YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—At least 171 people demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation were detained on Monday as they again blocked streets in Yerevan, heeding appeals from Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, the leader of ongoing antigovernment protests there.
Armenia’s Interior Ministry said 156 of them were released from police custody by late afternoon.
Galstanyan urged supporters to “paralyze” the Armenian capital and other parts of the country during another massive rally held in the city’s central Republic Square on Sunday. Hundreds of them briefly disrupted traffic in the center of Yerevan the following morning.
Riot police forcibly unblocked the streets, making the arrests in the process. They were accused of using excessive forces and even detaining protesters who did not close any roads.
“We were just walking on the sidewalk and they took away all of our boys, using brute force,” one young woman told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
There were also reports of similar protests on major highways outside Yerevan. In some of those cars, motorcades of opposition supporters drove very slowly in order to interfere with traffic.
Meanwhile, Galstanyan spend the morning and the afternoon meeting with members of the national unions of writers and painters as well as scholars and scientists as part of his efforts to drum up greater support for his protest movement sparked by Pashinyan’s decision to hand over several border areas to Azerbaijan.
Armenia – Anti-government protesters block a street in downtown Yerevan, May 13, 2024.
The cleric was accompanied by over a hundred supporters as he went to those meetings on foot. Some of the cars passing by the small crowd honked their horn in support.
The meetings and the road closures were aimed at stepping up the pressure on Armenian lawmakers. Galstanyan wants them to oust Pashinyan through a vote of no confidence.
The two opposition alliances represented in the parliament have pledged to try to engineer such a vote. But they lack a single vote to force a formal parliament debate on the measure.
Opposition leaders and Galstanyan hope the missing vote will come from Ishkhan Zakaryan, a nominally independent deputy who left the opposition Pativ Unem bloc in 2022. Galstanyan said on Sunday that Zakaryan “didn’t refuse to join this process.”
Zakaryan, who rarely attends sessions of the National Assembly, could not be reached for comment on Monday. He was not spotted inside the parliament building either.
Lawmakers representing Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party seemed confident that Zakaryan will not join the opposition push for regime change. Even if he does join, the opposition will have to win over at least 18 of the 71 Civil Contract lawmakers. Parliamentary leaders of Pativ Unem and the larger Hayastan alliance declined to comment on how they plan to muster sufficient support for their planned motion of censure.