YEREVAN —
Armenian opposition supporters clashed briefly with police on Monday during the
latest in weeks of protests over Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s handling of a
territorial dispute with arch-foe Azerbaijan.
اضافة اعلان
Opposition parties
have been staging rallies since mid-April to demand Pashinyan’s resignation,
accusing him of planning to make unacceptable concessions to Baku over the
Nagorno-Karabakh region. Nagorno-Karabakh, located in Muslim-majority
Azerbaijan but largely populated by Christian Armenians, is the focus of a
decades-long territorial dispute between the two ex-Soviet Caucasus neighbors.
On Monday,
hundreds of protesters marched through the center of the Armenian capital,
Yerevan, before blocking the entrance to a building housing government offices.
Clashes erupted after demonstrators attempted to break through police cordons
and enter the building, an AFP journalist witnessed.
During the
protest, parliament deputy speaker and opposition leader Ishkhan Saghatelyan
urged government employees to distance themselves from Pashinyan, so they do
not “share his responsibility for ruining the country”. Pashinyan met Azeri
President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels last week for a fresh round of
European Union-mediated talks on a future peace treaty. They have agreed to “advance
discussions” on normalizing ties and on overcoming differences over border
delimitation, as well as unblocking transport communications.
Azeri Foreign
Minister Jeyhun Bayramov told journalists last Friday there was a “positive
atmosphere” in relations with Yerevan. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought two wars —
in the 1990s and in 2020 — over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Opposition parties have
accused Pashinyan of planning to cede to Baku parts of Karabakh that are still
under Armenian control. Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke
away from Azerbaijan when the
Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing
conflict claimed around 30,000 lives.
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