Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday accused the organizers of continuing protests against his territorial concessions to Azerbaijan of trying to provoke another Armenian-Azerbaijani war with the aim of toppling him.
Pashinyan claimed that Azerbaijan will invade Armenia if he bows to their demands to halt the handover of key border areas to Baku.
“If process is stopped, a war will break out,” he told a news conference. “I believe that this is [the protest leaders’] goal.”
“The forces that are demanding a halt to the border delimitation will do, with the help of some external forces, everything so that more territories of Armenia are occupied and use that for causing political changes in Armenia,” he said, adding they want to install a “puppet government.”
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Pashinyan spoke as hundreds of protesters led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan continued to march to Yerevan from the northern Tavush province that has comprised the border areas in question since the early 1990s. Many residents of adjacent Tavush residents are also strongly opposed to the unilateral land handover, citing serious security risks.
Galstanian brushed aside Pashinyan’s “unserious” claims as he and the other marching protesters approached Charentsavan, a town 35 kilometers north of Yerevan. “Shame on him,” the outspoken clergyman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We are fighting to make sure that there are no more wars in Armenia,” said Garnik Danielyan, another protest leader and an opposition lawmaker. He said the protesters will reach Yerevan as planned on Thursday.
So far the protest leaders have not listed Pashinyan’s resignation among their demands. They have attracted strong support from the Armenian opposition as well as other groups and individuals critical of the government.
Opposition leaders have dismissed Pashinyan’s earlier claims that the territorial concessions are necessary for preventing Azerbaijani military aggression. They say he is on the contrary encouraging Baku to demand more territory from Armenia and use force for that purpose.
Pashinyan on Tuesday described Robert Kocharyan, a former president heading the main opposition Hayastan alliance, as a “beneficiary” of the ongoing protests which he said are led by Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Speaking one day before his planned visit to Moscow, he also implicitly accused them of collaborating with Russia.
Pashinyan similarly accused Moscow of fomenting last September’s antigovernment protests in Yerevan sparked by an Azerbaijani military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh.