Thousands of people demonstrated in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Sunday to warn the government against any concessions to Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh, a territory that the two countries have been fighting over for thirty years.
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The demonstrators called for the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and held up placards bearing the words "
Karabakh
" or "
Armenia without Turks
", in reference to Turkish-speaking Azerbaijanis.
The opposition accuses Nikol Pashinian of wanting to cede the entire separatist enclave of Nagorny Karabakh to Azerbaijan, after the latter declared in April that "
the international community calls on Armenia to reduce its demands
".
At the rally on Sunday, Deputy Speaker of Parliament and opposition leader Ishkhan Sagatelian said "
any political status of Karabakh within Azerbaijan is unacceptable to us
".
"
Pachinian has betrayed people's trust and must leave
," he added, assuring that the protest movement "
will lead to the overthrow of the government in the near future
."
Yerevan and Baku have been fighting over Nagorny Karabakh since the 1990s. The most recent war, in the fall of 2020, claimed some 6,500 lives before ending in a Russian-brokered ceasefire.
As part of the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territory it had controlled since a first victorious war in the early 1990s, and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers.
In April, Armenia and Azerbaijan announced preparations for peace talks.
The Armenian and Azerbaijani presidents then met for rare talks under the mediation of the European Union in Brussels.
This meeting came after an outbreak of violence in Nagorny Karabakh in March.
Read alsoArmenian-Azerbaijan talks: “very positive”, for the Kremlin
Populated mainly by Armenians, the mountainous region of Nagorny-Karabakh, supported by Yerevan, seceded from Azerbaijan at the collapse of the USSR, leading to a first war in the 1990s which caused the death of 30,000 people and made hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees.