Demonstrations continued Tuesday, May 3 in the Armenian capital Yerevan, increasing pressure on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian accused of wanting to abandon the separatist enclave of Nagorny Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
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Demonstrations broke out in Yerevan on Sunday, with the opposition demanding the resignation of Nikol Pashinian, and they have continued since. Chaotic scenes unfolded in the center of the city on Tuesday and police arrested dozens of people as groups of protesters blocked traffic on all major streets.
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Six Week War in 2020
Nagorny Karabakh, which the two countries have been fighting over for thirty years, was the subject of a six-week war in 2020, which left more than 6,500 dead before ending in a ceasefire brokered by the Russia. As part of this agreement, Armenia ceded whole swaths of territory it had controlled since a first victorious war in the early 1990s and a Russian peacekeeping force is deployed in Nagorny Karabakh.
In April, Armenia’s prime minister told parliament that “the international community calls on Armenia to reduce its demands on Nagorny Karabakh“, remarks that the opposition denounced as revealing a desire to cede all of this territory to Azerbaijan.
Early parliamentary elections
Deputy Speaker of Parliament and opposition leader Ichkhan Sagatelian said that “Pashinian is a traitor and constant demonstrations in the streets, which grow, will force him to resign“. He announced a rally on Tuesday evening in Yerevan’s central square, which has seen thousands of protesters in recent days.
One of the protesters, 57-year-old blacksmith Sergei Hovhannisian, told AFP that “Nikol (Pachinian) must leave, he will leave, because he is a symbol of defeat and Armenia has no future with such a leader“. The agreement reached to end the 2020 war was experienced as a national humiliation by Armenia and sparked weeks of protests in 2021. The prime minister then held snap parliamentary elections which his party won in September .
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Populated mainly by Armenians, the mountainous region of Nagorno Karabakh seceded from Azerbaijan when the USSR collapsed in 1991, leading to a first war in the 1990s which killed 30,000 people and left hundreds thousands of Azerbaijani refugees.
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