Anti-government protesters clash with police in Armenia

On Monday, Armenian opposition supporters clashed briefly with police in the latest in a series of weeks of rallies over Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s handling of a territorial dispute with arch-foe Azerbaijan.

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 centre 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.

Six weeks of fighting in autumn 2020 claimed more than 6,500 lives and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.

Under the 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.

Opposition parties have accused Pashinyan of planning to cede to Baku parts of Karabakh that are still under Armenian control.

When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, ethnic Armenian rebels in Nagorno-Karabakh split away from Azerbaijan. Around 30,000 people died in the ensuing fighting.