Riot police unexpectedly left a border village in Armenia’s northern Tavush province on Tuesday after its mayor said that authorities suspended preparations for the handover of adjacent territory to Azerbaijan amid antigovernment protests approaching Yerevan.
The village of Kirants was the epicenter of the protests sparked by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s decision to cede several border areas adjacent to this and three other Tavush communities. A map released by the Armenian government on April 19 suggested that Kirants would lose not only much of its agricultural land but also some of its houses and a key bridge connecting it to the rest of the country. The government’s plans have met with strongest opposition there.
Scores of police officers cleared a protest camp just outside Kirants early on May 2, arresting dozens of local residents who prevented relevant authorities from clearing the adjacent area of landmines and placing new border posts there. The preparations for the land handover continued in the following days amid heightened security.
The police presence in and outside Kirants was beefed up further on Tuesday morning. However, all of those security forces, including special police units sent from Yerevan, left the village in the afternoon.
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Speaking to reporters shortly before their sudden departure, the head of the village administration, Kamo Shahinyan, said the delineation of the “most painful” section of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border in the area has been “frozen for now.” “They all have left,” he said of officials involved in the controversial process.
“We have three most sensitive points [in Kirants] and more detailed work will be done on those three most sensitive points because every centimeter matters there,” Pashinyan told a news conference held in Yerevan around the same time. He did not explicitly say that the Azerbaijani side has agreed to delay their delineation.
Pashinyan met the press as hundreds of protesters led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, head of the Tavush diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, continued their march to Yerevan which began from Kirants on May 4. Galstanyan and other protesters plan to reach the capital on Thursday to press their demands for an immediate halt to the land handover which they believe would heighten security threats to not only Tavush but also the entire country. Pashinyan accused them of seeking to topple him with the help of the Armenian opposition and unnamed “external forces.”
