Residents of Kirants, a border village in Armenia’s northern Tavush province, met with the provincial governor Friday on the second day of their renewed protests against the transfer of a part of their community to Azerbaijan.
They were dissatisfied with what they heard from the governor, Hayk Ghalumyan. Nevertheless, they decided to restore traffic through an adjacent highway blocked by them on Thursday morning hours after the government resumed preparations for the land handover. They gathered outside the village administration house to discuss their further actions.
“I didn’t really care about this meeting,” said one woman. “At the meeting, I only told them that I will not leave my home.”
Ghalumyan refused to talk to the press after the short meeting held behind the closed doors. The protesting villagers demanded on Thursday that he meet them in the presence of journalists.
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The government announced on Wednesday night that senior Armenian and Azerbaijani officials signed another protocol formalizing the handover of border areas adjacent to several Tavush villages. Kirants would he affected hardest as it would lose not only agricultural land but also some of its houses and a key bridge connecting it to the rest of the country.
The bridge is part of one of Armenia’s two main highways leading to Georgia. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said that the government will build a road bypass in the next few months.
Speaking to state television late on Thursday, the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council, Armen Grigoryan, said that only four structures in Kirants, including a house and a village shop, will fall under Azerbaijani control.
“People have ownership certificates which they [the authorities] now say are false,” said one local man. “But how are they going to pay compensations based on false documents?
Many other Kirants houses and the village school would move to within a few dozen meters away from the new Azerbaijani border posts. The villagers view that as a grave security risk.
This explains why Kirants was the epicenter of angry protests in Tavush sparked by the initial announcement of the border deal on April 19. Security forces cleared a protest camp there on May 2 to allow military and other officials to prepare for the land transfer. The process was suspended on May 7 as the protest leader, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, and his supporters marched to Yerevan to demand Pashinian’s resignation.
