Published on: 02/05/2022 – 19:40 In Armenia, several thousand people gathered again on Monday in Yerevan, after a day of demonstrations the day before, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. The head of government is accused by the opposition of wanting to cede Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. Some 5,000 people demonstrated in Yerevan on Monday May 2 to demand the resignation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, accused by the opposition of wanting to cede the entire separatist enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. We are launching a popular protest movement to force Pashinian to resign,” Deputy Speaker of Parliament and opposition leader Ichkhan Sagatelian told AFP. “He is a traitor, he lied to the people,” he said. he added, accusing Nikol Pashinian, 46, of wanting to cede Nagorno-Karabakh, a separatist region populated by a majority of Armenians, to Azerbaijan. “He has no popular mandate to do so,” said Ichkhan Sagatelian. Nagorno-Karabakh, which the two countries have been fighting over for thirty years, was the subject of a six-week war in 2020 that caused more than 6,500 dead. A Russian-brokered ceasefire then came into effect.Under the agreement, Armenia ceded territories it had controlled since a first victorious war in the early 1990s, while a force Russian peacekeepers have been deployed in the region. “The international community calls on Armenia to reduce its demands on Nagorno-Karabakh,” Armenia’s prime minister told parliament in April. Remarks that the opposition interpreted as a desire to give up the entire territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Ichkhan Sagatelian warned that the demonstrations would continue as long as Nikol Pashinian remained in power. “Our people have never been in a such a depressive state””Nikol must resign. His pathetic policy has resulted in the loss of territory and human lives,” said a protester. “Our people have never been in such a depressed state. We don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.” On Monday morning, public transport traffic was disrupted in the Armenian capital, as small groups of protesters tried to block the city center. Police briefly arrested dozens of participants. The Union of Journalists, a media advocacy organization, criticized the methods used by the police, citing several examples of journalists covering opposition protests being molested by police. several thousand people had already called for the resignation of Nikol Pashinian. The Russian-brokered ceasefire deal was seen as a national humiliation in Armenia and sparked weeks of anti-government protests. Talks in the works In September, Nikol’s party Pashinyan, the Civil Contract, won the snap parliamentary elections called following the protests. In April, Armenia and Azerbaijan announced that they would engage in preparations for peace talks to resolve the conflict, as part of of a meeting organized in Brussels between Nikol Pashinyan and the Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, under the mediation of the President of the European Council, Charles Michel. of peace between the two countries”. territory – which would mean, for Yerevan, the recognition of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. With AFP