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THOUSANDS OF OPPOSITION supporters rallied today in the Armenian capital Yerevan to warn the government against concessions to arch-foe Azerbaijan over the long-disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Opposition parties have accused Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of plans to give away all of Karabakh to Azerbaijan after he told lawmakers last month that the “international community calls on Armenia to scale down demands on Karabakh.”
This evening, several thousand opposition supporters gathered in the capital’s central Square of France, blocking traffic throughout central Yerevan.
Protesters shouted demands for Pashinyan to resign, with many holding placards that read “Karabakh”.
Parliament Vice Speaker and opposition leader Ishkhan Sagatelyan said: “Any political status of Karabakh within Azerbaijan is unacceptable to us.”
“Pashinyan had betrayed people’s trust and must go,” he told journalists at the rally, adding that the protest movement “will lead to the overthrow of the government in the nearest future”.
Addressing the crowd, he announced, “a large-scale campaign of civil disobedience to begin on Monday”.
“I call on everyone to begin strikes. I call on students not to attend classes. Traffic will be fully blocked in central Yerevan.”
‘Threat of unrest’
Yesterday, Armenia’s National Security Service warned of “a real threat of mass unrest in the country.”
Yerevan and Baku had been locked in a territorial dispute since the 1990s over the mountainous region of Azerbaijan predominantly populated by ethnic Armenians.
Karabakh was at the centre of a six-week war in 2020 that claimed more than 6,500 lives before it ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded swathes of territories it had controlled for decades and Russia deployed some 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.
In April, Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met for rare EU-mediated talks in Brussels after which they tasked their foreign ministers to “begin preparatory work for peace talks.”
The meeting came after a flare-up in Karabakh on March 25 that saw Azerbaijan capture a strategic village in the area under the Russian peacekeepers’ responsibility, killing three separatist troops.
Baku tabled in mid-March its set of framework proposals for the peace agreement that includes both sides’ mutual recognition of territorial integrity, meaning Yerevan should agree on Karabakh being part of Azerbaijan.
Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan sparked controversy at home when he said — commenting on the Azerbaijani proposal — that for Yerevan “the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is not a territorial issue, but a matter of rights” of the local ethnic-Armenian population.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The ensuing conflicts claimed around 30,000 lives.
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To think there’s a family out there who’s probably been looking for that poor girl for the last twenty years , it’s very sad .
And what about the disappeared don’t they count?
How do you lose a skull?
The poor girl,how could she ever rest in peace,no family as yet,buried in a place she probably never knew,from her shoulders down in a coffin and her skull probably in a box in a basement somewhere..such a sad story..your right Jane how do you lose a skull..
My parents were involved in the recovery of the body of a man in the early 2000′s (?) in the Shannon Estuary. That man has never been identified. He was given a state burial in Ennis. Another member of the rescue crew entered a competition on Clare FM a short time after to win a headstone. The competition called for people to write their own epitaph. He wrote one for the unidentified man and won. “All you people of Co. Clare, kneel down here and say a prayer, for the man from God knows where”. Very sad to think that there is no name on that headstone.
That made me go cold. What a lovely thing to do for someone and a lovely epitaph.Unclaimed bodies always make me feel so terribly sad, lost souls,some never missed and others never found.
With technology and communication being so advanced it is hard to believe this persons family or friends can not be located ..very sad story ..
Great and sensitive article.
another massive Fail for the Irish State – We are good at failure.
Hardly a fail.sure she cud have come from anywhere
Thats the sad thing about stories like this, maybe no family to miss her! Like the lady who’s body was found in the sea in clontarff I dont think she was even identified never mind been missed! We all take it so much for granted that everyone has family! Cherish yours everyday♡♡
A pretty epic fail really by forensic standards. No dental xrays,no chance of facial reconstrustion. Plus its just bad form to loose a part of someone,how’d you even do that its not exactly a set if keys!
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