(Yerevan) Some 3,000 Armenians demonstrated Thursday in the capital Yerevan against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, denouncing the territorial concessions he recently granted to neighboring Azerbaijan to calm relations between these two rival Caucasian countries, noted AFP journalists.
A series of rallies have shaken Armenia since the government approved the return of four border villages in the Tavouch region, seized in the 1990s, to Azerbaijan at the end of April.
The demonstrators, encouraged by their charismatic leader, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, are demanding the resignation of Nikol Pashinian.
On Thursday, there were still 3,000 gathered in a central square in Yerevan, in front of the government offices where the prime minister chaired a weekly meeting of his team, AFP noted.
The protesters, who blocked traffic in the area with their vehicles, had some tense exchanges with riot police.
“We came to tell this man (Nikol Pashinian) that he has nothing to do in this country,” Bagrat Galstanian proclaimed in front of the crowd.
The 53-year-old prelate calls for a vote of no confidence against the prime minister, who came to power in 2018.
He temporarily renounced his clerical functions on Monday, a necessary step to be able to consider running for the post of prime minister.
As it stands, this religious leader from the Tavouch region cannot run for this position, due to his dual Armenian and Canadian nationality. However, nothing would prevent him from renouncing his Canadian nationality, a potentially long process.
The returned villages are of strategic importance to landlocked Armenia because they control sections of a vital route to Georgia.
The Armenians of this region claim that their cession cuts them off from the rest of the country, and accuse Nikol Pashinian of ceding territories without concession in return.
Mr. Pashinian assures him that this decision aims to guarantee peace with Baku.
Armenia and Azerbaijan clashed in two wars over control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan.
The first, in the 1990s, was won by Armenia.
Azerbaijan then regained control of part of the region in the fall of 2020, before taking the entire region after a lightning offensive in September 2023, driving out the Armenian separatists who had ruled it for three decades.