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YEREVAN, Armenia (AFP) — Hundreds of Armenians on Wednesday took to the streets of the capital Yerevan in a fresh protest against government plans to concede land to the country’s historic foe, Azerbaijan.
Protests erupted in the Caucasus nation last month after the government agreed to hand over to Baku territory it had controlled since the 1990s.
On Wednesday evening, large numbers of police cordoned off a central square in Yerevan outside the Opera House, where Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was addressing an international conference.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in the area after the protest leader, charismatic archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, called for a mass rally to demand Pashinyan’s resignation, an AFP reporter saw.
Pashinyan “must step down, otherwise Armenia is screwed,” one of the protesters, 54-year-old shop assistant Tigran Balasanyan, told AFP.
Housewife Nune Sargsyan, 60, said: “Pashinyan has crossed all the possible red lines, he has failed the country, he must go and give Armenia a chance to rise from its knees.”
Pashinyan’s territorial concessions to Baku — which he defended as aimed at securing peace with Armenia’s arch-enemy — have sparked weeks of protests and demonstrators have blocked major roads in an attempt to force him to change course.
The protests were spearheaded by Galstanyan, a church leader from the Tavush region, where villages are set to be handed over to Azerbaijan.
He is seeking to launch an impeachment process against Pashinyan.
Opposition parties would require the support of at least one independent or ruling party lawmaker to launch the impeachment process and success would then hinge on at least 18 lawmakers from Pashinyan’s own party voting to unseat the leader.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars for control of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Baku’s forces recaptured last year from Armenian separatists who had held sway over the mountainous enclave for three decades.
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By Agence France-Presse
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