always gets a nervous tick when there's turmoil in the neighbor it considers its most obsequious servant.
The stand-off in Yerevan started Sunday, when a dozen followers of fringe opposition leader Jirair Sefilian seized the police station to demand his release on charges of plotting a coup.
The situation reminds me of what American law enforcement officers faced when they surrounded the compound of the fanatic Branch Davidian religious sect near Waco, Texas, in 1993.
The stage was set for the Waco stand-off when federal officers raided the Davidians' ranch to seize weapons the group had been stockpiling. A gun battle broke out, killing six of the fanatics and four officers.
That led to a 51-day stand-off that law enforcement decided to end with a tear-gas attack aimed at forcing the Davidians out of their compound. Unfortunately, the compound caught fire, killing 76 men, women and children.
Ever since, right-wing extremists have invoked the Waco dead to try to win converts to their anti-government agenda.
The stand-off at the Yerevan police station has some of the elements of the Waco situation.
The Davidians were fervent followers of a charismatic fanatic named David Koresh.
Those who seized the Yerevan station are diehard followers of Sefilian, who has called in the past for an overthrow of the Armenian government. Police arrested the war hero in June on the coup-plot charges.
Another similarity between the Waco situation and the one at the Yerevan police station is that the initial clashes between the loyalists and police spawned bloodshed.
In the case of Waco, 10 people died. Those holed up at the Yerevan police station killed one of the officers there when seizing it -- Colonel Artur Vanoian -- and wounded two others.
Although they have let the wounded and other hostages go, they still hold five.
Bloodshed makes the resolution of a dispute between anti-government types and authorities much harder. Most of the public expects those who commit bloodshed to be prosecuted, regardless of the political inclinations that prompted the bloodshed.
If there had been no bloodshed, Armenian authorities would have had room to compromise with the station occupiers. Now compromise is out of the question.
On the other hand, the last thing Sargsyan needs is to turn the occupiers into martyrs whom the broader political opposition could use to try to ignite a general uprising against the government.
A lot of the Armenian public dislike his regime, starting with their belief that he stole his second term as president in the election of 2012. He is also disliked for agreeing to let Armenia's Russian-owned electricity company increase rates by 17 percent, and for forcing through a new constitution in December of last year that extended his rule for many years.
The simmering anger against the government means police must refrain from storming the Yerevan police station. That would not only lead to the martyring of the occupiers but the deaths of some of the hostages.
Sefilian, who served 18 months in prison on a weapons charge in 2007 and 2008, has called openly for a government overthrow.
He has been unhappy of late with Sargsyan's policy on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. His specific beef is that Sargsyan refuses to commit to retaking small slices of territory that Azerbaijan reclaimed in a flare-up of the fighting in April of this year.
Sargsyan has been going along with Russian President Vladimir Putin's effort to broker a Nagorno-Karabakh peace deal. Sefilian, who fought in the Nagorno-Karabakh War from 1990 to 1994, opposes a deal.
The Nagorno-Kazabakh War started when the mostly ethnic Armenians in the territory declared their independence and neighboring Azerbaijan objected because it considers the enclave its territory. Armenia has always supported the separatists.
Since the takeover of the police station, Sefilian supporters have taken to the streets of Yerevan to demand that he and the station occupiers be released.
Most of the demonstrations have been small -- fewer than 200 people -- because most Armenians consider Sefilian's Founding Parliament Party a fringe group.
Police have used force on the protesters, however -- and that has angered some of the public and members of opposition groups that enjoy broader support.
Those groups' strategists are undoubtedly trying to figure out ways to fan the flames of the "Free Sefilian" protests into a broader conflagration against the government.
It's just as likely that Sargsyan's loyalists are staying up at night trying to figure out ways to keep that from happening.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Follow her on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/ArmineSahakyann