Police clashed with residents of an Armenian border village and detained other people, including an opposition parliamentarian, on Friday amid ongoing protests against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s decision to hand over four border areas to Azerbaijan.
Protesters continued to block streets in Yerevan and major highways outside it in a bid to scuttle the territorial concessions portrayed by Pashinyan’s government as the start of the demarcation of Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan. Some of them used heavy vehicles for that purpose. Police forcibly restored traffic through virtually all of those roads.
A key national highway running north from Yerevan was blocked for about an hour in the afternoon. The protesters there were joined by two lawmakers from the main opposition Hayastan alliance. One of them, Artur Khachatryan, was pushed into a police vehicle and driven away after bitterly arguing with a regional police chief at the scene.
Khachatryan was taken to a police station in the nearby town of Hrazdan. He was able to talk to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service by phone before being set free a couple of hours later.
Read also
“Citizens were exercising their constitutional right,” Khachatryan said, condemning the police actions.
In the morning, road police stopped and searched many trucks driving to Yerevan along the same highway. A police spokesman said this was done for security reasons. He did not elaborate. The Armenian police did not specify the total number of protesters detained on Friday.
Late in the evening, tensions rose at the epicenter of the protests in and outside Kirants, one of the four villages in Armenia’s northern Tavush province adjacent to the border areas that are due to be handed over to Azerbaijan.
Hundreds of villages joined by other residents of Tavush and other parts of the country blocked a local section of a key national highway for the sixth consecutive day. Some of them stopped and seized several state vehicles which they thought carried officials planning geodetic and demining work in preparation for the land handover.
A special police unit tried unsuccessfully to evacuate the vehicles shortly after senior police officers arrived at the scene to talk to the furious protesters.
Bishop Bagrat Galstanyan, a protest leader heading the Tavush diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, repeatedly urged the locals to allow the evacuation. They reluctantly heeded his appeals.
“You have shown that you are the real masters of this country,” Galstanyan said through a megaphone. “This must happen all over Armenia. Let them see the victory of the Kirants people in all corners of Armenia.”
Tavush Governor Hayk Ghalumian visited the protest scene earlier in the evening. He claimed there that the Kirants section of the delimited Armenian-Azerbaijani border has not yet been “fully ascertained.”
“So we can’t tell people whether their property will remain on our or their side [of the border,]” Ghalumian said, seemingly contradicting what the Armenian government reported late last week.
“Dear people, these are complete lies, misleading lies,” countered Galstanyan. “These people are liars, literally liars. They have lied to you for two years. Please do not succumb to that.”
The government announced, meanwhile, that Armenian and Azerbaijani officials have already demarcated roughly one third of the border sections it wants to cede to Baku. They have placed a total of 28 border posts there, it said in a statement.
