Armenians stage more campaigns against territorial concessions to Azerbaijan

PanARMENIAN.Net - Protesters blocked more roads across Armenia on Friday, April 26 in continuing attempts to scuttle territorial concessions to Azerbaijan made by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government.

At least 45 were detained on Thursday as police used force to restore traffic through several national highways as well as streets in the center of Yerevan. Most of the arrests were made in the Armenian capital, according to the Interior Ministry.

“There will be no violent resistance to police officers,” said one of those activists, Avetik Chalabyan on Thursday, RFE/RL’s Armenian service reports. “We won’t let them break the law or ourselves break the law. These are peaceful actions, and we will achieve victory with peaceful actions.”

Many residents of the affected Tavush villages are strongly opposed to the unilateral handover, saying that they would lose access to their existing agricultural land, have trouble communicating with the rest of the country and be far more vulnerable to Azerbaijani armed attacks. They have dismissed Pashinyan’s claims that failure to accept Baku’s territorial demands would provoke another Azerbaijani aggression against Armenia.

The delimitation processes continued on Thursday despite the ongoing protests. In a statement issued late in the afternoon, Pashinian’s press office said that 20 border posts marking the demarcated Armenian-Azerbaijani frontier have been placed in the area. “The work of expert groups of the two countries is continuing,” it said.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said earlier in the day that “about 10-12 kilometers” of the border has already been delineated. Baku has so far refused to give back any land to Armenia during the delimitation process.