Organizers of the rally gave the government one week to meet these and nine other demands or face more such street protests. They pitched a tent and began a nonstop sit-in in the city’s Liberty Square right after what was the biggest demonstration staged by Karabakh Armenians since their September-October 2023 exodus.
It took place amid an unusually heavy police presence around the square. The government did not immediately react to the protesters’ demands.
“If the authorities take no action to keep this segment of the Armenians in Armenia and strengthen Armenia, the course of this struggle will definitely be unpredictable,” warned one of the speakers. “If they don’t solve our socioeconomic problems and our women and children are left on the street, this struggle will become a political struggle, whether they like it or not.”
The protest leaders first and foremost want Armenia’s leadership to take “all possible legal, political and diplomatic steps to ensure the collective return of the people of Artsakh to their homeland where they can live a safe, dignified, stable and self-determined life.”
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government does not raise this issue in its peace talks with Azerbaijan or on multilateral international platforms. Pashinian has repeatedly indicated that the Karabakh issue is closed for his administration. He has lambasted Karabakh’s Yerevan-based leaders for continuing to present themselves as a government in exile and threatened to crack down on them.
The rally’s organizers, who did not include members of the exiled government, accused Pashinian and his political team of spreading hate speech against the Karabakh Armenians and demanded an end to the alleged practice. They said the authorities in Yerevan must also reinstate all refugees as Armenian citizens.
In a major policy change, Pashinian and other government officials declared in October 2023 that the refugees are not Armenian citizens despite the fact that virtually all of them hold Armenian passports. Some legal experts disputed those claims.
Another key demand of the Karabakh Armenian demonstrators is that the government must scrap its decision to stop paying housing allowances to many refugees and significantly reduce them for others.
Since November 2023, the government has given each refugee, who does not own a home or live in a government shelter in Armenia, 50,000 drams ($125) per month for rent and utility fees. The aid program has benefited the vast majority of some 105,000 Karabakh Armenians who fled their homeland after it was recaptured by Azerbaijan in September 2023. A lack of affordable housing remains one of the main problems facing them.
The government decided in November 2024 to start phasing out the housing scheme. Starting from next month, the financial aid will be provided only to children, university or college students, pensioners and disabled persons forced to flee Karabakh. The monthly allowance paid to them will be cut to 40,000 drams in April and to 30,000 drams in July.