More than 200 people were arrested on Tuesday in several cities in Armenia during demonstrations by the opposition, which accuses Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian of wanting to abandon the separatist enclave of Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
The Armenian Interior Ministry announced that 237 protesters had been arrested in Yerevan and several provincial towns, where protesters tried to block traffic on the streets, demanding that Pashinian resign. On Tuesday evening, several thousand demonstrators waved Armenian and Nagorny Karabakh flags, chanting: “Nikol, resign!” »
Demonstrations bringing together thousands of people at the call of the opposition have continued since Sunday to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister. These are the largest anti-government protests since the September 2021 elections, won by Mr Pashinian’s party.
Armenia’s security services have warned of “a real threat of unrest in the country”, but parliament speaker Alen Simonyan, an ally of Mr Pashinyan, downplayed the risk of instability, saying he would not there was “no political crisis in Armenia”.
“The political forces that lost the legislative elections in 2021 are aggressively trying to stage a wave of protests, but our citizens have already made their choice and will stand aside from their attempts,” he said on Tuesday. at a press conference.
“Panichian is a traitor, and the ongoing and growing street protests will force him to resign,” said Deputy Speaker of Parliament and opposition leader Ichkhan Sagatelian.
Mr. Sagatelian called for demonstrations on Tuesday evening in Place de France, in the center of Yerevan, where thousands of people had already gathered on Sunday and Monday to denounce the complacent policy, according to the opposition, of Mr. Pashinian vis-à-vis -Azerbaijan vis-à-vis Nagorny Karabakh.
A disputed ceasefire
“Nikol is ready to abandon Karabakh for which we shed our blood,” exclaimed one of the demonstrators, Sergei Hovhannissian, a 57-year-old blacksmith.
Nagorny Karabakh, which the two countries have been fighting over for more than thirty years, was the stake in 2020 of a six-week war which left more than 6,500 dead before a ceasefire negotiated by Russia.
As part of this agreement, Armenia ceded whole swaths of territory it had controlled since a first victorious war in the early 1990s, and a 2,000-man Russian peacekeeping force is deployed in Nagorny Karabakh.
In April, the Armenian Prime Minister declared before the parliament that “the international community calls on Armenia to reduce its demands on Nagorny Karabakh”, remarks which the opposition denounced as revealing a desire to cede all of this territory to Azerbaijan.
The ceasefire agreement, seen in Armenia as a national humiliation, sparked weeks of anti-government protests, leading Mr. Pashinyan to call early parliamentary elections that were won in September by his Civil Contract party.
Nagorny Karabakh’s Armenian separatists split from Azerbaijan during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The resulting conflict left an estimated 30,000 dead.