Yerevan, May 30, 2024 (AFP)
Some 3,000 Armenians on Thursday rallied against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the capital Yerevan, denouncing his territorial concessions to arch-foe neighbour Azerbaijan.
Protests erupted in the Caucasus nation last month after the government agreed to hand back to Baku territory it had controlled since the 1990s.
Pashinyan's position remains unshaken despite the challenge mounted by charismatic archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan.
On Thursday, some 3,000 protesters gathered in Yerevan's central Republic Square, outside government headquarters where Pashinyan was chairing a weekly meeting of his cabinet, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
Demonstrators who blocked traffic in the area with their cars briefly clashed with riot police.
"We came here to tell this man (Pashinyan) that he has nothing to do in this country," Galstanyan told the crowd.
Galstanyan has sought to launch an impeachment process against Pashinyan, and on Monday temporarily stepped down from his religious post to run for prime minister.
But he is not eligible to hold the office under Armenian law because he has dual citizenship -- Armenian and Canadian -- and opposition parties do not have enough seats in parliament to launch impeachment procedures.
The protests have centred on Armenia's decision to cede territory to Azerbaijan.
Last week, Armenia officially returned to Azerbaijan control over four border villages that it had seized decades earlier, with Pashinyan defending the decision as aimed at securing peace with Baku.
The Caucasus rivals have fought two wars for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan recaptured last year from Armenian separatists who had held sway over the mountainous enclave for three decades.

Sumber : AFP