At least 45 of them were detained 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.
Tensions ran particularly high at a road junction near Armenia’s main border crossing with Georgia at Bagratashen. It is part of the northern Tavush province mainly bordering Azerbaijan.
Throughout the day, riot police repeatedly clashed there with mostly local residents angered by the government’s decision to hand over four contested border areas to Azerbaijan. Garnik Danielian, an opposition lawmaker actively participating in the protests, passed out during one of those scuffles and was taken to a nearby hospital.
Similar protests broke out at other sections of one of the two highways leading from Bagratashen to Yerevan. The blockages there were organized by Yerevan-based opposition activists.
“There will be no violent resistance to police officers,” said one of those activists, Avetik Chalabian. “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.”
Also temporarily blocked were key highways in at least three other parts of the country as well as a number of streets in downtown Yerevan. Traffic through one of those streets was disrupted by cars belonging to two young men.
“This is done against the authorities and their anti-Armenian policies,” one of them told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Security forces continued to avoid cracking down on the epicenter of the protests located at a section of the other Bagratashen-Yerevan road adjacent to the Tavush village of Kirants. The road section is one of the four contested border areas that are due to be ceded to Baku as part of what Pashinian’s government calls the first partial delimitation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Hundreds of people, most of them locals, have been camped out there since Saturday.
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 Pashinian’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.