The Armenian Apostolic Church on Tuesday officially voiced support for one of its senior clerics leading ongoing protests against the government’s decision to hand over disputed border areas to Azerbaijan.
It called on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government to accept the “legitimate” demands of the protesters who began marching to Yerevan at the weekend from one of the villages in the northern Tavush province adjacent to those areas.
“We regard as extremely dangerous the actions in the border areas of Tavush portrayed which are taken in the name of a border delimitations and demarcation without comprehensive and guaranteed solutions and are causing new threats to our people,” read a statement released by the church’s Supreme Spiritual Council.
The council headed by Catholicos Garegin II said that Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, the head of the church’s Tavush diocese, could not stay indifferent to the resulting “existential challenges” facing the region’s population.
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It went on to urge the protesters to “express their righteous concerns and anxieties exclusively in peaceful ways” and “refrain from illegal actions.” For their part, Armenian security forces should act “in strict conformity with the law,” added the statement.
The protesters led by Galstanyan are expected to reach Yerevan and start demonstrations there on Thursday. Armenia’s main opposition forces as well as other groups and public figures critical of the government have vowed to join those rallies.
Speaking at a news conference earlier on Tuesday, Pashinyan accused the protest leaders of seeking to topple him with the help of the opposition and unnamed “external forces.”
He also said that Garegin is the real “leader of this process.” The Supreme Spiritual Council insisted that the church is not seeking any “political power.”
Pashinyan’s relationship with the ancient church, to which the vast majority of Armenians belong, has increasingly deteriorated since the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Garegin and other senior clergymen joined the Armenian opposition in calling for Pashinyan’s resignation following Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war.
Tensions between the government and the church rose further last October when Garegin blamed Pashinyan for Azerbaijan’s recapture of Karabakh and the resulting mass exodus of the region’s ethnic Armenian population.
