The Hayastan and Pativ Unem alliances rallied thousands of supporters in Yerevan on April 5 the day before Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in Brussels.
Aliyev and Pashinian agreed to start preparing for an Armenian-Azerbaijani “peace treaty” and to set up a bilateral commission tasked with demarcating the border between their countries.
Pashinian reiterated afterwards that Baku’s proposals on key elements of the treaty, including a mutual recognition of each other’s territorial integrity, are acceptable to Yerevan in principle. Armenian opposition leaders portrayed this as a further sign that he is ready to help Azerbaijan regain control over Karabakh.
Seyran Ohanian, Hayastan’s parliamentary leader and a former defense minister, announced a four-day opposition boycott of the National Assembly. Speaking on the parliament floor, Ohanian accused the Armenian government of ignoring grave security challenges facing Armenia and Karabakh.
“We are leaving for Artsakh and Armenia’s border regions in order to continue directly communicating with our compatriots, to visit the sites of our country’s primary agenda,” he said before placing a Karabakh flag on the parliament rostrum.
Deputies representing Pashinian’s Civil Contract party dismissed the opposition move as populist. One of them, Vahagn Aleksanian, removed the small flag from the podium.
“With this step the parliamentary is not defending Artsakh but aggravating the security problems of Artsakh and the Armenians,” charged another pro-government parliamentarian, Hayk Konjorian. “The parliamentary opposition is using the Artsakh issue and our security problems to stage a coup and seize power in Armenia.”
