Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Armenia over the last week against what they consider to be concessions by Nikol Pashinián’s government to its enemy and neighbor Azerbaijan. Within the framework of the negotiations for the signing of a peace treaty to end more than three decades of conflict, last Wednesday the governments of both countries agreed on the final demarcation of a section of the border, which will imply the transfer of some lands of four Armenian villages to Azerbaijan. This pact has been seen by Armenian nationalists as a new humiliation for Pashinián, who since he came to government in 2018 has presided over one defeat after another against Azerbaijan, which has ended Armenian control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region – in legally Azerbaijani—and the expulsion of the more than 100,000 Armenians who lived there.
“It is about restoring the dignity of our people and starting negotiations with Azerbaijan again from that point,” the leader of the protests, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanián, stressed to Morning Express via videoconference. “A nation without dignity is not a nation,” adds the religious, whose objective is the resignation of Pashinián and the formation of a new Government that shows a position of strength against Baku. “Armenia has been subjected to pressure from Azerbaijan and other international players, and is conceding its lands unilaterally. We are protesting against it, not against the very idea of delimiting the borders,” the head of the religious community of Tavush, the province affected by the pact between the two countries, states emphatically.
The archbishop traveled on foot about 150 kilometers when he began his march on May 4, and little by little he gathered the opposition forces in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. Among them, members of the ultranationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation and several representatives of the Republican Party, the party that led the country for two decades until Pashinián came to power in 2018.
“We have not come to Yerevan to start a new war with Azerbaijan,” says the religious, who not only considers the current negotiations inadmissible from a legal point of view, with respect to the Armenian constitution and international law, but also denounces that they are “unacceptable in its moral and spiritual aspects.”
The current negotiation affects land in four villages in Tavush province that were taken by Yerevan in the war fought by both countries until 1994 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Its inhabitants, in protest, have been picketing and blocking the highway that connects Armenia with Georgia for more than a week.
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The governments of Baku and Yerevan agreed on Wednesday to definitively establish the line of separation between both countries on the basis of the 1976 maps of the General Staff of the Soviet Union, the most topographically detailed, and on the 1991 Almaty protocol, which recognized the independence of the former Soviet republics with their borders from the USSR. “I am not an expert on the subject, but there are experts who explain that the treaty is not about territorial delimitations, but rather recognizes the existence of the new States of Armenia and Azerbaijan” says Galstanián, emphasizing that the agreement is illegal.
The Security Council of Armenia announced that the change of demarcation will only affect four buildings – which will remain under Azerbaijani sovereignty – whose owners will be compensated, and one road, which will be redrawn within Armenian territorial limits. However, what angers critics of the Government is that Azerbaijan has not taken reciprocal measures, such as the withdrawal of some mountains in Armenian territory occupied by Azerbaijani troops during the border skirmishes of 2021 and 2022. Part of Armenian society He sees with fear that the Pashinián Government does not seem to have any other plan regarding the negotiations with Azerbaijan than to accept each of the demands that Ilham Aliyev’s regime is putting on the table, without demanding anything in return.
Yerevan, abandoned by Russia
Galstanián suggests that his country has been abandoned even by Russia, an ally within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Moscow’s alternative to NATO to which Yerevan has announced that it will stop financing starting this year. “No country is going to rescue you if you do not try to spread your own agenda and defend yourself,” laments the archbishop, who calls his people “naive” for trusting in justice “when in international relations you cannot talk about morality because there is enormous hypocrisy.”
The fear is that the war will return in a situation of extreme weakness for Armenia, with many fewer resources than its eastern neighbor and which its traditional supporter, Russia, has left stranded due to the Pashinián Government’s approach to the EU. “There is a risk of further escalations and military attacks by Azerbaijan in southern Armenia. Azerbaijan feels grown after its latest military victories [ante Armenia] and for the blind support of Turkey and Israel and the lack of Western pressure on Baku,” the director of the Yerevan Regional Studies Center, Richard Giragosián, explains to Morning Express.
The protest movement promoted by Galstanián, which at first was only directed against the demarcation of the border, has begun to make political demands, such as a motion of censure against Pashinián’s Government and the implementation of a transitional Government to the one in which the archbishop has offered himself as prime minister. Analyst Eric Hakopian, in the Armenian environment Civilnet, compared the archbishop’s political aspirations to Imam Khomeini and his protests against the Shah’s regime in Iran: “But as Marx said, history repeats itself twice. The first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce.”
The demonstrations have resulted in hundreds of arrests. Among them, a controversial individual adopted by the movement, Hampig Sassounian, who shot dead the Turkish consul general in Los Angeles in 1982 as part of the campaign of assassinations of around thirty Turkish diplomats and their relatives initiated by armed Armenian nationalist groups such as revenge for the genocide of 1915. Sentenced to life in prison in the United States, Sassounian was paroled in 2020 and escaped to Armenia. “He is a patriot, a true Armenian, and he is not a terrorist. Like other freedom fighters, he has tried to demonstrate to the international community what happened to his own family during the genocide against our people,” Galstanián defends.
As the days have passed, the protests have been deflating in terms of participation, something that Giragosián attributes to the “inability of the opposition to offer a serious and credible alternative to the current Government.” The other big problem that this analyst sees is that the Church has taken the step of getting into politics. “Traditionally, the Church has been very popular among Armenian society, but because it has respected separation from the State. “This unprecedented interference against a democratically elected Government will lead to a reaction against it,” he maintains.
“We are not afraid of anything that could happen to our nation, we have already been through it before,” Galstanián warns at another point in the interview. Pashinián, for his part, trusts in peace negotiations with his neighbor. On May 9, Victory Day in Russia, the Armenian Prime Minister agreed with President Vladimir Putin that Russian troops protecting its border with Azerbaijan would withdraw and only those stationed on the border with Iran and Turkey would remain.
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