Opposition parties in Armenia on Monday vowed to stage a mass protests that would be aimed at unseating Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whom they accused of plotting to give away a disputed region to arch-foe Azerbaijan.
Africa Today News, New York reports that Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a territorial dispute since the 1990s over Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
The enclave which is highly mountainous was at the centre of a six-week war in 2020 that claimed at lrast 6,500 lives before it ended with a ceasefire agreement which was brokered by Russia.
Opposition parties now accuse Pashinyan of plans to give away all of Karabakh to Azerbaijan after he told lawmakers last month that the ‘international community calls on Armenia to scale down demands on Karabakh.’
‘We are launching a popular protest movement to force Pashinyan to resign,’ parliament vice speaker and opposition leader Ishkhan Saghatelyan told reporters on Monday.
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‘He is a traitor, he has lied to the people,’ he said, accusing the 46-year-old leader of wanting to hand over the contested region to Azerbaijan. ‘He has no popular mandate to do so.’
Saghatelyan disclosed that an opposition rally would be held in the capital Yerevan on Monday evening, saying ‘protests will not stop until Pashinyan goes.’
Africa Today News, New York gathered that public transport was disrupted in Yerevan on Monday morning as small groups of protesters attempted to block traffic in the city centre.
Police intervened, briefly detaining dozens of protesters.
The Union of Journalists, a media advocacy group, criticised police tactics as heavy-handed, saying there were several instances of officers punching journalists who covered opposition protests.
Under the Moscow-brokered deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.
The pact was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation and sparked weeks of anti-government protests, leading Pashinyan to call snap parliamentary polls which his party, Civil Contract, won last September.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflicts claimed around 30,000 lives.
Africa Today News, New York