YEREVAN, Armenia — A brawl broke out Tuesday in Armenia’s Nationwide Meeting involving an opposition lawmaker who later was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and faces prosecution for calling for ousting President Nikol Pashinyan as political tensions flared within the South Caucasus nation.
Artur Sargsyan, who represents the opposition bloc Armenia, had completed a speech by which he mentioned the case in opposition to him had been determined forward of time and tried to go away the chamber. Different lawmakers then moved to cease him, and safety guards flooded in, based on video from information retailers.
In his speech, Sargsyan mentioned Armenia had grow to be “a bastion of dictatorship” the place “all the things is determined upfront, written down, accredited.”
Lawmakers later voted to strip Sargsyan of his parliamentary immunity, opening him as much as prosecution. He turned himself in to Armenia’s Investigative Committee, which had accused him and 15 others of plotting to overthrow the federal government.
Pashinyan’s authorities has been cracking down on political opponents he has mentioned try to engineer a coup.
Numerous members of the opposition, together with the influential Armenian Apostolic Church, have been main demonstrations urging Pashinyan’s ouster after he agreed to territorial concessions within the nation’s decades-long battle with neighboring Azerbaijan for management of disputed areas.
Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan and Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, each senior church leaders, are in pre-trial detention after being accused of participating within the alleged plot.
On June 28, crowds of supporters gathered at church headquarters exterior the capital of Yerevan to forestall Ajapahyan’s arrest. He later turned himself in to the authorities.
The Investigative Committee mentioned conspirators deliberate to hold out bombings and arson to disrupt energy provides and stage accidents on main roads to paralyze site visitors. Each males rejected the fees in opposition to them.
Ajapahyan and Galstanyan are members of the opposition group Sacred Battle, which took a central function in anti-Pashinyan demonstrations final 12 months.
Though the territorial concessions had been the motion’s core concern, it has expanded to a big selection of complaints about Pashinyan, who got here to energy in 2018. It has additionally sparked growing friction between the president and the church in latest weeks.
In a social media publish Monday, Pashinyan mentioned he would liberate the Armenian Apostolic Church from its “anti-Christian, adulterous, anti-national, anti-state” management.
Police on Monday raided one of many nation’s main vitality suppliers, which is owned by one other Pashinyan critic, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. Parliament adopted a regulation permitting for nationalizing the corporate on July 3, days after Karapetyan was arrested for calling for the ouster of the federal government.
The raid started within the morning and it was unclear which department of the federal government or safety companies was carrying it out, mentioned firm spokesperson Natalya Sarjanyan.
“We have no idea which division these persons are from, however we aren’t allowed into the workplace,” she mentioned.
Armenia and Azerbaijan had been locked in territorial disputes because the early Nineties, as varied components of the Soviet Union pressed for independence from Moscow. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatist forces backed by the Armenian navy gained management of Azerbaijan’s area of Karabakh and close by territories.
In 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured broad swaths of territory that had been held for practically three a long time by Armenian forces. A swift military campaign in September 2023 noticed Azerbaijan acquire full management of Karabakh, and Armenia later handed over the border villages.
